My marketing playbook

My marketing playbook provides a foundational blueprint by which progressive businesses can realistically, effectively and reliably promote their business growth on the web.

Understand the digital battlefields

Since most businesses are trying to grow on the web, it’s a constant battle to beat their competitors. Business growth on the web is a war of many battles fought on multiple, simultaneous fronts. It’s also a never ending war.

We’ll focus on a simple game plan which allows for a progressive enhancement over time of the “big five” things to focus on immediately. Winning these battlefields will have business well on their way to winning the war.

Later, we’ll add more to the strategy.

Be there when they seek you, inspire confidence and close the sale

Fight hard with persistence in each digital battlefield

Actively grow your online reviews

This one may seem obvious, but it’s imperative that you differentiate your business from your competition while also inspiring the confidence necessary to close business online.

Creative monthly ongoing search engine optimization efforts

Optimize for your target consumer market

You probably want to show up higher than your competitors for a variety of searches performed by your target consumer market. So you would be wise to optimize for that target market.

Optimize for a larger target market group as well

What you may not have thought to do, is try to show up high on search results of topics related to those your competitors would actually search online.

Google counts all visits and interactions

Remember, Google is evaluating your business every single day on the web. Each and every day robots are reporting back who visited your site, how long they were there, how much engagement took place, were there any types of conversions, etc… Keep in mind every visitor to your website is valuable to your SEO efforts - even those not buying.

And every single day those robots report back to a master algorithm that ultimately decides where your business places on search results. So it’s wise, in this case to have as many visitors spending as much time as possible on your website that are all part of a larger”target market group”.

Inbound marketing

Inbound marketing is a wonderful way for businesses to present useful information to their prospective consumer market during the pre-purchase part of a buying cycle. This is very simple, consumers ask questions on the web about a particular product or service and inbound marketing efforts will contain blogs with specific titles that attempt to answer said questions. With this plan, the user searches a question and finds your blog post to answer it. When you’re the person or business being helpful in the beginning during the decision-making process - you’re well on your way to earning their business.

One of the most effective ways for search engines to determine a websites ranking is through the use of back link algorithms. If enough relevant and quality websites are linking to your website this will greatly enhance the search engine placement, all other things being equal. It is also very important to realize that backlinks are weighted very heavily in the ranking process and should be one of the top priorities of any well-structured digital strategy. In layman’s terms, other websites must be linking to your website. More importantly, the more relevant and the higher quality websites linking towards your website, the better.

Because we want to be helpful to the users out there in their pre-purchasing buying decision processes, and we want to show search engines that we’re placing highly relevant and useful information up on our website anyway, it makes sense to use these links in our back linking efforts. By sharing these links across the web, we’ll be killing multiple SEO birds with one stone.

Social media marketing your online reviews and blog posts

It’s wise to have a well planned, defined and executed social media marketing strategy. Using the results of the first two digital strategy tactics, post to your business social media any and all of our new reviews and blog posts.

Humanize your organization

The other thing to be sure to post on social media are things about your organization teams and or employees. Any types of team recognition, group photos while at work, in the act of conducting business, etc…, are all great ways to show the human side of your business online.

Once you’ve built beautiful and compelling content that helps get awareness, encourage consideration and drive conversions - it’s time to do advertising for each of those three specific categories. Utilizing the content you’ve been creating, perform ads on social media and on search engines that raise awareness. Make other ads that are helpful and encouraging consideration of your products or services. And finally perform advertising that is designed specifically to drive conversions. By nurturing consumers at each of these phases, you’ll satisfy the needs of each regardless of where they are and they’re purchasing journey.

Measurement

This one’s a no-brainer, absolute must! If you don’t start from the beginning with excellent measurement you’ll never understand how well your money time and efforts are producing. It’s imperative that measurement be at the forefront. a well structured digital strategy will comprise of a multi-month test and should be measured analyzed reviewed and tweaked such that each quarter improvements in the marketing and advertising are realized.

Understanding your competition and where you place

It’s not enough just to go with this plan without any regard to where your competitors are placing in a each of these battlefields. Are competitors posting more relevant and quality information on their social media more routinely? Are your competitors getting more online reviews than you more often and are they better reviews? How often is your competition posting new material on their website? While you’re measuring yourself routinely you’ll also want to keep track of how you are measuring up against the competition and making sure that you make appropriate tweaks to ensure you’re beating them.

Rinse and repeat

You’re going to want to continually review analyze and tweak your digital strategy efforts ensuring you’re maximizing the most from your advertising / marketing spends and efforts. If your goal is to compete with and win the war of better/more business growth on the web then you’re going to have to actively fight these battlefields over and over, indefinitely.

And if you’ve read gone this far, then maybe you’re the type that appreciates the competitive advantage before you. It is those that are willing to work harder, more consistently and more often that can take this simple recipe of rinse and repeat and use it to dominate their competition whether it be locally, regionally, nationally or even internationally.

Get started now and iterate

Digital strategy doesn’t have to be fancy, it doesn’t even have to be creative, it just needs to exist and it needs to continue and it must improve residually.

Don’t get caught up in the perfect circle, but rather deploy early and iterate often. A good plan executed is always better than the best plan never seen.

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