Since the 90’s and early 2000’s, the market for digital marketing exploded. Today, there are thousands of businesses offering a wide range of marketing services. Thousands of freelancers inquire your business, too. You also have a wealth of freely available DIY strategies and tutorials.
How do you make sense of it?
A smart business will deploy digital marketing strategies both in-house and through third-parties. It’s about knowing strengths and weaknesses with online promotion. This article provides a blueprint to touch on digital marketing within budget.
The Digital Marketing Basics: Easy DIY Strategies for All Businesses
7 Tools to Help You Master the Art of DIY Digital Marketing
Sure, there are lots of components to a digital marketing strategy – each requiring research. But, most are doable with in-house or personal talent.
The following isn’t intended to provide detailed explanations (that’s what extra research is for). But, it does give a blueprint for what needs to be done on your end:
- Use a keyword research tool like Google AdWords or SEMRush to discover 5-10 high search volume, profitable keyword phrases you intend to rank
- Create a revised site structure where each of these keywords becomes a central page supported by blog posts, interlinks, and extra resources
- Develop each page with the main keyword in the title, description, and H1 while adding related keywords – found in keyword tools or suggest Google searches — throughout the page content
- Improve site layout, flow, and speed by removing unnecessary elements, cleaning website code, and buying better web hosting
- Add social signals and elements to the page to encourage social shares and interactions, then continually update this page effectively making it go-to resource on that topic
What you’re doing is:
- Building a better foundation for SEO through a semantic website
- Using main and secondary keywords effectively to improve relevancy
- Improving page interaction and authority with content and usability
Commit to improving your core pages (home, sales, about, contact). Then, radiate to blog content to reinforce topics and link quality by building topic clusters and silos.
Scaling Up with Paid Digital Marketing Services: An Absolute Must for Business
5 Things Your Marketing Team Will Thank You for Outsourcing
DIY marketing strategies are an easy way to bootstrap the launch and early stages of your business website. But, campaigns grow and before long it’s nearly impossible managing a massive site. Especially when normal business operations require your attention.
Smart business owners will:
- Outsource marketing projects
- Automate marketing aspects
- Expand their marketing team
Begin with local SEO services to improve search rankings and placement in your immediate area. This leverages your local referral network aiding in generating great reviews and feedback. The reviews will improve desirability once you expand locations. The feedback will optimize the site and offers to create a stronger call-to-action and value proposition once competing with market leaders.
Once local is handled, pay for:
- Social Media – Automate parts of social media interaction through bots and scheduled posting.
- Advertising – Use ad bidding and management tools to test, run, and track ad campaigns.
- Content – Hire writers or employ content services to fill in blog and outreach content.
- Research – Add virtual assistants to collect/compile competitive data into reports.
This hands-off approach to the digital marketing will create more time for you and the team to focus on product/service development. It also grants additional time for customer service and relations. These two develops an experience and value customers feel compelled to share.
Leverage the stellar service for digital marketing opportunities through:
- Adding an affiliate program to turn vocal customers into sales representatives by incentivizing their referrals through commissions
- APIs and product/service feeds to widely distribute listings across several e-commerce channels including coupon affiliate sites and referral platforms
- Encouraging user-generated content submitted to your blog to creates personalization and easily touch on keywords while having some create and backlink through their properties
Each of the above three are done so through third-party services such as affiliate networks, aggregate services, and using talent to manage social and editorial properties.
Do the Big Stuff, Then Fill in the Rest
8 Digital-Marketing Tips for Bootstrapped Startups
Focus on the core components of increasing online reach:
- Better SEO
- Better offers
- Better social
The rest (like email marketing, print, and the like) will fall into place once creative/copy, brand guidelines, and campaigns are established. These create the foundation – all extra efforts reinforce efforts leading to improved organic rankings, traffic, and sales.Doing all of this leads to a strong digital marketing strategy.