Top 10 x Things You Urgently Need To Know About Digital Marketing
As a digital marketing consultant with over 22 years experience, I was recently asked to deliver an impromptu Digital Marketing Briefing for the Managing Director of a very successful food production and packaging company in the UK. The goal was to bring him up to speed with Digital Marketing generally and make him feel more confident in meetings about their digital marketing. They also have a number of consumer-facing brands and are very interested in marketing and growing those lines using social media.
As Robert explained to me, while he knows everything there is to know about his business, he knows next to nothing about Digital Marketing. Like many high powered businessmen and women, he doesn’t “do” social media, relying 100% on the telephone to keep in touch. He does have email but it’s mainly dealt with by his Personal Assistant.
However, he’s becoming increasingly aware of how other brands are successfully using social media to grow and he’s observed several of his competitors in his sector establishing new brands and growing them fast!
His marketing team at the business are always asking him for a budget for this and that on social and he’s not sure what they are talking about most of the time. He’s always being approached by Digital Marketing Agencies to pitch for his business and he’s very sure he doesn’t know what they are talking about either! Could I bring him up to speed quickly?
Here’s what I told him and I hope that it will be useful for you if you are talking to Digital Marketing Consultants or Agencies.
1. Your Website IS Still Important
While you can make sales directly on Social Media, it’s still much easier to make sales from a website.
Getting started can be no more complicated than a PayPal button connected to a mailing list host in the early days. We can talk about more complicated software later but you don’t need to have anything custom built. If you do want to upgrade from PayPal, I’d start with Thrive Architect which is a website theme which also has proven well-converting optin pages and order forms that will integrate with your existing website.
Two things to note immediately about your website are that Google are updating their search algorithm in July 2018 to favour websites that are 100% adaptable to mobile and also those that have a security certificate (https) and if your site is lacking in both areas, you may find your website is no longer found in searches.
2. Your Prospect & Customer Lists
Assuming you have a database of customers (and hopefully prospects) you can import your existing customer to a list where you can “tag” them depending on how much detailed data you hold and the product they bought. Then you can set up a new prospect list and start collecting new prospects, then when someone buys, move them from the Prospect List to the Customer list tagged accordingly.
Both lists can then be used to make a series of dynamically updating Custom Audiences in Facebook so that you can advertise your most profitable products to your prospects, then advertise other products to your customers.
3. Which Products?
I’d start with selling a limited range of your most profitable products online, not least because each product ideally needs it’s own marketing funnel and sales page/order form. It most certainly needs it’s own “thank you” page after purchase, something many e-commerce retailers overlook. This is important because that means you can tell which of your paid Facebook & Twitter ads are turning into sales, especially sales of your most profitable products.
Consider making a “Shop” on your Business Page on Facebook, sharing your most profitable products and linking through to the exact page on your website where your customer can buy. Even if you are a service business, you can create “products” in your Shop, to showcase your services. This excludes subscriptions by the way, so make sure you create a one-off product for the first month or year.
Simply click the button to download your complimentary PDF with the full 10 Digital Marketing Briefing Points.
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