While many businesses may be focused on learning social media best practices, they can sometimes forget about other important components of their marketing. Social media may get most of the attention from businesses because of its learning curve, and while it is an important part of online marketing, it’s not a solo marketing tactic. Your purpose in social media is twofold: you want to build relationships with others and drive them to your home base.
You want to send them to your own website, where the message is presented exactly how you want it so you can continue to grow the relationship with your audience. If your home base is not set up or updated, this makes your mission more difficult than it needs to be.
When integrating your marketing, you want to begin by thinking about the end. Where is your marketing ending and what are people doing when they get there? It could be a sale, a filled contact form, or gaining email addresses. Whatever it is, you’ll use three parts of marketing to get there: social media, email marketing, and your website.
So how do you integrate all parts of your online marketing? Start with building a great website, look to create an email marketing campaign so you can capture emails, and have a strategy in place so you can have these work seamlessly together.
Measure Success
You have to build momentum and keep it going before you see results. Too many times we’ve watched people try for two months and give up on their marketing because they don’t see the results they want. The truth is it takes time to build up the process, and you likely won’t see the results you want immediately. That’s ok. You’re going to be tweaking as you go, using your analytics to determine your success and making tiny changes along the way to see what works better.
You can’t track what you don't measure. You won’t know what’s working or what isn’t if you’re not using something to measure your success. You should be tracking your social pages, your email sign-ups, and your website traffic. Determine what’s doing the best and keep feeding that.
Provide Value
Online marketing isn’t just saying buy me! Buy me! Your building relationships with people and a major way you do that is by offering them something valuable. You can do this through both your website and your social posts. Through your website you can provide blogs, downloads and guides, videos, and more. We have recently started using a resource center that collects all of the valuable content you create and places it into one easily found page.
To begin creating content, you can start by answering the questions you are frequently asked. It’s an easy way to know the top things people need (and want) to know about your industry.
For your social pages, consider using a 10:4:1 formula, using both your content and content others have created. Read more about 10:4:1 here.
Create Drip Campaigns
Once people are on your site and looking around you, need to have a soft lead capture. Unfortunately, this is often something that’s missing on websites. That’s alarming, considering that 70 percent of people who visit your website probably aren’t going to visit again. While they are there, however, you want to pique their interest, offer them something valuable. They may not be ready to buy, but they may be interested in what you have to offer for free.
Once you begin to offer valuable content, you can start to separate your leads. You’ll have leads in the beginning stage, who will move to marketing qualified leads, and, finally, sales qualified leads. This is all about nurturing leads through the marketing funnel, so they are confident in your knowledge and expertise, and they become ready to purchase from you.
These are the foundations that will make your online marketing work for your goals. You’ll need to work on and constantly assess what’s working for you and then focus on that. As you continue to use online marketing, focusing on what’s working, you’ll find success in building relationships.
Join us next Tuesday at 4 p.m. EST for our next Magnet Marketers.
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