5 Mindsets When Reaching Out to Your Audience
There are many digital marketing tools available, most offer huge assistance to push our online strategies while others appear complicated than it should be. Be wise in picking what’s best for your company so you don’t have to spend so much time (and money) familiarizing the dashboard. Yes, there are many platforms made-ready to amplify your brand but don’t drown too much on the technical jargons or the need to join the bandwagon. Sometimes what works is the authentic and simple means to communicate. Don’t forget these human ways of reaching out to your audience.
- Build on trust – No false claims. No over the top promises. No hazy deal. Follow agreed deadlines. Offer and deliver what you can—no excuses. When trust is present in any transaction, clients can even recommend your service to others and become repeat customers.
- Converse naturally – Create a clear picture of your audience and keep this in mind in making advertising materials and content plan. Do not alienate them. Resist saying too much without being understood.
- Strengthen reputation – Be the go-to expert in your industry. Provide relevant advice based on your experience. Be open to learn and be willing to share your knowledge. Attend trainings. Speak or write; join an activity related to your business.
- Offer help – Yes, the main agenda of all this is to sell BUT it cannot be the only reason of your operation. Give aid. Make the lives of your customers easy. Find a way to solve their problems directly or indirectly related to your product.
- Be present – Respond promptly (and politely) to messages regardless of what gateway they got in touch (phone call, e-mail, messenger, website). Stay consistent when it comes to your social media posting schedules.
Maintain one voice as you present your product or service. Make use of online marketing platforms and integrate your overall plan-of-action without losing the essence of your main goal.
Go Local with Your Digital Marketing Strategy
When you have a local business and your goal is to amplify your product or service to the community, you can implement the following approach to your digital marketing initiative. This does not require a strong technical expertise and proper attitude plays a huge role. You have to be patient, consistent, resilient, and always eager to learn. Good, effective results in digital marketing is not an over night gig. It is always correct to have the urge to begin a campaign—polish, run, evaluate then tweak as needed based on existing data. You must start today even if the tasks appear mundane (and at time really slow and repetitive if internet connection is bad).
- Own Your Google My Business – claim and verify your profile. This is one of the first touch points with your customers. When they search for your company name or related keywords in Google, it is important to provide them with the right information and drive their interest to engage with you—go to your website, make a call, find you in the map.
- Join Facebook/LinkedIn Groups – Find a buoyant local industry groups and be an active member. Provide value by sharing quality posts or giving well-thought answers to valid questions; this effort can put your expertise forward.
- Create Directory Listing Profile – Find quality listing websites and create an account. You don’t have to update as often like the efforts required with social media but you need to be properly presented there. Include a catchy profile, add your website and contact details, and back it up with nice photos. Give it a month or two and you will see traffic data coming from these listings from Google Analytics and Search Console.
- Boost on Facebook – Depending on your budget and audience, run a geographically targeted advertisement and support it with specific modifiers related to your brand (what’s their age bracket? Interest? Job?) Note that running a paid promotion is not just limited on Facebook but it is one of the most affordable means to advertise versus other platforms.
- Connect with Niche Influencers and Industry Experts – Send them your product and request them to review it. Conduct an interview. Sponsor a post or a blog. You will be surprised to meet a lot who will not charge a big amount for the featured contents as long as they are happy with the product.
- Capture Local News Blogs and Forums – You don’t have to be everywhere but just in those sites that makes sense to your business; websites where your audience are present—commenting or even asking questions. Reddit and Quora has a solid community worth joining.
Other than reaching out to your local target audience, this proposed strategy can equally benefit your SEO campaign. Just send me a message if you have questions on how to carry out any of the given activity.
Checklist Before You Accept Your New Website
Make sure that your website is on the right shape when it is turned over to you. I’ve seen and helped some company owners who are disenchanted with the kind of website handed back to them by their web developer/designer. There are a lot of excellent website creators but there remain a few who deliver horrendous result way beyond the agreed timeline. They drown the clients with unnecessary technical jargons pushing them away to have revisions.
Web developer is usually more expensive than web designer. To simplify, the first makes code from scratch while the latter is like a graphic artist that beautifies the page. If your goal is creating simple sites to display your services without a need to code for e-commerce or app usage, for example, then getting a web designer should be okay. Luckily, there are Content Management System (CMS) that is so easy to use like WordPress and Wix. CMS have themes ready to be applied and web designers can produce pretty pages without writing codes.
Before hiring a website team, don’t hesitate to request and identify the following aspects:
Portfolio – authentic rockstars would be proud of their craft and will not refuse to show sample work in reason of confidentiality or busy schedules.
Scope – Ask in detail the task lists. What’s the maximum pages? Will the contents (text and images) come from you or from them? Will they apply basic SEO? Will the website turnover include a live training?
Good to discuss here the expectations of both sides; share your pegs and what do you like to achieve by launching a (new) website. You must also not hesitate to ask questions on the process.
People – Know the people you are working with. Will you talk straight with the developer, or will they have an account manager? For sure, you can skip this part if hiring a freelancer but make sure communication gateway is clear.
Communication – Will they answer a call in the morning via Viber? Can they reply to email within 24 hours? Good to have this stipulated in the agreement as well.
Timeline – Don’t jump into a contract without knowing the schedule. When will they start the preparation? When will they start the migration? When will you go live? How long will they troubleshoot? Sometimes delay happens when there are glitches on the site but doing a troubleshoot should not go more than two weeks.
The moment you get an access to your website, take a look at the following checklist before you proceed with the sign-off:
Proofread your site. Avoid typo and grammar error as it diminishes the professional value of your online presence.
Check each CTA button and hyperlink if working and if it is anchor to the right page.
Photos are not distorted on web and mobile.
Since most traffic comes from mobile, make sure that yours is friendly. Go to this site and find out: https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly
You can report it back to your web team to make sure they improve the result. Same goes for page speed.
Slow website is not good. Your site visitors (humans and bots) are not very patient to wait for your contents to load. It should be on the good mark based on this test: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
It may take a while before your new website is crawled by Googe-bots. There is no schedule as to when it will visit but give it about two weeks to one month then try this on the search box, type: site:mywebsite.com
Search Engine Results Page (SERP) should generate for you the index pages (this means the pages from your website that it sees).
Another way to make sure it is crawlable is via robots.txt. Try this, type: www.yourwebsite.com/robots.txt
You should see something like this:
User-agent: *
Allow: /
“User-agent” means search engine robots.
“Allow: /” means you permit the user agent or the bots to crawl your website.
You can revert back to your web team if you see “Disallow: /”, they should be able to fix it quickly. Note that it is okay disallow archive folders or membership private pages.
When your package includes basic SEO, they should be able to sync your site to Google Analytics and Webmaster plus creating meta descriptions based on your identified keywords.
Some on the list may sound complicated but you need to establish an open working relationship with your web team so they can guide you every step of the way.
10 Website Tweaks to Boost SEO
Eye on these hacks to make sure that your website appears good looking to the bots of search engines and make it friendly for human visitors as well.
- Use your keywords at the above-the-fold page of your site and within the stretch of your first paragraph.
- Rename your images based on your brand name and identified keywords. Example, file name “logo-version 1.jpg” to “my-company-name-logo.jpg”.
- Create a Google My Business account, link your website, and verify. Information here is vital especially when people start to Google you.
- Align with your web developer and alert them that your page must be within the good speed and must be mobile friendly. Google offers a free tool to identify these factors.
I initially wrote a blog giving tips to business owners and marketing team before proceeding with the sign-off. This is important to make sure that the website handed to you is at the right shape.
5. Avoid 404 or page not found. All your sites intended to be seen by Google should not be empty. There are sites that you don’t want Google to see like the archives or test pages, apply “no index” at the backend or via robots.txt file. Your web/SEO team should be able to assist you in this step.
6. Install Google Analytics and Search Console to monitor the activity of your site.
7. Draft your blog pipeline and commit to write an article every other week or at least once a month depending on your human resource. Your blogs must cover your keywords immediately at the title part and content must look professional to amplify your expertise.
8. Create a meta title and meta description per page the right way. Imagine writing a unique advertising campaign when doing so and each page of your site must be catchy and unique.
9. Call to action buttons and anchor text must go to the right pages. Social media buttons and other outbound links to open in a new tab.
10. Draft ways to build backlinks. You can start with social, directory listings, and links from your clients, member organizations, and associations.
It is part of my scope as a Digital Marketing Consultant to set-up the SEO campaign of a client’s website and train the marketing team to maintain the strategy; result does not just happen overnight. If you have questions or if you need an expert assistance, just send me a message.