Your business have an established method to drive traffic and sales to the Store, Online Store or Physical Office.
Each business should have also multiple streams of income and accordantly multiple streams of traffic.
Never rely on one traffic source. Even if you have great reviews on Yelp and receive a lot of referrals and cold traffic, You should build additional sources traffic. We had a client, who lost his 1st page ranking on Yelp almost overnight.
But how do you not only maintain but grow your business with Digital Marketing and Social Media?
1. Claim your Business Listings on all local directories.
There are dozen of business online directories. You'll probably want to stick to the most popular ones—the well-trafficked and most valuable directories for citation purposes.
In general, if you stick with the top 10 directories listed on that list, then you'll be off to a good start. The most important thing is to claim your listings and to ensure they provide searchers with accurate information about your business.
Think of Coca Cola, they did a study in the 60s and found out, that an adult person thinks about drinking water about 10 times a day. So they found out, that those thought were triggered visiting specific places. So they placed either a wending machine or an ad next to this places. Thats how Coca Cola started developing their brand. Fast forward, today Coca Cola is every where, they dominate the beverage market.
You have to know your clients. Do you know where and when they are looking for products and/or services you are providing?
You have to start somewhere, so start with the Local Listing.
✅ What Is A Local Business Listing?
If you've searched for a business on Google Maps, then you've likely seen descriptions of those businesses when you found them. Those are local business listings, and they often include business hours, address, and full contact information. Without them, many businesses simply could not be found online by people searching for them. But Google isn't the only place online where local business listings can be found. Other places include:
Yellowpages.com
✅ Important Information on Business Listings
Double check your existing listings and bring the information up-to-date. Discrepancies between listing will cost you ranking on search engines. Include SEO Keywords related to your business in the description field. This is your elevator pitch for your business. Tell your clients how they will benefit from your products and/or services and not about how great your business is.
Couple weeks ago out client was looking for a trucking company for moving oversized goods. He had problems finding a trucking company. 3 out of 10 Listings were out of date and had no valid contact details. How can a business be found, when the contact details are wrong?
We had to run ads to find a company which would solve the task.
✅ Reviews on Business Listings
Reviews of your product or service have multiple functionality.
Study after study has shown, that consumers are increasingly reliant upon online reviews when making purchasing decisions. In fact, a recent Nielson study found that 70 percent of global consumers trust online reviews, up 15 percent within a four-year period. Industry experts project this trend to further increase in the coming years.
On one hand more reviews drive more business. The trust in your business correlates with the amount of positive reviews.
On the over hand reviews boost your SEO. Google is interested to give their users high quality content. It crawls the internet for your business and make a profile. 30 percent of the search engine ranking are driven by reviews. They have to be updated on the regular bases, to show, that the business is still active. If your business stops receiving reviews, google will stop pushing your business higher.
✅ Establish a Review generating system for your business
Ask your happy clients for video testimonials for your website. Run giveaways, under promise and overdeliver, so your clients will leave reviews on their preferred social media.
2. Sort up all Social Media Accounts
The secret to your business success is your brand. We are overwhelmed by all ads, information and promotions. To be different and to stand out of the crowd you have to develop a Brand. The best and easiest way to build a brand is to utilize Social Media.
Although it is pretty basic, your have to update your social media accounts on the regular basis. Double check and update the contact details of your company.
The most common Social Media platforms are Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn.
We see a lot of businesses posting same content at the same time on all their social media and wondering, why it does not work out.
Each platform has its own rules and standards. So be sure to have a basic knowledge of each platform you are using.
You can generate over 40 percent of organic traffic to your business from Social Media.
✅ Create a catchy description of your business profile
Let your clients know, who you are and what they will get from you by ordering your product or service.
Include SEO keywords, but don't stuff them in the description. Make it stand out and sounds interesting
✅ Decide which platforms are right for you
Don’t make assumptions about where your audience spends their time online. Your instinct might tell you that you should skip Facebook and focus on Instagram and Snapchat if you’re targeting millennials, but the data shows that 82 percent of millennials still use Facebook.
✅ Build relationships
The benefit of social media compared to other marketing channels is that it allows you to talk directly to customers and followers. You need to build relationships, rather than asking for a sale right upfront. This single reason alone convinced 93 percent of people who follow small- and medium-sized business on Twitter plan to purchase from the SMBs they follow, according to a report from Twitter and Research Now.
Facebook Groups are one of the best ways to build community and establish relationships, communicate with your client and build brand loyalty. SkinnyMint did it right, they have a group in which women can show off their weight loss and support and motivate each other. The SkinnyMintBabes group has more than 4,000 members who act as brand promoters for the product just by showing their results. That is an incredible promotion strategy. Your clients are promoting your business and you do not spend any funds on ads!
3. Track your website Traffic
This point is so critical, yet we face this issue multiple times everyday. A lot of our clients do not understand the power of website tracking. The following three instruments are very important in the long run for building your brand and expand your brand awareness.
✅ Facebook Pixel
Facebook knows everything about everybody, but you have to let Facebook know, who is your ideal client. You have to created a Facebook Pixel in your Business Facebook account and install it on your website. Here is a step by step instruction from Facebook.
Once you have placed a Facebook pixel on your website, it will start tracking your website visitors. Pixel will fire each time, when a visitors viewed your website. After you build enough data, you can start retarget your audience with profitable Facebook ads, create a similar audience a so called lookalike audience and scale your sales with Facebook ads. No other Social Media platform has such laser sharp targeting options like Facebook.
✅ Google Analytics and Google Search Console
Create an account on Google and place Google Analytics Tracking Number on your website. The insights of Analytics are very broad, you can see which marketing channels brought you the most traffic, which referral websites, guests blogs, marketing campaigns generated most traffic.
Google Search Console is another powerful instrument. You have to connect your business website to the console to be listed on Google. Once you connect it, it takes up to 30 days to see the first results. Google Search Console will track the keywords your website is indexed for on Google.
4. Develop a Solid Social Media Strategy
The key ingredient for running successful social media marketing is having a solid strategy. Without a strategy, you might be posting on social media platforms for the sake of posting. Without understanding what your goals are, who your target audience is, and what they want, it'll be hard or even imposible to achieve results on social media.
✅ Identify your ideal client
Who is your ideal Client? Whats interest does your client have, which other topics are interesting for your clients?
You can start researching by using such instrument like Audience Insights from Facebook. Research your key word and get additional information from Facebook about your client like which pages she likes, which topics are important to your target groups.
This insight can will help you generate content. We see a lot of business profiles, who use social media as their show room, following just one purpose - selling their product or goods.
This brings us to our next point.
✅ Don´t sell - tell a story
When composing content you should ask yourself following question:
Why should your clients buy from you?
It sound harsh, but Nobody cares about the features of your or our products. Clients are fed up with sales pitches, but they will listen to a good story.
Everybody loves a good story, especially when it is money related 😉
Don't sell coffee, create nice atmosphere.
Don't sell vacuum cleaners, tell a story about the benefits of dust-free air.
Don't sell cars, tell a story about road trip and unforgettable vacation.
Don't sell real estate, tell a story about family happiness.
Tell a story and you will be heard!
✅ Choose and Adapt content specifically for each platform
Each Social media platform has its own rules and formats. You can't post a though on Instagram the way you do it on twitter.
On Instagram You can hide 30 hashtags in 1st comment, but on Twitter your post will look spammy with that amount of hashtags!
You can post longer Captions on Instagram than on LinkedIn. So you have to be very creative to catch the attention of your customers with a picture (click bait) and keep them on your post with a great caption.
We recommend using such tools like www.Placeit.net and www.canva.com those both tools will bring your social media posts to another level.
✅ The power of YouTube
Did you know that almost 5 billion videos are watched on Youtube every single day?
That is an incredible high number!!! We see many companies posting only promotional videos on YouTube. This is the same mistake like posting random topics on social media.
YouTube introduced hashtags, Live Videos, Tags and many more options to increase the organic reach. Additionally YouTube Ads are one of the cheapest ads and one of the most converting.
You can post about your company, about your team, speak about the daily routine. Bring the client insight of your business! Don't sell, but build relation ship.
YouTube prefers videos which are between 10 and 20 minutes long.
When uploading content, write a longer description and don't post links in the description, since YouTube does not want people leaving the platform.
Use tags, which have high search volume but low competition.
Let your subscribers know, that you have uploaded a new video.
With a proper YouTube strategy alone you can generate leads and new business within days!
✅ Instagram
YouTube and Instagram are my personal favorite platforms. The reason for that, is simple. You have still the possibility to reach your potential clients organically!
There are few basic steps you need to implement now. Since most of the business owners are busy during the working day, they post in the evening. Thats a huge mistake!
You have to post the contents, when your audience is online. The timing is very crucial!!! You have to get engagement within 1st hour, so Instagram algorithm will think this content is great and it will be shown to more people.
Start by exploring the available data. Go to your account click on Insights then audience. Use this information to plan your posts. So if your audience is e.g. active on Monday between 9 and 12, test different times (9, 9:15, 9:30 am ect.) and test, at witch time frame the audience will respond quicker to your posts.
Find hashtags related to your niche. Create a 4-7 sets of 25-27 hashtags mixed between high and low competition hashtags. Rotate the hashtags with every post.
Warning: If you use same hashtags over and over again, Instagram will limit your reach to minimum and reduce your account to spam level.
Post Videos about your company. Use stories and repost niche related content giving credits to the content owner.
All this simple tips will provide you a solid foundation to grow your followings on Instagram.
5. Build An Email List
Email lists are the new assets of every company. You can utilize them in many ways. People are leaving their email address and sign up for your news, so it's time to use it.
Promote your new video and let the subscribers know that you have uploaded new video content on YouTube. This strategy brings a lot of engagement and views of your video within first 24h. This will trigger the algorithm of YouTube and your video will shown to more people.
Run Contests and let the subscribers know how to participate and which benefits they will get. Create a lot of useful information around your company and use the email list to communicate it.
Sent useful niche related information to your subscribers. When your subscriber will need similar product or service she will think first about your company.
Apple Inc. masters this strategy perfectly. It creates rumors by sending information to influencers, so there is a lot of information related to e.g. new iPhone. Thats the real reason people stay in lines for hours to get a new iPhone.
6. Run Ads on Social Media
Have you opened your post box recently? How many of the received printed advertising flyers and newspapers went directly to recycling bin?
Companies spend millions on wrong promotion. They use GROUPON and hard copy ads with a limited results! They have to pay the printing and shipping costs, and the worst part the printed media is sent to wrong audience.
The huge benefit of Social Media Marketing is that you have the possibility to target your specific audience! Facebook, Instagram or YouTube ads won't be shown to people who are not interested in your product or services. Additionally You can review your ads, and see which ads did perform good and scale them and cut the bad ads. If you see a printed mistake, you have the chance to correct it immediately. This option is not available once you print a flyer.
Here is a simple basic step you can make to test your audience and website.
✅ Create a simple landing page
We like using ClickFunnel to test landing pages. While the main page stays untouched, you create a landing page on ClickFunnel and test different content like pictures, videos and descriptions.
Once you determine a winning version, you move it to your main page.
The benefit of that, is that your main Paige won't be associated with different test key words on google in the test phase. Additionally You can test a landing page without putting your logo on it. Blind tests are good to test brand loyalty.
✅ Test different Ads
Successful ads are created out of many tests and failures. You can test ads with small budget. Running different ad sets have the advantage to see test the engagement of your audience. You can test running video ads and retarget them with photo ad and vice versa. You can target your clients from emotional point of view and retarget them with logical solution of the problem your product is solving.
✅ Create Lookalike Audiences of your clients
Google and Facebook let you create similar audiences to your clients and/or website visitors. You have to feed both Facebook pixel and Google Analytics with data first. Once you have enough data it is simple as a single click to create similar audiences to target them with your ads.
Social Media and Search Engine Ads are the best way to grow and promote your business. You have more options in targeting and retargeting your clients and website visitors.
7. Collaborate with other brands and influencers
It´s all about trust and social proof. On of the positive sides of growing social media is the amount of your followers, which are also social proof for your company. A company with higher amount of followers will be likely followed and trusted.
Same goes for your Domain. Google gives your domain a rating. The higher the rating the better the chances to be on the desired 1st page of search result!
By exchanging blog posts with a partner company both companies benefit from cross linking and increase their domain score and amount of backlinks.
You clients will trust more someone else opinion reviewing your product or service than your own statement about your company. By establishing a network and partnership with other companies and by exchanging blog posts you create social proof.
Another great way to promote your business is to hire a brand ambassador and/or collaborate with a social media influencer.
Since both strategy involve promoting your business by third party through social media, we will be handling it as one bullet point.
This strategy is and old psychological strategy. People trust more other people reviews and promotions than ads or company statement. When you find someone who can show all the benefits of your product or service and position it as their life savior, you will hit the jackpot.
Conclusion:
The best way to promote your business is by letting your clients talk about it. Communicate with your clients through social media, so you have a reason to tag them in a post, that will make the followers of your tagged client curious and they will check out your posts on social media. You can grow only if you establish relationships with clients and other companies.
If you have any questions and would love to explore possibilities on how to grow your business, feel free to schedule a strategy session with us.