How to Use Digital Marketing to Grow Your Business

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How to Use Digital Marketing to Grow Your Business Without Getting a Migraine!

To say that digital marketing has become mind boggling complicated in the last few years might just be an understatement. It can feel like you are spending more time on emails and social media than actually running your business. We have been told we need to be on every social media platform and post multiple times a day. Just when we think we have that under control, they change the algorithms or something new comes along like Tik Tok, Instagram Stories, or YouTube Shorts and we have to start all over.

Today we are going to walk you through each of the areas of digital marketing we get the most questions about and show you how to effectively navigate through each one. Then we are going to provide you with tools and resources to help streamline your workload and make your digital marketing more effective to help you grow your business. So, here we go…

Email Marketing

The most valuable assets your business has is your email list. When it comes to digital marketing, email definitely makes most entrepreneurs a little uneasy because we know that every blog post we publish or email we send will be sent out to more people than you will ever probably meet in your entire lifetime.

As a result, the more your business grows, the more important it is to make sure that you’re editing correctly and that what you are writing not only makes sense, but is of value to those who are going to read it.

Sending direct emails to your list can generate greater results in the form of revenue than just posting blog articles. However, both play a key role in growing and sustaining your business. Are you just sending out marketing emails when you offer a new promotion?

How to Start Your Digital Marketing

If your frequency has been once or twice a month, I encourage you to up that to once a week and make sure your content is valuable. In other words, that it provides information that provides a solution to one of your customer’s or client’s current needs, not just when you want to sell them something.

We tend to take it one step further and also include a link to a free tool to help our readers actually do the thing we are talking about that week. As an example, we provided free Marketing Message Toolkit. You can get yours here!

Building Customer Relations

When your customer’s find information they think is awesome, chances are they will want to share it with other like-minded people within they know. This is a very effective digital marketing way to build your brand awareness and your customer base.

However, be careful not to send too many emails or you will find yourself being unsubscribed from annoyed potential customers and that directly affects your bottom-line. When people sign up for access to a free video series on how to successfully solve a business problem or tips on growing their business, they also receive an email from us usually on Wednesday with a link to our current weekly blog post answering that week’s most frequently asked question.

Create Real Value for Your Customers

Not only does the email and blog provide information that our customers can implement immediately to make their business more successful, but it also lets them know that we are listening to what is bothering them the most at that moment and responding accordingly. It lets our customer base know in a concrete way we think they are important.

We definitely want to encourage you utilize email more in your digital marketing and to help you we have a FREE downloadable tool to help you get started from our partners at AWeber. It’s something you should always be trying to do better and utilize it more effectively, be in better communication with your readers, customer, and increase your profits. Here are a few steps yo can take right now to get you started.

5 Tips to Get Started with Digital Marketing

We would encourage people to set up a plan and framework for your integrated marketing. Sit down and write down your vision of who your target audience is. Focus on “How am I going to build my list?”
You want to build your list through excellent content first, then social media channels, and then drive them to your email list. Offer your audience great value in your content and extend an invitation for them to sign up on your list to get even more value.
Analyze social media networks and consider how effective they are for the niche you’re working in. Focus your digital marketing on two or three social media networks and leave the rest alone after that. Don’t spread yourself too thin publishing to every social media network around. Use the ones that are good for your type of business and where your audience spends most of their time.
The bigger your list, the more lucrative it is. It’s really beneficial and it’s the most valuable part we’re able to hold on to. With social media networks, you don’t really own that content. With email, you do.
We think people setting up new businesses should definitely focus on that. Start capturing emails, give your people the option to subscribe in exchange for real value. Always try to over deliver.

How Not to Get Overwhelmed

Trying to keep up with social media can be an overwhelming endeavor and it’s easy for a small business owner to feel spread too thin. So how do you determine which social network is the right choice for your business and how do you integrate it with your email marketing efforts to grow your list and optimize conversions?

Our first step, was to share our own strategy for creating a powerful digital marketing presence with actionable tips for entrepreneurs just like you and how we use social media in conjunction with our Recommended Partner AWeber to grow our own customer base.

We started writing articles about the key steps to starting and growing your own business. As our audience grew, we started capturing email addresses with AWeber by offering other free services such as key interest video series and our site started to grow and grow.

Integrating Social Media with Email

As soon as we started our website and blog, we set up an AWeber email subscription box in the sidebar, created a subscription page and a few social media accounts. We did not set up a Pinterest page because it was better suited for a product or service that is more visual.

Since that time we have in fact created our Pintrest page which you can follow right here. If you have a Pinterest page please let us know so we can follow you back.

Target Your Ideal Customer

However, if the bulk of your audience are women and you offer visual product or service such as beauty cooking, fashion, interior design, or other visual products and services, creating a Pinterest page could be a good move since the bulk of Pinterest users are also women. This is where getting to Know Your Customer Base is so important before you begin your digital marketing.

When is the Best Time and Day to on Post Social Media?

The next questions usually are about Content and Posting. Most small business owners do not have virtual assistants to manage their social media for them and if you are like us, you are a do-it-yourself-er anyway, which makes it is easy to get overwhelmed. Here are a few of our own trade secrets when it comes to social media for our business.

With the help of our friends as Sprout Social, we found that currently the key times for connecting with our audience is in the morning on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and later in the afternoon. As a result we scheduled our posts to go live at 9:00 am (EST) and we answer comments and questions each day in the late afternoon.

How to Create a Great Post.

Our post is a brief description of that week’s blog post with a direct link to our featured article on our home page on Wednesday mornings when most social outlets are the most active. We also include some visual that the reader can instantly understand the topic of our post. Recently, we have also added brief text to the image, usually limited to just a couple of words. To make things a bit easier we use the schedule feature on our different platforms to post infographics and photo’s the rest of the week that also include our website address.

Budget Your Time

The interactions with our followers in the afternoon is truly enjoyable and for us it is easy to get carried away and spend way too time, so we developed a little trick that works well for us. When we sit down at the computer in the afternoon, we set a timer for one hour. That one hour is for all our social media outlets. When the hour is done so are we and we move on to the things that will generate income to our business and value to our customer base.

What is the Most Effective Method for Growing Your Following?

It is all about engagement. The single most effective way to grow your following is to provide real value and connection with the people who find your product or service the most valuable. It’s creating a community of like-minded people who believe what you believe.

That means your digital marketing needs to call out directly to those people in your posts and graphics. As our social media followers continue to grow organically, our traffic and email list grows.

Be Consistent

You can do this by consistently creating social media posts that are timely, relevant, and in direct response to the current needs of your customers. As a result, a growing number of companies are now using social media as a customer support platform to connect with their audience, it is just that effective.

How do You Keep Your Social Media Followers Engaged?

Ask them questions about them, their experiences on a particular topic, or other solutions they might have that you haven’t heard of yet.
Host a give-away. You can do about one giveaway a month, and always make sure it’s lucrative – at least $250, up to $500. We like Rafflecopter, which has entrants follow my social media channels as one of the entries (Check out AWeber + Rafflecopter integration). Sharing one of our blog posts could amount to five entries. You could definitely use this in your digital marketing to grow your own social media networks and email lists

Do you Use Analytic Tools to Measure Social Media Driven Traffic and Sales to Your Website?

Google Analytics is our tool to track where traffic comes from. It helps you to see the hours traffic is coming from certain sites.

We also use Yoast which is a plugin to our WordPress website hosted on BlueHost.

Many of the social media platforms also have analytic tools for you to see what post are doing well and other detailed information to help you develop your personal best social media strategies.

We hope this post has inspired you with a more effective way of marketing your business and help you generate real results. In addition, we want to empower you with tools to actually do the things you just learned, so that you can personally experience the level of success you are currently seeking.

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How Business Genesis Can Help Me Now!

We hope this has genuinely helped you understand how to effectively implement your own digital marketing program. If you have a comment or question about this week’s post let us hear from you! You can join the fun on our Twitter Chat and share your own success tips or challenges! We love hearing from you and read every post personally!

If you are looking for more practical hands-on help, we have two other resources for you. First, we have created an actual Marketing Message Toolkit for small business owners just like you to help you create your own marketing message build your brand and generate more sales with confidence. You can find yours right here.

If you scroll down just a bit further, we also have a collection of more success tips. Just click on any of the links. If you have a question about your business, please feel free to Contact Us and send a personal message. We love hearing from you!

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