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Energetically Amplifying you with Space Alignment

Hey, guys, welcome back to another episode. Today we are talking about digital marketing, and diving in looking at the objective of digital marketing within your business, and also the role that tracking plays into this strategy. So when we're looking at digital marketing, we really need to think about it as an overall picture. So things like your website, Google My Business, different social media platforms, paid traffic, Whether that's on Facebook, tick tock is a big one lately, YouTube, or Google, there are so many places and different aspects of a digital marketing strategy that need to be considered.

Ultimately, when you're starting out your business, there's almost more options than you know what to do with. Because, you know, you'll get in contact or be connected with a Pinterest expert, and they will explain all of the benefits and upsides to Pinterest. And you'll think, Yes, that sounds great. And then, you know, you can go along a little further in your journey. And it's like, Oh, my goodness, there's such amazing opportunities happening right now on YouTube ads. Oh, my goodness, okay, well, that's another big one. And then, you know, SEO, and then Google, thinking of the Google business profile, there are truly opportunities in each of these places. And deciding on the true objective of your digital marketing strategy is the first step to deciding which of these opportunities you want to try and utilize for your business and which ones you want to put on the shelf for a rainy day, or even never. And all of that is 100%, up to you. If there are parts of your business that you're like, hey, I do not like this. Don't include it in your strategy.

There are some amazingly talented coaches online for different businesses, and they don't do pieces of a digital marketing strategy that other businesses would say are essential. So I think the number one thing to remember here is that your business is yours. And therefore, if you want to make changes, you want to include something, you don't want to include something that's okay. Because you are the decision maker, one of the things that we discuss, you know, in terms of decision making, is often when people are going to start to bring in other people, what tasks they want to delegate to those people. And so, you know, this is a spot where it immediately comes up with well, I really like these tasks. These are my favorite tasks. And so even though it might make more sense for another business owner to say, you know, oh, my goodness, I want to delegate social media immediately. This is, you know, I don't want to be doing this, I want to hire someone who's going to take care of the social media strategy.

Another entrepreneur might absolutely love the social media aspect, and it might make more sense for them to delegate something else. There is no perfect answer. Because realistically, it really comes up to what feels the best for you. Remember, when you started with creating your own business and being an entrepreneur, it was for some freedom and the decisions that you can make. So well, I will make some general recommendations and we'll talk about the pros and cons of different pieces today. Know that what is right for your business specifically requires a more in depth discussion and perhaps a strategy session.

Digital marketing strategies

So when we look at the objectives for a digital marketing strategy, there are realistically what I like to think of as three main focuses that almost everything can be grouped into. Number one, you are using digital marketing for lead generation, you are reaching out to your ideal clients, whether that is through cold outreach, cold email, ads, all of these different pieces you are trying to bring people from the online digital space and bring them to your business to be customers. So this is like lead generation 101. So this can be a big strategy in the digital marketing space, but not for all businesses. Some businesses are not using digital marketing to drive leads and customers at all. Some of those are purely using digital marketing, to create brand awareness to be online when those other customers look them up. But they're not actively seeking customers online. So that is strategy number two, it's really just brand awareness.

And then there's option number three, and this is when you are using your digital marketing to generate some form of connection outside of leads. So very frequently, we see this for people generating new employees, new team members in their business, hiring, you know, and I mentioned it, it often hiring good people will be the difference between being able to truly grow your business and not, we need to be utilizing technology and automation to do the tasks that it can so that we can take the amazing people that we have and put them into the right roles doing the right tasks. And so now that we've grouped these three major digital marketing strategies, we can start to look at the different pieces and why they're important. 

Lead Generation

When we look at that first lead generation digital marketing strategy, this is the one that requires the most tracking. So when we bring that back to tracking, this is ultimately going to require the most tracking the most strategy and an overarching plan, it's important to be tracking, because while you might be generating leads from multiple sources, the two big questions then become, what is your cost per lead from each of these places? And what is the likelihood that that lead is going to convert? Because we want the objective here to be two things.

Number one, we want lots of leads for the business. But we also want high quality leads, none of the tire kickers, every business will have some, but it's important to really focus on the quality of leads, especially if you have a fairly elaborate or time consuming sales process. You know, if you are an e-commerce Store, and realistically, you're bringing people to your website, you're generating that traffic, and then you know, people get to the page and they purchase or they don't obviously, you know, a high conversion rate is desirable. But realistically, for each person that hits your website, there is no significant associated cost other than the advertising to get them or the cost to get them to that page. Whereas if you have an elaborate sales process, perhaps you generate a lead and now your you know, your salesperson needs to go to their location, they need to take a bunch of measurements, then they need to bring that back to the office, you know, put this whole proposal package together, each person that that that that process occurs for has a cost both a hard cost in the fact that you need to pay for this person's time but also an opportunity cost up if they're doing measurements and creating a proposal for someone who doesn't purchase that time could have been used for time for someone that does purchase. And so, bringing that back to you know, the objective of the digital marketing strategy is we want to create, you know, a large quantity of high quality leads. And so, you know, a system that is going to be tracking where those leads are coming from becomes more and more important, if you have one source that is giving you 50 leads each month, and you know those have a 40% conversion rate. And you have another source of leads, maybe a different social media platform, maybe you know email marketing campaigns, whatever that alternative channel is, if they are giving you a, you know, 200 leads per month, but you only close at, you know, 3% then these are not really worthwhile leads. This is not you're not getting that good product market fit in that audience.

So, if we look overall, if we combine all of that data into one big pool, we might say hey, this whole marketing strategy is now working very well. But in actual fact, you have some parts of your strategy that are working well, and some parts of your strategy that are not working at all. And so it is only by creating tracking and, and data points within a strategy that we can actually say, hey, I want to do more of this, and less of that. So that was number strategy number one, so that led generation digital marketing strategies.

Brand Awareness

And so if we look to the next one, which is really that brand awareness piece, you have to truly go back to your objective. When deciding about your online presence, tons of social media, like lots of SEO, websites, all this, it can be a really big cost in time, energy, labor hours, all of these different pieces. And so, while you can always do more, I think we also need to remember that we can also do less, and, and really, with that results, mindset, what is the objective? Why are we doing it? And are we meeting that if you are purely using digital marketing, for a brand awareness piece, you might not need to be in all the places you might need to meet not need to be doing all of all of the possible options. Something like Instagram, maybe you don't need to include it. Maybe you don't need to include Pinterest, maybe you don't need to include social media at all, it is important to have what I like to call, you know, a digital business card, every business should have at least a one page website, you should own your domains. Because maybe your business makes a you know, transition in the future. And that becomes important. 

So I think when you start a business, you should always grab the domain, even if you're not going to be using it. And you should grab all the social media handles, even if you're not going to use them right now. So that they're yours, so that the person down the road isn't going to create or take those from you. So whether or not you're going to be using all of these domains, and social media handles at this point, at least they're yours, you can put them on the shelf for a rainy day, then decide, okay, so you need at least a one page website. This would be the bare minimum, it can be a nice one page website. But you still need to have some form of digital business card, you should include you know who you are, what your business does a little bit about, you know, your service. And for sure, some contact information.

Transitioning

From there, you should also have your Google My Business Profile. So in 2022, they made the transition, they just call it Google business profile now. But you should 100% go through the steps of claiming your business profile. Going through the verification process, they actually need to send you a postcard in the mail, it takes, you know, a couple of weeks, sometimes longer depending on your location. And these would be the two minimum requirements. So while you don't need to do, you know, Pinterest, and Twitter, and Facebook, and LinkedIn, and all these all these things, you at least have some digital record of your business and its existence. That way, if a customer is looking you up, you can find these places. The Google profile also includes a spot for reviews, information about your business updates, and whatnot. 

So I would ensure that you fill out that profile and utilize that to its full potential. As a busy business owner, we all know that you want more traffic, more phone calls, more website visits, realistically, all of the more things that can bring additional sales.

So if you were looking for 40% more phone calls, 64% more exposure in searches, and 143% increase in Maps listings, that it's time to optimize your Google My Business Profile. Right now your business management agency is giving away the eight step guide to optimizing your Google My Business Profile. And the guide is totally free. Down in the show notes. You will find the link, go grab that guide, you'll be well on your way to more calls, more traffic and more sales.

But from there, really look at individual platforms if you were sharing content and you know it's not reaching your ideal audience, and it's not part of strategy number three, which we'll discuss in a minute. Ultimately, this might not be the best use of your time at this point. 

Bringing Yes to strategy number three, which is utilizing a digital marketing strategy for something outside of options wanting to be frequently used for staff. So if I go back originally, to my experience, when I was, you know, dealing with a technical trades company, and, you know, for the last decade or so prior to starting my own business, and when we first started, the business had no website, the business had no decoloring on the van, a small like, this is the business the base requirement on the back door. But this was not a significant expense to the business, this was not an area. But realistically, when we look at the audience, the target audience, the ideal customer, and if that stuff was important, it just wasn't part of the marketing strategy overall. But as the business continued to grow, the number one thing preventing continued growth was not the ability to generate leads to generate the work, it was the ability to grow the team at the same rate, across the board. 

There are people who, you know, are making these fairly significant predictions about, you know, basically, the labor supply being very short, as we continue over the next 10 years into the future, there are not enough skilled people to do all of the jobs that will become available. And so when we look at that, and we say, you know, if you've got your lead generation strategy dialed in, you've got your business going, your operations are optimized, everything is going according to plan. However, you cannot find the right team members. Now, ultimately, it really depends on for what reason, you know, there's, there's the ability to train people who have the right attributes, and all these things really depends, you know, if you are looking for people with specific certifications, that changes things a little bit across the board, we are going to see a continued shift, that we don't have the people we're already seeing it many industries, we've been seeing it for years, there are not enough people, you know, if you go on to say, you know, indeed or LinkedIn jobs, or or all these places, and you can type in certain industries, and there are pages and pages of people looking for the exact same all these different businesses. 

Yeah. And you think, Oh, what is going to make the difference? What is the difference maker for that person to apply to, you know, my job posting versus someone else's job posting? And so this digital marketing strategy, although isn't when we think marketing, you know, we initially think customers, but when we're planning out a digital marketing strategy, we also have to be thinking about who else would be seeing or has the potential to see who else can we reach to, with our digital marketing strategy that can help our business grow, can help this evolution. And ultimately, it comes down to these potential team members. And so going back to my, you know, example, when we didn't, we were not using a digital marketing strategy to generate leads the transition tree, significantly heavier presence online, doing a fairly elaborate than surface stand wrapping, pitch potentially helped with lead generation, just in in that brand recognition, seeing, you know, things that were more recognizable, but 100%, the strategy was created to attract more people. 

That strategy was used, you know, the, the investment in wrapping a fleet of service vehicles, being more online sharing more about the business in social media, that was to appeal to potential future employees, you know, sharing different, you know, pictures from a leadership event or, you know, a team event, all of these pieces that played into sharing more about the company values, company culture, you know, advancement opportunities, promotion, announcements, all of these types of things. Realistically, all of that is done in a way to appeal or to help people to understand more about the business to help derive You know, those employment, future employment opportunities. So when we, when we are planning out this digital marketing strategy, we really need to understand who and where our true audience of our content is, if you think about, you know, if you go back to, I remember, early high school English, and my English teacher would say, you know, you have to imagine your audience. So whether you're writing a piece of content, whether it's an email, whether it's a social media post, all of these pieces, it comes down to who are you trying to reach out to with this digital marketing strategy. And so, you know, to take that a step further. And to talk about this tracking and the need for tracking across your business, the ability to create different data points.

Data Analytics

Typically, when I say data, people start to get that look of like, Oh, my goodness, I don't want to talk about data, I don't want to talk about analytics, I don't want to do any of these, just get really thick, forget the tech, forget the tech. And think about it from a very just 30,000 foot overview. And you want to be able to know where people came from, what was the journey they took to get to you? And think about, you know, why? Why the person took that journey and what it led to, because ultimately, result, we are results orientated, we want to know, who is purchasing and how they're getting to us.

So understanding more about our customer, you know, if you think about a lot of the grocery stores have, you know, the cards that give you the discount, you have swipe your card, then you check out and then you get this discount, what's the significance of the card, I can't I just get the discount, I mean, just really swiping the card does it, you know, if I leave my card at home, I don't get the discount, that's frustrating. The purpose behind this whole program at the grocery store is that they are collecting data, they are putting data points when you swipe the card, you know, you've already signed up when you got the card, so they know who you are. And now they are able to say, you know, Mrs. Smith buys milk 13 times a year, they are able to say you know this, Mrs. Smith used to buy this brand and now buys that brand. You know, the the quantity of groceries has gone up all of these pieces, you know from, again, 30,000 foot view or right down to the nitty gritty, when you when you take all of that information across 1000s of people purchasing from the grocery store, they are able to create some significant customer behavior data.

And so in your own business, you realistic II want to be doing the same thing. It's just slightly different. The process is different, adding additional pieces in the background, so that you are collecting customer behavior data, as you're going through your day to day business allows you to make minor adjustments to your processes, and the customer journey to get a better result. So we talk about number one deciding on what the overarching objective is, why are you, why are you looking at a digital marketing strategy coming back to what is the objective? Why are you actually adding in a digital marketing strategy for your business? What serves the end business goals from a digital marketing perspective, then deciding what data points need to be a part of your digital marketing strategy.

Something as simple as creating a duplicate page on your website. Maybe your contact page, actually is two contact pages. Not that your customer would ever know that. But the contact link that is in your social media profiles is slightly different from the contact link that is just on your website. From your homepage they buy and create those two pages. And it's as simple as duplicating a page during the page once and then duplicating it, changing the URL slightly. Maybe one is, you know, contact us and one is contact. In the URLs, we're talking about very minor differences, nothing your customers would ever know about. Why do you then go to look at where customers are coming from, you can say, Oh, well, this person came through, and they filled out the contact page that's linked to social media. So that means that our social media content was driving them to the website, this person, they filled out the Contact page, and it came from the homepage. So they were at the website, one came from social media, one came from the website. 

Tracking Technical Parameters

Now there's a number of technical pieces that can do a lot of this tracking, things like UTM parameters, things like cookies, which have changed and evolved a lot in what they can do with some of the recent iOS upgrades. It's a huge digital marketing discussion. But before we dive into, you know, how to track them, realistically, we have to decide what is worth tracking? Does it matter where the person came from? Does it need to be that we need to know if they came from Instagram or Facebook, when it comes from social media? Or is it enough to know that they came from social media, these are the types of decisions that need to be made at the strategy phase. And that it's about just building it out. And so if you're comfortable with doing things like setting up UTM parameters, and tracking and whatnot, then you're well on your way to be able to track as many things as you want. But most business owners unless you have really invested into learning some of these more technical marketing pieces, they you know, you don't know how to add in something like UTM parameters. You don't necessarily want to know anything about that. If you have an outline in terms of, hey, this is important to my business, I want to know where people are coming from, I want to know, you know, how many other places? Are they seeing me, I want to know, how long did this take?

If you know what is important to you, then you can work with a marketing agency. Like, you know, so many different ones online, of course, I'm gonna say you can work with our agency butcher Business Management Agency, this is something that we do often for our clients is, you know, there's this strategy aspect, but there's also the implementation aspect. And so, you know, often we have people come to us and say, Hey, I don't, I know, I want to know this information. But I don't know how to actually get this information. And then we can, we can install and add in the pieces that are required to give the data points.

So guys, that's all we have for today. If you want to know more information about digital marketing strategies, and how they can assist your business in moving forward, how they can assist you in scaling by showing you, you know what you should do more of what you should do less of feel free to reach out in the service based business society, Facebook group, lots of different discussions going on there about how technology can really be assisting entrepreneurs and business owners in their mission to scale their businesses.

It is so key to utilize technology for all of the things it can be doing for you so that you can use your skills, energy and time towards things that you really need. Whew. So, once again, you can come hang out with us in the service based business society, Facebook community. You can also check out the channel on YouTube, where we have some training videos and whatnot, there will be one specifically about UTM parameters we are watching next week. And so thanks very much for tuning in. And until next week.

Well, we are all out of time for today. If you guys have not joined the service based business society Facebook community, make sure you head on over to Facebook and we can continue the conversation. Be sure to also follow the show by going to any podcast app and searching surface space business society. Click subscribe, click the fifth star and leave us a written review. Have a great week and we will see you soon.