Think about your marketing strategy. What is it?
Do the marketing parts and pieces align with your company’s strategic vision? (If you aren’t sure what your company’s strategic vision is, let’s talk.)
Are you set up to experience how your marketing tech systems and their outcomes effect your goals? Are those systems directed so that your ideal audience easily receives it?
When you are ready to embark on a review of your overall digital marketing strategy, it's worthwhile to participate in a business assessment review that will educate businesses about what we call The Golden Triangle. Our focus is Main Street business growth, serving those small to mid-market companies.
You may have heard this term, Golden Triangle, if you’ve played Halo Wars or traveled to Thailand. But in the game of marketing, the Golden Triangle is all about turning up or turning down the heat like the dials on your stove, to create a solid, successful strategy when it comes to delivering positive results and business growth.
Our Golden Triangle includes having an (1) interactive and responsive website, (2) search engine optimization (SEO), and (3) social media constantly drives traffic for conversion. They play very, very well together even when only one of them is turned up at a given time.
Basically, this concept acts like a rock, paper, scissors system within the marketing game. One wins against the others, then the second one steps forward, and so on. This three-pronged approach allows for dial adjustment every quarter when we review the data. The data is our scorekeeper, the tools execute our decisions, and our experience is the compass.
In the big broad world of digital everything, SEO finds your people. It shepherds them to you when they are lost and searching. Their queries are answered by being delivered to your website.
Your website is where your customers learn more about the bones and body of your work and how you will solve their problems.
When we are approached to design and develop websites, we’ll take a hard look at the SEO implementation, because it’s not always easily apparent. We had one potential client tell us he paid a firm over $11,000 for SEO, and there was nothing apparent to be found for that spend.
Needless to say, SEO is super important because it brings your audience to you, but more-importantly you’ve got to trust your marketing firm who’s implementing it. You must ask them to see what’s really going on under the hood. You must ask for updates, and you must ask for analytics. Great SEO is not just adding stuff to the back end of your website. Ask. It's your money, and leaving that money on the table just should not happen.
Onward… Your customers find you, and now they're on your website, and see how you may be able to work together to solve their problems. Do you have all sorts of call-to-action buttons? Do you have interesting topics that your ideal client wants to know about?
Businesses can have little or no marketing employees, and want to focus on their own business instead learning how to execute successful marketing. Our company, Visual Thrive, often becomes the marketing arm for businesses and we slide in to work side-by-side together.
Your website is your digital front door. The key to a great website is ease. Plain and simple. Ease on the eyes. Ease of understanding the personality of your company. (Visuals lead the pack, so easy on the stock photos, too! Let your audience see YOU). Ease finding information. Ease reading and informing. Ease contacting you.
If you haven’t reviewed what the world sees when they find you, go take a look right now.
And now for the third point…
Social media. It also moves your audience to your website. Social media tells your company’s story all the time. It changes all the time. Is your social media creating an authentic voice, a peek behind the scenes, or a company style that resonates with your customers? Social media is often how your audience evaluates if they ‘get’ you, and want to be “friends.”
A great social media feed will inform your audience.
• Do your company’s values resonate with theirs?
• Do your employees enjoy their work at your company?
• Do the owners of your company jump into the fray or not?
• Is fun happening at your place of business?
• How successful at you at your work?
• Are your Followers real? Or are they Memorex? (You have to be a certain age to get that one ;-).
Next time, let’s review the best practices around media, and the best ways to display and promote your company.
Start with an assessment by jumping into a free "Are You Leaving Money on the Table?" class. It'll be the start of working ON your business' growth and walking away with actionable items to review.