What Digital-Marketing Level Is Your Organization At?
This article was originally published on Unreasonable.is
Maybe it’s because I played a lot of video games as a kid, but I often think about the growth of a business in terms of levels that unlock new ways to play the game.
To avoid the black hole of digital marketing—holding marketing activities accountable with measurable, bottom-line results, not just likes and shares—we first need to understand what strategies fit into a company’s stage of growth. New tools and strategies become available and priorities shift as the company matures.
Here are three levels of growth that can clarify an organization’s digital-marketing priorities and make sure that we’re working on the right problem:
Level 1: Understand the customer and their problem.
You might be in Level 1 if:
You’re an idea-stage or a pre-revenue startup or nonprofit. (You don’t have paying customers for a standard product or service.)
Your organization is zero to three years old.
You have one to four full-time team members.
Milestones to graduate from Level 1:
Understand your customer and their needs: Must have a concrete definition of who your customers are and the needs they have that your organization can solve.
Value proposition and differentiation: You have identified clear value propositions and differentiators for your product or service based on what your customers care about.
Market validation: Paying customers who serve as proof that your product fulfills a real need.
Until these milestones are met, any form of digital marketing is very likely to have poor returns.
Don’t spend time and money on building sophisticated websites, a following on social media, or paid advertising because without a clear understanding of who your customer is, the problem you’re solving, and how to communicate with them, there’s a real danger of wasting resources offering things that people don’t need.
Not only is it nearly impossible to identify what traffic sources or marketing channels are relevant, but writing compelling copy is impossible without understanding the customer. Even if your ideal customers somehow found their way to your website, you wouldn’t be able to get them to pay or take any sort of action.
If you don’t know who you’re talking to and what they care about, it doesn’t matter if you’re speaking to one person or ten thousand.
No one will pay attention to you because you’re not paying attention to them.
So what do we do? First, keep it personal. Above all else, prioritize building one-to-one relationships with the people you believe are your ideal customers. Interact with them. Share ideas with them. See what they think of your product or service. See if they’ll buy from you in person or over the phone. This is how you gain deep, nuanced insights about your customers—what they care about, and how to create an offer that speaks to them.
Next, if you feel like you’re gaining traction on an idea that people are interested in, give them a simple way to find you online and stay in touch using a simple landing-page creator like Launchrock or Instapage.
Create more opportunities to interact with potential customers and get direct feedback from them. As your understanding develops, work to craft a clear, concise explanation of who you serve, what problems you solve, what benefits they’ll enjoy as a result, and how to get started. If the messaging seems to resonate with your audience, put it front and center on your website.
When it comes to digital marketing—especially in the early stages of your business—empathy is far more important than sophistication.
Level 2: Focus on the fundamentals.
You might be in Level 2 if:
You’re a small business or early-stage startup/nonprofit.
Your organization is two to five years old.
You have three to ten full-time team members.
Milestones to graduate from Level 2:
You have a simple website with copy that communicates the main points in Level 1 and covers basic conversion best practices.
You’ve established a basic online presence with consistent branding and messaging that directs visitors to your website.
You’ve set up basic analytics and identified Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and track them on a regular basis.
You’ve developed at least one consistent way of driving traffic to your website that converts into sales.
Creating bottom-line results from digital marketing boils down to two main things: driving qualified traffic (i.e. people who are likely to want and pay for what you offer), and converting traffic into customers.
Your website is the centerpiece of your online-marketing strategy. The final outcome of everything you do to drive traffic—whether through blogging, paid advertising, social media, SEO, PR, or partnerships—will hinge on your website’s ability to convert that traffic into sales.
Unless your website effectively converts traffic into leads or customers, it doesn’t matter how many different sources of traffic or followers you have.
Secondly, if potential customers can’t find you online without knowing your website’s direct URL, you’ll be missing out on the cheapest and easiest source of new customers: word of mouth and referrals.
To take advantage of this, create a respectable presence on the usual suspects: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Instagram. Not necessarily all of them—it depends on your ideal customers and where they spend their time online. However, unless your website is already at the top of page one on Google for your organization’s name, it’s safe to assume that people are going to look for you on one or more of these platforms.
Do whatever you can to make it easy for them to find you, and invest time into making sure you appear consistent, professional, and legitimate across these various platforms. And don’t forget to show a link to your website in a place that can’t be missed.
Lastly, establish a foundation for data-tracking before moving to more sophisticated tools such as Google AdWords, Facebook advertising, SEO, retargeting, or marketing automation software. Baseline data for performance comparison is the only way to make smart decisions—especially if digital advertising is a part of your marketing plan.
Build a strong digital-marketing foundation by covering the 80/20 rule of best practices: a solid website built with conversion (turning visitors into leads or customers) in mind; a respectable and professional online presence; basic analytics; and one reliable traffic source that produces sales.
It’s critical to get customers online on a small scale before investing in more high-volume or long-term strategies.
Level 3: Achieving Scale—Multiply Your Traffic Sources
You might be in Level 3 if:
You’re a profitable, high-growth or venture-backed business.
Your organization is three or more years old.
You have five or more full-time team members
Milestones to go beyond Level 3:
Create more than one reliable source of traffic.
Develop consistent internal practices of ongoing testing and optimizing and make data-driven decisions.
Get an experienced direct-response marketer on your team.
After identifying your customer, selling them a product or service that fulfills their need, and establishing a strong online presence and sales-driving website with analytics, what comes next is scale.
A good place to start is experimenting with new sources of traffic. Developing multiple sources of traffic is a critical strategic move for long-term, organizational success.
Here’s a maxim worth remembering:
“One” is the most dangerous number in business.
If a company has one client that pays them one million dollars per year and that client suddenly decides to leave, that company is ruined the next day.
A company with the same annual revenue but with 1,000 clients paying them $1,000 per year is much more stable and secure.
Whether it’s revenue streams, suppliers, or sales teams, being dependent on one of anything in business is dangerous. The same is true with traffic to your website.
Don’t dependent on any one source because who knows whether it’ll still be flowing three months from now. Google could change its algorithms and drop your SEO rankings due to no fault of your own. Facebook could decide to halve the organic reach of your posts to fans. A competitor could raise millions in funding and decide to outbid you on all the key search terms you advertise on. A key partner that you rely on to promote your products could shut down its virtual doors without a day’s notice.
Don’t expect things to stay the same for long in the online world. If you want to build a sustainable business that lasts, it’s critical to build multiple sources of traffic and avoid having all of your eggs in one basket.
Achieving Scale: Become Data-driven
The keys to building a resilient, adaptive, and continually expanding digital marketing system are testing and optimization.
Test by setting new initiatives or campaigns as experiments with specific desired outcomes that can be measured objectively, and clear indicators that tell you whether it’s working or not. Optimize by continually making small tweaks to specific website elements, ad campaigns, etc., and systematically improve effectiveness over time.
Most companies invest in paid advertising or hire marketing managers to develop multiple streams of traffic. Developing a culture of testing and data-driven decision making is critical because investing in these resources can be a waste if they don’t deliver lasting results.
In my experience working with dozens of startups and nonprofits across the US, most organizations do not operate this way. They rely on gut and personal preference, or reactively implement random tips they read about.
To make this radical shift, you need someone who can provide the expertise, strategy, and discipline for your team to start running campaigns by the numbers.
This is the role of a direct-response marketer: someone trained in the discipline of creating marketing campaigns that generate a direct, measurable response. Distinct from community managers, social media marketers, or brand marketers, this type of marketer specializes in things like conversion best practices, analytics, testing and optimizing, and building paid advertising campaigns.
Without someone like this on your team, it’s very difficult to allocate resources and budget wisely on the right strategies as you grow.
To sum it up, if you’re Level 3, become data-driven and systematize your marketing. Now that you’ve got your foundation set, take a longer-term perspective and build a sophisticated marketing system—one that is consistent, predictable, and robust.
Standardize key processes to make them more efficient. Run controlled experiments that consistently increase the ROI of your core marketing channels. Use technology to drive scale and efficiency. Make your customer acquisition strategy more resilient against competition and technological shifts by developing multiple traffic sources.
What Every Entrepreneur Needs to Know About Digital Marketing
This article was originally published on Unreasonable.is
If you’ve ever started a company or worked in an entrepreneurial organization, you’ve probably experienced what I like to call the black hole of digital marketing.
In a mad rush to get the word out about an upcoming event or launch, or to announce the existence of your venture to the world, you take to every online channel and platform imaginable: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Youtube.
You spend weeks and weeks to craft and perfect your vision statement, your company values, and your beautiful logo. You pull late nights emailing your newsletter lists, friends, colleagues and anyone else who just might know someone who would be interested. Then, when the frenzy is over, you suddenly snap out of it and wonder to yourself:
“Did any of that actually do something productive for my business?”
There are few activities in the entrepreneurial world that suck up more time, energy, and money without anything to show for it than digital marketing. Why does this happen?
In my experience, the problem stems from the fact that most organizations fail to hold their marketing activities accountable with measurable results. They use vague rationales like, “We need to get our name out there,” and “We’re promoting thought leadership,” to justify spending inordinate amounts of time on social media without ever taking a minute to critically analyze the return on investment of those activities.
Here is my advice to entrepreneurs and leaders who want to leverage the full power of digital marketing to create real business results—attracting more customers who will pay you to make their lives better.
1. Set a specific intention with your digital marketing... And let that goal dictate the tools and channels
The overwhelming number of tools, channels, platforms, and strategies available gives many of us the impression that digital marketing is incredibly complex; but it’s actually very simple. Here’s how it works:
You have a website.
You get people to come to that website.
Your website (hopefully) educates visitors so that they believe you’re the right company to solve their problem—then they either contact you, come into your store, or buy from you online.
That’s all there is to it. Put into a formula, digital marketing looks like this:
Traffic x Conversion = Customers
For example, if you get 100 people to visit your website (traffic) and two percent of them decide to buy from you (conversion), you get two customers. These two pieces of digital marketing serve to create bottom-line results: getting more traffic, and converting traffic into customers. If you want to hold your digital marketing activities accountable, measure your outcomes with this framework in mind. Is your most important objective right now to generate more traffic to your website? Or are you trying to convert more of your traffic into customers? If the answer is both, be mindful that each goal requires a different approach.
2. Pick the Right Tools
Once you are clear on what you are trying to accomplish, you’ll be in a much better place to choose the right tools for your situation. Here is a brief overview of the most effective tools and strategies used in digital marketing today to, first, get more traffic, and, second, increase conversion.
Getting more traffic
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is the practice of improving your website’s rankings on search engines, such as Google, so that people who are searching with keywords that are relevant to your business are attracted to your website.
When you should use it:
You have a product or service that people actively seek out by searching online, and keywords can be used to effectively target potential customers.
You believe that improving your rankings on Google (being listed closer to page one of the search results or being at the top of page one) for a set of keywords would bring a significant number of qualified visitors to your website.
You see the long-term value in consistently growing the number of people who don’t know your brand but discover you online using a search engine.
While there are many variables to play with in improving SEO, an effective and reliable approach is to consistently add things to your website that make it an increasingly useful destination for people who are searching for the keywords you want to rank for—in other words, publishing high-quality content on your website domain.
You won’t see results overnight. SEO is a long-term approach that requires consistent effort over months with a focused keyword strategy. Begin by using a tool such as Google’s Keyword Planner to get a sense of what relevant keywords get significant search volumes and how competitive they are to rank for.
Paid Advertising
This can take a number of forms, but the most commonly used and effective methods today include Google AdWords, Facebook advertising, and display ads on other websites.
When You Should Use It:
You are willing to invest in a monthly budget for driving traffic to your website.
Your ideal customers can be targeted by keywords (Google ads), demographics and preferences (Facebook ads), or other factors.
You have access to a numbers-oriented person who can consistently monitor campaigns to optimize the performance of ads over time.
This is a short-term approach that can ramp up traffic to your website literally overnight—but it must be used with great care and planning, as each click or impression will cost you money.
Be mindful of what you’re doing with that traffic: if your website isn’t designed to intentionally convert visitors into sales or leads, all you get from paid traffic is a chart of anonymous views and clicks on your dashboard—in exchange for a big negative number on your bank statement.
Content Marketing
You can increase traffic to your site by publishing helpful content, such as blog posts, podcasts, infographics, videos, ebooks, and other resources that your target audience will find useful.
When You Should Use It:
Your product or service requires some level of education for your customers to see the full value in it, or for a relationship to be developed for them to trust your solution.
Your product or service can be tied to a topic that people want to learn more about.
You don’t have a budget for paid ads or you want to stay in touch after the first impression and stay on top of your prospects’ minds.
The key to content marketing is quality and consistency. Your content has to be valuable enough for people to spend time consuming (not to be underestimated), and you have to stay on top of your customers’ minds long enough for them to believe in your credibility and become ready to make a purchase.
You can publish content on your own website, or you can build relationships with editors of other websites and blogs to get in front of their audiences and attract them to your site. Start by asking yourself: what do my ideal customers want to learn more about that I can add a unique perspective on?
Social Media
Building an audience on social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram can help to drive more traffic to your site—but know that getting someone to “like” your page does not necessarily translate to higher website traffic or increased sales.
When You Should Use It:
Your ideal customers are active on social media.
You have a strategy for converting your followers to customers—whether by making offers, running ads, or driving clicks to your website.
If your intention is to use social media for bottom-line results, make sure the person managing your channels is aware of this. Social media is most often used for less tangible outcomes such as building brand awareness and growing a following (for no apparent reason); it’s up to you to co-create a strategy with your social media manager to make sure there is a clear ROI in their time invested.
Improving Conversion
The process of converting online traffic into customers varies significantly by business—it can be as simple as a visitor clicking the “Buy now” button on an e-commerce site, or it could require months of back and forth with your sales rep.
In any case, here are the most common tools available to an digital marketer for improving conversion:
Website Copy, Design, and Functionality
Your website is the centerpiece of your conversion strategy. It’s generally the first place people go when they hear your name, and it’s often the only chance you have to persuade potential customers that your company is a good fit to solve their problem.
Understand that in order to create a website that consistently produces bottom-line results, you need a completely different mindset than with a standard website. A typical website designer or developer will tell you how to style and structure a site based on their professional training—which is grounded in principles of aesthetics and design, or programming—NOT based on what helps people make a buying decision. Don’t expect them to tell you how to create a website that sells.
The good news is that creating a website that sells effectively is no mystery. Many smart people have crunched the data on what works and what doesn’t, and there are clear best practices that are proven to work, whether for writing copy, designing a layout, or deciding what functionality to include. Reevaluating your website with an intention to optimize conversion, together with someone who knows these best practices is typically the best place to start for a business to improve its results online.
Email Marketing
As a conversion strategy, email marketing works together with your website as a one-two punch.
Even with a perfectly optimized website, out of every 100 people that visit, only a handful will be ready to buy at that instant—so what about the rest?
Just because they’re not ready to buy right then doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be a happy customer of yours 30, 60, or 180 days from now; but you’ll never know if you don’t extend an offer to start building a relationship. Unfortunately, engagement with email marketing have continued to plunge in recent years. If you’re wondering why, look no further than your own clogged inbox.
That’s why it’s critical to have a sharp copywriter on deck to craft your emails. A well-crafted headline, compelling language, and a strong call to action can make the difference between someone clicking the “unsubscribe” link and clicking “learn more.”
Of course, you also need to convince people to give you their contact info in the first place. A great strategy to do so is to offer an incentive: a free download or helpful resource that visitors would find useful, in exchange for their permission to follow up with them.
Direct Sales
You might think this strange coming from a guy who makes a living as an digital marketer, but here’s the truth: websites, emails, and social media simply aren’t enough for most businesses to make a sale. No amount of emails, tweets, or blog posts are going to change the fact that people need to feel that they can trust you before making a buying decision.
If you sell a product or service that costs more than a few hundred dollars or involves high risk for the buyer (ex. asset management, recruiting, legal services), your clients are going to want to talk to someone before they sign a deal. In cases like these, conversion is achieved by turning a visitor into an inquiry for your sales rep to follow up with.
Even if it’s not responsible for closing deals, digital marketing can still serve to make a great first impression; educate visitors on what makes your company the best choice; qualify good leads from bad leads; and equip your sales team with helpful data about each prospect before they get on the phone with them.
A solid website, a few well-crafted follow-up emails, and perhaps a helpful sales rep are often all a business needs to reach respectable numbers for conversion. Sure, there are plenty of other advanced techniques to play with: retargeting, webinars, sales videos, automated nurturing emails, and so on. But remember, there is no need to overcomplicate things. Digital marketing is simply a tool—it should serve you, not the other way around.
Digital marketing doesn’t have to be a black hole of time and energy. If approached correctly, it can be a results-driving engine in your business that allows you to reach your ideal customers and help them to understand the value you can bring to their lives. Each time you want to improve your results, start by setting a specific intention. Know your desired outcomes in measurable terms. Consider the strategies and tools available to you, and follow best practices.
How to Market Your Startup on Facebook
There’s a big problem with the way the majority of businesses are using Facebook.
Most businesses, startups, and nonprofits have a Facebook page, and, as common sense would tell you, you should. With over 2 billion people around the globe using Facebook on a monthly basis, your business should be getting its name out there too, right?
The problem is that most organizations approach marketing on Facebook all wrong. They spend valuable time creating content and posting on Facebook to gain likes, comments, and shares—this strategy simply isn’t working anymore.
According to a study by Locowise, which analyzed 500 pages throughout February totaling more than 215 million likes and 27,000 posts, organic reach was found to be between 7-11 percent—meaning only a small fraction of your total followers have the opportunity to see the content you’re posting, and a small fraction of those actually engage with it.
And it’s only going to get worse. Brian Boland, Facebook’s VP of Advertising Technology, has gone on record saying organic content will become increasingly less effective as an engagement tool.
Your News Feed only has so much real estate, and each day there are more people and brands posting more and more content. The natural result is that each post has less exposure to each individual.
All that said, Facebook is still a superbly powerful and increasingly relevant tool for online marketing—if used correctly. The future of marketing on Facebook requires a drastically different mindset and approach.
Facebook has made it clear that free, reliable access to its users is coming to an end—so if you want your organization to continue to have a presence there, prepare to allocate an advertising budget to it.
1. Be very, very specific about whom you advertise to.
What makes Facebook such a powerful tool for marketing is its ability to hone in on a hyper-niche segment of its massive global user base.
For nearly ten years, Facebook has been collecting data on every user—from the information on their profile to every organization, book, brand, celebrity, and interest liked. And through its mobile network and partners, Facebook has aggregated volumes of data on things like your income and net worth, loan history, purchasing patterns, ethnic affinity, political views, charity donation activities, and travel preferences.
Privacy concerns aside, what makes this exciting is that as an advertiser on Facebook, you can use this data to define a very, very specific audience that is primed to be a good fit for the product or service you offer.
For example, if you work for a startup that makes premium, organic, sustainably made snacks, and you know that affluent female professionals are your best customers, you can tell Facebook to show your content only to women who are between the ages of 35-45, who have Bachelor’s degrees and earn $75,000 a year or more, have kids, live in a particular neighborhood in your local area, like the store “Whole Foods,” and work in an office job.
Facebook’s targeting takes it even further. Upload a newsletter email list and choose to include or exclude people in ad campaigns; include or exclude people who have “liked” your page; or track website visitors that saw (or didn’t see) a particular page and target them.
By combining demographic data, personal preferences, online behavior, and previous engagement with your brand or website, you can design the perfect audience to show your content to. And as an advertiser, your ability to reach them doesn’t depend on them having “liked” your page in the past.
No other advertising tool or platform in history has offered small organizations this level of sophistication and precision—the vast majority of businesses out there aren’t taking advantage of its full power.
2. Don’t treat Facebook like a sales tool.
Facebook does not exist for the purpose of selling products and services. If you treat it like a commercial platform, your campaigns are almost guaranteed to lose money.
Aside from failing to target properly, the most common mistake that businesses make on Facebook is treating it like a common advertising channel. Why? People don’t log into Facebook to make buying decisions. We go to Facebook to be entertained; to share what’s happening in our lives; and to connect with people we know—to distract ourselves from doing more productive things.
We are not there with a buyer’s mindset, credit card in hand. And the last thing we want to do on Facebook is make decisions.
Given the never-ending stream of content and our ability to scroll past uninteresting posts in a fraction of a second, typical ads that attempt to sell things directly don’t stand a chance of being read or clicked. Being smart about targeting helps tremendously to reach an audience that will find your product or service relevant, but you need to take it a step further.
Tip #3. Add Value First.
Here’s a good rule of thumb for success on Facebook: your ads should add to the user experience, not take away from it.
Ads that say things like “check out our new product!” or “now available for only $79.99!” are very obviously designed for the seller’s benefit, not the reader’s—they take our attention without giving us anything positive in return.
Smart Facebook advertisers respect the context by creating ads that look like—and genuinely are—interesting content. This could take the form of text, photos, videos, or links to articles and webpages, but the bottom line is that the ad itself should serve the viewer in some way. Ads should be designed to entertain, inspire, educate, inform, excite, amaze, shock—do something that will catch a user’s attention while they’re thumbing through the News Feed at lightning speed.
If the audience is pleasantly surprised by what they find the first time they click on an ad, they’ll be much more likely to engage next time. If consistently delivered, they will come to see you as a giver, not a taker; and that is the beginning of a relationship that breeds trust, and eventually sales.
Tip #4. Know What You’re Doing with Those Clicks
We can’t justify spending money to show people great content unless it actually contributes to sales and generates a positive ROI.
After pinpointing your ideal audience and creating engaging ad content, your job is to get them to take action. Since people on Facebook are not in the mindset of making buying decisions, the best course of action is to take them off of Facebook.
If your goal is to generate sales, don’t pitch your product on Facebook. Instead, get them to click on your ad, take them to your website—whether it’s a “landing page,” a blog post, or a specific product page (just make sure it relates back to the original ad)—and consider how you can most effectively make the sale from there.
Think through these steps carefully like a chess master planning his moves—what happens after people click the ad makes all the difference between a money-losing campaign and a money-making campaign.
The right approach will vary depending on the business. The most effective place to make the sale could be over email (newsletter or sequence of automated emails), phone, or directly on your online store. People will often not buy the first time they click on an ad and visit a site, especially if they haven’t heard of or engaged with that content before. So it’s critical to find ways to keep them engaged after their first visit by capturing their contact information, and offering a compelling reason to follow up with them.
This may sound like a lot more work than you’re used to putting into Facebook—and it is. Anyone can post free content, get some likes and comments, and build a “following”—though the data makes it abundantly clear that people aren’t actually following brands on Facebook anymore.
Getting people to exchange money with you is a completely different matter. It requires a carefully thought-through strategy; a nuanced understanding of who your customers are and what they care about; building trust and credibility with them; and taking them through an intentional series of steps and experiences that get them warmed up and ready to buy.
If not done right, Facebook will drain a business’s resources. But those who put in the effort to learn how to make it work will gain a dominant presence in what is arguably the most popular place that people spend time online, and be able to create new customers at will.