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Building a Strong Online Foundation Is Vital to All Your Other Marketing Work
Second in a Series
Of course you want to start your next marketing campaign immediately, but hold on there! You’re wasting your money if you don’t establish this solid base.
Before launching an SEO or social media marketing campaign, our team needs to ask a bunch of questions about your operation. If you have a very recent business plan, then you already know the answers! But it’s extremely common for small businesses to be already humming along without a completed business plan or with a plan that is woefully out-of-date.
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What kind of questions will we ask you? They are all about your business, but require very specific answers because that’s how search engine optimization works. Personalized experience is today’s key marketing trend, so if you are not precise in providing the right information to the right consumer, you’ve blown any chance of a connection.
Here’s what you need to know and why:
Who is your customer?
Pick the best one and get to know that type intimately, including age, gender, hobbies, and so on. Now you can pinpoint where to find more like that and the right way to connect with them. Focus on just this one – you can always add the next best customer later.
Who are you?
Are you known by your legal company name or is there a “doing business as” name? It’s important to search engines that you are consistent. Also, folks would rather buy from someone they know and trust. How are you letting your prospective customers get to know and trust you?
What is your product or service?
You need to explain what you are offering clearly and quickly to engage both search algorithms and people with really short attention spans.
What problem does your product or service solve?
Your prospective customer needs to see how your offering will make a positive change in their life. Stuff that’s just “nice” goes on the back burner. You want to inspire hitting that “buy now” button.
Why are you better than your competitors?
And there are always competitors, but you can filter out some of them by focusing on a specific niche and showing how you do things better.
How do people search for what you offer?
If you are selling “bed linens” but everyone is searching online for “sheets,” then you had better be using the word “sheets” in your content. Also important is making sure you show up in the correct business categories so search engines are identifying you properly.
These are the same questions you answer when creating a business plan, so if you haven’t formalized one yet, this will be super useful for all aspects of your operations. Remember, too, that businesses grow and adapt over time, so your answers may be different today than they were when you started.
By documenting all of this info first, you can measure how well your SEO and marketing efforts work going forward. Use these insights about your business to inform your marketing campaigns, both on social media platforms and offline. This is also your cheat sheet for accurately claiming your place on the Google Business Portal and the many other online directories, as well as making the most search engine results.
If this sounds like more effort than you have time for right now, then hand it over to our team. This is what we do every day and we’ll get you set up as quickly as possible so you can track how well your marketing is doing now and try some tweaks for doing even better. Click the button below to get started.
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Read the next post in this series.
Photo Brickwork via CC-BY 4.0 license from torange.biz
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Kate Gingold
I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.
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I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.
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