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A Step-by-Step Guide to Get Started with Digital Marketing

If you’re still trying to understand concepts like digital marketing, Facebook ads, SEO, and all of those other terms used by marketing experts these days, then there’s a good chance that you haven’t migrated your business to an online platform just yet. Online marketing via social media platforms and websites are some of the most efficient and cost-effective approaches available to either B2B or B2C companies right now.

Understanding how online marketing works for various companies, businesses, and entrepreneurs will allow you to target new markets through the internet, but why market your services online when you can pay for a billboard ad or a TV commercial?

Here’s the tea:

In 2015, smartphones accounted for almost half of all online advertising spending in the United States. It bolsters the notion that consumers’ focus has shifted from “traditional media” to “modern media.”

So, in today’s digital era, in which technology, social media, and the internet have become the new foundations of modern-day communication, how exactly do you win?

What is Digital Marketing and Why is it Important?

Digital marketing is a way for businesses to convey their message, spark conversation, and elicit engagement between themselves and their target audience. Online marketing is also a good source for lead generation and positioning.

There are three fundamental reasons for a business to consider shifting its marketing campaign online:

Brand Positioning

Brand positioning is one of the oldest tricks in the book, whereby advertisers build a mental picture of the brand in prospective customers. We’ve seen this strategy at play in radio ads, magazines, billboards, and TV commercials.

Nowadays, ads are running on digital platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, and Twitter, proving that the internet plays a significant role in today’s marketing arsenal.

Audience Engagement

Audience Engagement is about breaking the ice and building rapport with your audience. A perfect example of audience engagement is when you come across a paid ad on Facebook and then visit that company’s page and “like” it. Audience engagement doesn’t necessarily result in an immediate sale. Instead, it’s about laying the groundwork, engaging with your audience, and building trust.

Get Conversions

One of the most prominent reasons for businesses to develop their online presence is to attract new patrons. Online marketing strategies connect brands with new customers, turn them into prospects, and eventually convert them into paying clients.

How to Start Marketing Your Business Digitally

Step #1: Establish Your Persona

Building a persona lets you target your desired audience and reach out to potential prospects. You’ll be able to break through the fog, see a clearer picture, and identify who stands out in the crowd. In other words, it helps you determine the specific type of consumers with whom you need to connect.

For instance, you are more likely to showcase your Facebook ads for hair accessories to a primarily female audience, as opposed to male, as there is a higher probability of female consumers buying your product.

You can also determine your ideal customer by using and analyzing key indicators such as behavior, demographics, goals, preferences, and patterns.

Step #2: Create Your Content

There’s a broad range of activities involved when marketing digitally, creating content, communicating with customers, and gaining visibility on the internet. Content creation is one of the factors that helps pave the way for you to market your business online successfully.

Here are some of the essential strategies in a digital marketer’s cache:

Content

Content includes anything from articles, podcasts, infographics, videos, and images that provide valuable and helpful information about your product or service to your audience.

Online Advertising

Online advertising is an essential pillar of online marketing. There are many online advertising platforms that you can use, like Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, and Twitter Ads.

One of the advantages of content creation is that you can use it for advertising on social media platforms and capture your target audience’s interest.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the answer if you want your content to perform better online. In SEO, you have the searcher and the search engine. Your goal is for your website to show up as a top result on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing, when searchers key in for a specific keyword.

Step #3: Have a Strategy

After you create content for your marketing campaign, you’re ready to devise a strategy. You can categorize your campaigns into two elements. These two factors aid in developing a more practical approach that includes the proper use of social media and online advertising channels.

Social Media Networks

Having a social media network is imperative to your entire online marketing approach. It would be futile to establish a strategy for online marketing without utilizing social media influence. So be sure that you choose the best platform where the majority of your target audience is most likely to frequent.

Online Advertising Platforms

With the introduction of social media, internet advertising has taken on a whole new meaning.

Some of the most popular advertising platforms these days are Facebook Ads, Google Adwords, and Youtube. Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Quora, and StumbleUpon are also major players when it comes to online advertising. Ideally, it’s best to place your ads where the bulk of the end-consumer’s attention is.

Step #4: Analyze the Results

Your campaign won’t be complete without insights and performance analysis. Understandably, you’ll want to jump straight to generating leads,  garnering more social media followers, getting more content shares, increasing email subscriptions, and growing your ROI. Analyzing the statistics and experimenting will help you determine the best strategy that works for you.

The best part is that the outcome of your efforts is all visible through the platforms that you use, and the numbers will generally speak for themselves. Facebook ads, for example, can be determined using the number of impressions, click-through rates, and people reached.

The analysis part shouldn’t be a challenge, as it is easily accessible through each respective platform.

If you’re still hitting bumps in the road, nothing seems to be working, hiring a professional team of experts can also save you thousands of dollars on experimenting.

No Joke Marketing is one of the leading digital marketing agencies that can provide carefully designed campaigns that reap positive results. If you’re struggling to pull off your online marketing campaigns, we might be the team for you! Give us a call.

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4 Benefits of Social Media Marketing for your Business

Nowadays, social media has become a key component of how many businesses operate. It has become an integral part of an effective marketing strategy for small and large business enterprises alike. Through social media platforms, you can reach a wider range of people and promote your company in various ways. Keep in mind, social media is more than just a tool to help you market your business and send your brand’s messaging to your target audience. It can also help you build relationships with potential and current customers. The more people you engage through social media, the better chance you have of converting them into loyal customers.

The benefits of social media marketing are vast. Utilizing social media platforms will help you increase your brand awareness and can help drive traffic to your website and social pages, generate leads, build relationships with current and potential customers, and create trust among consumers. It would be a huge mistake to overlook social media as a powerful marketing tool for your business. Read on and learn about several significant ways your business can benefit from social media marketing.

Social media helps increase brand awareness

Social media is one of the most cost-efficient ways to boost your brand’s visibility and market your business. It can help you increase brand awareness, making it easier for people to follow you and find out what makes your business different from the rest. Leveraging this powerful tool makes it easy and affordable for you to generate buzz about what you offer. Social media platforms also give you plenty of opportunities to engage with a broad audience of consumers.

Start by creating social media profiles for your business. Invite employees, sponsors, and business partners to like and follow your pages, and then you can start interacting with others. This is how you can start to build your reputation as a business. The more your posts are shared, the more people will learn about your business. The time and effort you spend growing your social media presence will eventually increase your exposure and generate a wide audience for your business.

Social media drives more inbound traffic

Imagine throwing a party and no one shows up. It’s the same thing when it comes to your business. Without social media marketing, you are significantly limiting inbound traffic to just those who already know about your company. It’ll be hard for anyone outside your usual customer base to find out about your services. It is through social media that you’re able to reach people outside of your loyal customer more easily. Each of your social media profiles on each platform is a gateway to your website. Every piece of content posted and shared opens a brand new opportunity to acquire a new customer.

Social media is a place where people from all walks of life, and those of varying backgrounds and preferences, can be found. Utilizing different platforms opens up more chances for your business to be found organically by a wider range of versatile individuals and potential consumers.

Social media marketing helps improve search engine rankings

Posting content on social media can help drive more traffic to your website. However, if you want to see even more significant traction, increased effort through social media may be required. This is where “SEO” (Search Engine Optimization) comes in.

When people look for keywords on Google, they aren’t likely to navigate past the first page of results because they usually find what they’re looking for on the first page. If your website doesn’t rank on page one, something has to change with your SEO strategy.

Social media may not directly increase your search engine rankings, but it does help to boost your chances of ranking higher. All you need to do is to make sure the content you create is quality content that integrates targeted keywords.

Social media marketing promotes increased customer satisfaction

Another important benefit of using social media for your business is promoting customer satisfaction. Since social media platforms offer a venue for communication, this type of marketing provides ample opportunities to help you humanize your company. Customers appreciate when they receive a personalized response or message rather than an automated one. The more you interact directly with your customers, the more likely they will become loyal consumers – the kind who will tell their friends about you.

With increased competition in the marketplace, it’s time to take your social media game up a notch. If you haven’t begun to use any type of social media marketing yet, now is the perfect opportunity to start! Follow these tips so you can implement straightforward and easy strategies that will help ensure people are talking about your business!

If you need expert help in making social media marketing work for you and your business, feel free to reach out to No Joke Marketing. Give us a call for more information.

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Why You Need Digital Marketing for your Small Business

For many small business owners, digital marketing can seem like a time-consuming and challenging endeavor. While there are many moving parts to the process, digital marketing is a constantly evolving facet for any type of business. Staying ahead of the curve can be difficult, especially when you don’t even know where to start! Today’s small business industry has become increasingly competitive in how they acquire a solid customer base and build brand loyalty. Here are a few worthwhile considerations regarding why you need to use digital marketing for your small business:

Traditional vs. Digital Marketing

Traditional marketing methods certainly have their pros. However more often than not, the cons tend to outweigh the benefits. While it’s easy to use classic methods like creating flyers and handing out business cards, it’s hard to measure the impact of these efforts to see how effective they are and whether you’ve achieved a return on your investment. It’s easy to believe that your small business doesn’t have the time or the money to invest in digital marketing strategies. However, the opposite is true, because there are plenty of cost- effective ways to convert customers solely online. In fact, many small businesses don’t realize that their traditional marketing strategies (such as printing out hundreds of flyers or buying ad space on a billboard) could very well end up costing more money than they can make back from these efforts. Digital marketing ensures that you’re able to pivot on a dime, and adjust your efforts accordingly based on your short-term and long-term goals.

Why you shouldn’t procrastinate when it comes to digital marketing

To reiterate, the digital marketing landscape is constantly changing and evolving. Therefore, businesses of all scales need to keep up as the online marketplace becomes more and more competitive. It’s understandable that while small businesses are still navigating the ins and outs of running a business in general, they may focus on one or two methods to start while their operations get up and running. The problem with this strategy is that it rests primarily on the idea of “hope marketing”, which happens when businesses hope that customers will simply walk through the door or randomly come across their website and make a purchase, without the company trying any new marketing methods outside their marketing comfort zone. As you might have guessed, no business (big or small) should rely on this method.

Your customers (and your competitors) are already online

If you’ve been thinking that you should just wait until your business is more established or well-known before you begin your digital marketing journey, consider the fact that whatever you’re not doing online right now, your competitors already are. Moreover, if your target audiences are primarily online and your small business is nowhere to be found, it’s almost certain that they’re going to opt for your competitor. At a bare minimum, your online presence will require a Facebook page and a website. Not only will these things legitimize your business in the eyes of prospective customers, but if you take advantage of positive customer reviews and effectively manage your reputation, prospective customers and leads will be far more likely to convert.

Bear in mind, however, that having a website isn’t automatically going to increase your overall visibility. This is where the importance of Search Engine Optimization (or “SEO”) comes into play. An integral part of your website and business’s online presence, SEO increases your rankings on popular search engines. Coming up with a keyword strategy will be your first step to increasing your site’s visibility on popular search engines (like Google.) From there, you’ll need to include specifics about your small business, including its name, address, phone number, and location. The more accessible you make this information, the easier it will be for customers to find you.

Get to know your target audience’s needs better

Digital marketing allows for engagement between you and your customers. This feature presents a great opportunity for your small business to get to know your audience’s needs, therefore allowing you to improve your customer experience based on their feedback. The more you’re able to learn about your audience’s demographics and preferences, the better you can tailor your efforts to meet their needs. Even better, there are tons of great tools available to help you do just that. The more receptive your small business is to your audience’s desires and preferences, the easier it will be to establish a line of trust and brand loyalty.

The prospect of digital marketing can seem intimidating at first. There are many different methods that will inevitably require an investment of your time. However, the measurable results they yield will be incredibly valuable to your small business’s overall strategy and profitability. Contact No Joke Marketing/Local Child Care Marketing today to learn more about digital marketing for your small business.

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Content Marketing for Small Business Owners

“Marketing is telling the world you’re a rock star. Content Marketing is showing the world you are one.” —Robert Rose, Chief Strategy Officer, The Content Advisory

Launching a successful digital marketing campaign is every small business owner’s goal. Without effective marketing strategies, growing your business and building a solid customer base can be quite challenging.

However, small businesses aren’t getting the same amount of attention and do not have the kinds of luxuries that big and more established enterprises enjoy. With limited resources, such as lack of funds or access to a larger and more experienced staff, smaller businesses may find it more difficult to make their marketing efforts pay off. Additionally, small enterprises also may not have the skills or knowledge needed to properly strategize and execute their marketing strategies.

The good thing is that these challenges can be overcome with proper planning and strategizing in the right direction. With so many marketing methods available with which you can experiment,  your chances of reaching a wider range of potential customers and creating a profitable long-term business are quite high.

Content marketing for small businesses is one of the many digital marketing strategies that is not only cost-effective, but also highly effective in terms of generating new customers and leads.

What is Content Marketing?

We’ve all heard the phrase “Content is king”, and many of us have started a few blogs to promote  our businesses. Content marketing is all over the place, and it has been around for a long time. When you hear the term “content marketing”,  things like blogs, curated content, or even social media are usually what come to mind. The truth is, content marketing is more than just the content format.

Did you know that about 90% of organizations in varying industries use content marketing in their marketing campaigns?

A definition of content marketing from Content Marketing Institute states that, “Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”

Content marketing is not your typical type of traditional marketing, namely one that usually involves interrupting your audience to ask them to perform a certain action. Instead, content marketing is permission-based and driven by creating content as a tool to distribute your message that resonates with your target audience and addresses their particular issues or questions. Over time, using content marketing can greatly influence your customer’s behavior as you continue to effectively communicate with your target audience, which will not only help you sell your products or services, but can also help you more effectively gauge the growth of your business.

A strong piece of high-quality content has the potential to make someone stop, think, review, and act upon your business’s desired call-to-action.

Benefits of Using Content Marketing

So does content marketing really work for small businesses? Yes, it can. In fact, big brands like Nike, Apple, and IBM are pushing out tons of resources to produce quality content. The good news is that you don’t need tons of money to see a positive ROI from incorporating content marketing into your business strategy. You just need to realize that 70% of customers prefer to learn about a company through a blog post over any other form of advertisement.

Do you know that the average small business owner spends less than 1% of their time on content marketing? That means these owners are spending most or all of their energy and resources in other areas. Content marketing is a long-term strategy that can result in increased traffic to your website, increased conversion rates, and more leads coming into your funnel. Content marketing is useful for your bottom line, as well as for your customers.

1. Increased Conversion Potential

The primary goal of content marketing is to engage, inform, assist, and deliver value to your customers. Once you have that covered, you can take advantage of any remaining space to promote your products or services. If done correctly, you can easily increase the number of conversions you get. Keep in mind that content marketing is not intended to directly sell your products and services, so remember not to turn your content into some kind of an advertisement.

2. Increase Traffic to Your Website

Most small business owners rely on their websites to generate new leads and revenue. However, simply having a website is not enough to guarantee success. Providing your audience with easily accessible quality content drives more traffic to your website. With improved search visibility, the amount of traffic that visits your site will eventually increase. 

3. Establish Your Brand as an Authority

If you want to become an authority within your industry, content marketing is a great way to do just that. Producing informative and educational content influences how your audience thinks of your brand. With a strong SEO in mind, coupled with a robust marketing strategy and the ability to consistently create high-quality content, you can indirectly sell your products or services to your target audience.

Your goal is to establish yourself as a recognized and esteemed leader through your content as the go-to resource for solutions when it comes to whatever questions or problems your audience may have. If you become an authority within your field, consumers will be more likely to trust your brand and support your products or services. 

4. Content Marketing is Cost-Effective

Content marketing only costs time, and compared with other digital marketing tactics, content marketing costs 62% less,  but is three times more effective. Content marketing is easy to begin, and often helps marketers reduce the number of resources they need to spend when engaging with customers and generating leads.

While your first few months may not yield much in terms of serious results, you will gradually start to see growth and improvement over the next few months. By the time you’re a few years into your consistent content marketing strategy, your return on investment could easily quadruple without you even knowing it.

Steps To Creating An Effective Content Marketing Strategy

“Content marketing” is a buzzword. It’s becoming more and more popular, but the problem for some business owners is that many people don’t know how to create an effective content marketing strategy for their business.

A ”content marketing strategy” can be defined as a long-term plan for creating and distributing content that will engage your target audience. This may include blogs, tweets, or any other type of social media post. You may also create infographics to display an idea in the most visually appealing way possible while still including text where necessary (this is a popular one for online retailers). Some businesses also create videos that get people talking.

There are many reasons why content marketing is such an effective strategy, including increased customer engagement in the form of higher click rates on your website, more qualified leads from potential customers who have been exposed to you through various forms of media (i.e. emails, tweets), and more qualified leads from potential customers who have been exposed to your business through various forms of media.

There are many variables that come into play when trying to create a successful content marketing strategy. These include the type of business you have, your audience’s demographics (such as age range, gender,), and how much time is available for consistent updates on social platforms like Facebook or Twitter.

One tactic  to help you systematically build your strategy might be working with somebody experienced. This may be a company that can help you not only develop your online presence, but also provide guidance around what kinds of strategies on which you should focus your energy and efforts towards ensuring the best possible return on investment.

For those without the resources or time (like some small business owners), there are some other ways you can build a content marketing strategy that may be more cost-effective in terms of ROI.  One idea is developing a brand personality, such as choosing an image or mascot for your business.  This can help create engagement with audiences.  Another approach might include creating engaging video updates, such as company profiles that show behind-the-scenes footage about things are done at your organization and staff members mucking around their workplace). 

1. Define your audience 

What are your business goals? Who do you want to reach with your marketing? What is the best way to get in contact with them?

The first step in defining your audience is knowing who they are and what makes them tick. Once you have a clear picture of who they are, it becomes easier to make a plan for how to most effectively connect with them.

2. Research what they are interested in 

There are a lot of quality marketing strategies out there, but they don’t work if you’re not utilizing the right ones. It’s important to know what your audience is interested in so that you can target them with specific content that will resonate. Blogging allows you to communicate directly with people who are already looking for information on topics similar to yours.

3. Create a content plan: What will you publish? How often? What format? Who will write it? 

You’ve got a great idea for a blog post, and you’re excited to get started. But wait, there’s more! You also need to create a content plan that outlines which specific topics about which you want to publish,  how often the posts will be published on your website or blog, and in what format they’ll be published (i.e., text-only posts vs photo/video).

The key is to identify the type of content your audience needs so you can give it to them with consistency. For example, if your audience needs inspiration for their businesses every day, then publishing one new blog post per weekday might work best. 

4. Determine the best distribution channels for your content (e-mail, social media, etc.) and set up an editorial calendar to keep track of all posts 

One of the most important aspects of content marketing is determining which distribution channels to use for your content. The reason this is so crucial is that it can affect how many people you are able to reach, and therefore, how effectively you can increase sales.

The best distribution channels for your content depends on the tone of your content. If you have a light-hearted blog post, sharing it on social media is a great way to attract an audience. If your blog post has more of an educational or informative tone, emailing it out to relevant businesses and organizations may be a more suitable route for reaching your intended audience.

5. Track metrics on how well each post is doing so that you can adjust future posts accordingly

One of the most important aspects of marketing is tracking metrics. It’s not enough to have a visually appealing website and business cards. You need to know how well each post is performing in order to plan most effectively for the future. Post metrics are an important measurement when it comes to content marketing. By tracking them, you’ll know which posts are getting the most likes and shares, which will give you a good idea of how well your future posts might do.

Learn more about content marketing and strategies you can incorporate into your marketing efforts by getting in touch with us at No Joke Marketing.

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What Is Social Media Marketing?

It’s 2021 and social media is here to stay! That’s why it’s so important for you to incorporate social media into your marketing plan for your small business. As a valuable means of communication and spreading awareness about your business, there are a variety of ways that you can leverage social media to attract new customers and maintain your online presence. There are numerous social media platforms that can suit your ideal audience types. And with a strategic plan in place to advance your social media initiatives and goals, you’ll be able to yield measurable results.

Engagement from your followers will be one of the many key indicators of how effective your efforts are. Whether someone has positive or negative feedback about your company,, this information will be very important. Furthermore, the way in which you handle this type of feedback on a public platform will have an impact on your brand’s reputation. We’ve all heard plenty of horror stories about big brands not responding to valid customer feedback, or completely missing the mark with certain content. Now, let’s talk a little bit more about why social media is going to be one of your most important tools when it comes to your overall business strategy.

Building Brand Awareness in the Community

New data tells us that as of March 2021, there are approximately 4.2 billion people using social media. On average, these users dedicate at least two and half hours of their day browsing various social media channels. Keeping those statistics in mind, you can drastically increase your chances of reaching your target audience as long as you’re utilizing the right tactics to reach said audience. In fact, the way many people come across your brand may just be through social media.

Building brand awareness will be one of the main components to your overall social media strategy. This can be accomplished through a variety of ways. However, for small businesses in particular, it’s important to be community-oriented. Building an established presence among surrounding communities is possible by partnering with other local businesses, launching campaigns for certain initiatives to create awareness regarding a certain topic, while simultaneously creating awareness for your brand will help cultivate a larger following to whom you can promote your brand.

Expertise and Thought Leadership

Sharing your expertise on social media will establish credibility among your target audience. Spreading information about topics in which prospective customers might be interested  empowers you as an expert in your field. The more your audience sees you on their social media timelines, the more likely you are to pop up in their minds when they’re looking for a specific product or service that you can provide. Ultimately, your interactions and feedback from your prospective buyers will help you learn more about your audience overall. Over time, you’ll have a better understanding of their behaviors and preferences, which will help you tailor your content accordingly.

Get One Step Ahead of the Competition

Larger corporations and businesses are inevitably going to have more resources at their fingertips when it comes to leveraging more traditional marketing methods. However, social media marketing  provides a much more even playing field. As a matter of fact, one advantage that smaller businesses have over large corporations is that personal touch. This authenticity will be what inspires brand loyalty within your customer base.

Of course, big corporations aren’t going to be your main competitor if you own a small business. Other small businesses are trying to accomplish the same thing that you are: building brand awareness and loyalty. But this is not a reason to keep going through the motions when it comes to your content – in fact, many small businesses don’t have a solid social media strategy in place. This is why paying close attention to what your competitors are doing is so important. Anything that they’re not doing is exactly what you need to be doing in order to grab your share of the market.

Reaching Your Goals

Now that we’ve discussed the “why,” it’s important to understand the “how.” How do you go about setting up your strategy? You’ll want to ask yourself, “How do I know how effective my efforts are?” There are going to be several factors that comprise your strategy, as well as key indicators of your campaign’s performance. To start, try to come up with small, measurable goals that will contribute to your overall strategy. These are known as your “Objectives.” If you want a crash course in Social Media Strategy 101, refer to the “SMART Goal Method”. Your objectives must be:

Specific 

Measureable 

Achievable 

Relevant

Timely 

It’s important to base your objectives on metrics that are relevant to your business and overall strategy. For example, you should be tracking how many followers you gain each month, in addition to likes, comments, shares, and account mentions. If your overall goal is to increase website conversions, include a link to your website in your posts and track social traffic in your website’s analytics. You should be tracking those conversions, as well as click rates. Alternatively, if your goal is to track brand awareness, you should be tracking growth (number of followers), as well as engagement (likes, shares, comments). These metrics are useful, as they will give you an idea of how well your campaign is performing, your brand health, and your strategy’s overall impact.

Of course, one of the most important factors you’ll need to track is going to be your engagement, no matter what your overall goal is. This term is all encompassing with regard to all of the different metrics that indicate how engaged your audience is with your content. Likes, comments, growth, and shares are all going to be very important metrics that fall under the engagement category. In a nutshell, engagement metrics are going to indicate how effective your social media efforts are.

Benchmarking

Benchmarking is a common practice for all types of businesses. Essentially, benchmarking means setting a standard metric and comparing your performance against that standard. Many businesses will set benchmarks for accountability purposes, while giving employees a goal towards which they need to work if they haven’t met that particular metric. In terms of social media marketing, a very common practice is to set your company’s metrics to reflect those of your competitors. Otherwise known as “competitive benchmarking,” this will provide you with a realistic goal to put in place for your metrics, and you’ll be able to assess your campaign’s effectiveness much more easily when you have additional context behind these metrics.

When it comes to choosing competitors to analyze, bear in mind that not all metrics are made the same. For example, if you’re a small, independent retailer, you won’t want to set your benchmarks to compare with those of a company like Walmart. Your competitors are going to be on the same level as you in terms of your social presence, following, and target audience.  Metrics such as interactions, how often your competitors post, as well as hashtags or keywords are all very important KPI’s to evaluate when setting your benchmarks.

We’ve all heard the saying “Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer.” While the term “enemy” is certainly harsh, this saying is particularly true when it comes to gauging your own social media strategy’s effectiveness. Not only will you be able to set realistic and attainable goals, but you’ll also be able to gain some valuable insights into social trends in your industry.

Implementation

Implementing and maintaining your social media strategy doesn’t have to be as time-consuming or overwhelming as you may think. There are plenty of different tools to help you create a post schedule, and even help automate your post schedule so there’s little to no time commitment. Maintaining consistency across the board will also help you measure your data more accurately, and in turn, you’ll be able to pivot your efforts accordingly.

Setting an automated post schedule will help immensely with timeliness and consistency across your posts, and will increase your chances for engagement among your followers. It goes without saying that small businesses will have an easier time connecting with their followers as there will be less of an influx in terms of engagement, so you should be able to respond to feedback promptly.

Influencers

Building your small business brand’s credibility is hard to do unless you have someone to vouch for you. When you think about it, influencer marketing has been around for years with celebrities endorsing products and services through TV commercials, radio ads, billboard ads, and the like. The difference today, however, is that much of this is now accomplished through the use of social media.

Influencer marketing is clearly being utilized more than ever. As a type of marketing that leverages social proof to your brand, influencer marketing is successful in establishing a line of trust between your audience and your brand. These individuals are typically well-known and highly regarded in your niche, with thousands of dedicated followers that boost their overall social presence.

Instagram is undoubtedly the best platform to leverage influencers, but that doesn’t mean other platforms aren’t just as well-suited to spread the word about your brand. However, as a rule, it’s best to stick with one platform when you start out. Ideally, you’re going to have some form of presence on your chosen platform. In terms of compensation for the influencer, this will be directly proportional to their following. Is this individual a “micro-influencer” with less than two thousand followers? Or are you looking to vastly increase your reach, and perhaps leverage someone with upwards of 20 thousand followers? Regardless, you’re going to want to do your research and ensure you’re able to identify how much of a contribution your influencer is making to your overall social media strategy.

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Social Media Strategies to Adopt for your Business

Our world’s technology is evolving at an exponential rate, and the digital marketing industry is no exception. The amount of time people spend on social media has increased by 700% in the last five years. If you’re a business owner who’s looking to stand out from your competitors, you need to be active on social media as well.

Social media is critical to the success of any business’s digital marketing efforts. Unfortunately, not all businesses are equally successful when it comes to using social media for their own purposes. Some companies fail to use this tool to its full potential. Many businesses know that they can benefit greatly from doing social media marketing, but they don’t actually understand how to go about using it effectively.

Social media today is way well over “post” and “hope”. As a business owner, you need to create a social media strategy that will meet your business goals:

Build brand awareness

Improve customer relationships and loyalty

Generate sales within the social media platform

A well-defined social media strategy will help your brand address your business goals and objectives with a sense of purpose. So what social media strategies can you incorporate in order to most effectively market your business in 2021? 

1. Start with a plan

By this point in time, social media has been a part of most of our daily lives, so we can assume that most of us are comfortable using these platforms for our business. Fortunately, it doesn’t cost anything to create a social media business profile on Facebook. It’s also free-of-charge to post on Instagram and LinkedIn and to build a social presence on Twitter.

However, keep in mind that every effective marketing strategy starts with a solid plan. While using social media platforms may not cost any money, a considerable amount of time and effort are still involved in order to successfully create a worthy social media campaign. The first step in creating a social media marketing strategy is deciding what it is you hope to accomplish. What are your specific goals? Do you want to expand your reach, find new customers, or increase engagement on current posts? Whatever your goal is, it’s important that you stick to it.

For many business owners, social media is not at the forefront of their minds. After all, there are so many other areas that need to be tackled, like marketing, customer service, and product development. But what if we told you that with just a little bit of time and effort in the right places, you could have your own army of followers who love your brand? Now don’t get us wrong – it doesn’t happen overnight (or in one day). Building an online presence takes patience and care in order to create a strategy that works well for your company’s needs. 

2. Create an efficient content marketing strategy

You may feel that you hear the same thing over and over again: “Content is king.” Regardless of your particular industry or niche, if you’re not creating great content to share with your audience on a regular basis, chances are that someone else is. Content marketing is an important strategy for any business. The goal of content marketing is to offer value and engage your audience, which can lead to increased traffic, leads, and conversions. But how do you know which types of content will work best for your business?

Quality is key, and content is no exception. One of the reasons many brands fail in terms of content marketing is because they are not linking high-quality content with an appropriate frequency of posts or an appropriate content-posting schedule. Coupling these things with high-quality SEO content and a relevant hashtag strategy will help bring in your desired customers at the right time. 

3. Use brand advocates or influencers

Do you want to know how to get your business in front of people without the hassle and expense of advertising? One of the best promotional tools, and probably the cheapest way to build brand awareness, is to make use of people who love your brand.

The power of “influencer marketing” is profound. When you’re designing an online marketing strategy, it’s not just about gaining new customers. It’s also about retaining the ones you have! Leveraging your business’s brand advocates or influencers in your marketing campaign can help amplify your message and make it more credible because these individuals are often seen as experts in their field. When people see a recommendation from someone they know, trust, or admire, they’re much more likely to take action than if they are presented with an advertisement alone.

Conclusion:

Developing a social media strategy for your business can be one of the most challenging tasks because it requires you to step back, take a closer look at your existing marketing effort, and look at the bigger picture. With so many social media marketing strategies available that you can utilize for your business,  it’s important to shift your focus away from just scheduling message replies and comments to higher-level thinking.

For more social media marketing strategies to help you achieve your social media and business goals, contact us at No Joke Marketing today!

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How to Incorporate Digital Marketing into your Business’s Marketing Strategy

Traditional marketing and digital marketing differ in a variety of ways. However, they can go hand-in-hand if you come up with a goal-oriented strategy. Depending on your audience, you may want to try using different avenues in order to reach them. Ultimately, your aim is to promote your brand, increase overall awareness, and drive revenue. Of course, no strategy will be effective if you don’t know what you want to achieve. This is why it’s important to set specific goals, complete with metrics and an ability to analyze your numbers, in order to pivot your efforts and strategy accordingly.

While digital marketing certainly has its pros, just because it’s relatively new doesn’t mean it works for everyone. Obviously, if your target audience is made up primarily of millennials, utilizing any type of online marketing approach will be effective. But if you’re trying to reach older generations, you may need to use an approach that doesn’t rely as heavily on the internet. For example, if you’re a lawyer who specializes in elder law, you’ll want to target older generations (such as ”Baby Boomers”) in order to gain more clients. The best way to reach this type of audience is primarily through traditional methods, such as newspaper ads, magazines targeted towards older generations, and local TV ads.

Benefits of Traditional Marketing

While both traditional and digital marketing approaches have their pros and cons, deciding which ones to incorporate into your strategy really depends on who your target audience is and how you can best reach them. For example, traditional marketing methods tend to appeal to older generations. Using things like billboards, local TV ads, mailers, and newspaper ads will generally resonate most with that particular demographic. However, it’s also important to keep in mind that statistically, more people own televisions than smartphones or computers. Not only that, but as long as people are on the road, you’re still more than likely to increase exposure by using a billboard ad. While some methods are more outdated than others, you shouldn’t discount the traditional marketing approach altogether.

Take a closer look at your audience

When it comes to choosing a marketing approach, one rule of thumb is to analyze who is most likely to buy your product or service. Demographics such age, education, gender, and lifestyle preferences all make up various characteristics of your target audience. Once you take this step, you can put together a profile of your ideal customer or lead. For example, if you own a childcare center, your ideal lead may be a mother in her early thirties who is college-educated and likes to maintain a healthy and active lifestyle. The more specific you can be, the better. This is how you identify your “audience persona”, which is the ideal type of prospect you’re aiming to convert.

The sales Funnel

The “sales funnel” refers to the buyer’s or lead’s journey to conversion. While the names of the stages involved will vary depending on who you ask, the concept remains the same. Generally, there’s the top of the funnel, which indicates awareness or discovery of your product or service. Then, moving down the funnel you’ll find the middle portion, which refers to the buyer’s interest. They’ve essentially raised their hand to learn more about what you’re offering. From there, you’ll move towards the bottom of the funnel, where the prospective lead will decide whether or not to move forward with your offer. Finally, you’ll get to the conversion (or action) stage of the funnel. This is where you’ve converted your lead to a sale, and you now have a loyal customer or client. It’s important to track the buyer’s journey, so you can adjust your strategy accordingly, as needed.

Determining your End Goal

Knowing what goal you want to achieve has to come before figuring out how to achieve it. Whether you’re looking to generate more leads, increase your overall brand awareness, or simply drive more traffic to your website, it’s imperative to set realistic benchmarks in order to achieve those objectives. Once you’ve nailed down your strategy according to your audience persona, you’ll want to set specific guidelines and metrics in order to accomplish both your short-term and long-term objectives.

Tactics

Whether you opt to utilize traditional or digital marketing, creating a “call to action” (or CTA) is how you’ll get prospects over the hurdle. Including a “lead magnet”, or something to push the prospect in the right direction, is beneficial. Lead magnets tend to include perks like free services or materials, with the aim of gathering contact information so you can keep in touch with the lead. Other tactics include showing testimonials on your website, or using a service like Google My Business to help improve your local SEO.

It’s important to remain data driven, rather than simply “throwing something to the wall and seeing what sticks”, so to speak. If you are in fact looking to make use of a hybrid strategy that includes both digital and traditional marketing methods, we strongly suggest taking a close look at your audience demographics and determining which approach will best resonate with each. That way, you’ll be able to nail down exactly who you need to reach and the best strategy to utilize accordingly.

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What is Digital Marketing?

Digital Marketing – An Overview

If you’re someone who has only used traditional marketing methods to promote your business, the term “digital marketing” may sound like a whole other ball game. But when it comes down to it, the basic fundamentals of digital marketing are the same as those for traditional methods: utilizing different channels to reach your target audience, with the sole aim of converting the prospective buyer. The main difference is that digital marketing will attract a much larger audience and increase your reach across different channels.

Of course, you’ll need to update your knowledge in order to create a robust and highly effective digital marketing campaign. It can certainly feel overwhelming if you’re looking to master the concept of digital marketing, especially since the landscape of digital marketing is constantly changing and evolving. This is why we’ve come up with a comprehensive guide to digital marketing for beginners.

So, how does digital marketing work?

There are multiple means of reaching your target audience. Digital marketing and traditional marketing both have their pros and cons. If you tend to utilize traditional marketing approaches, such as billboards, flyers, or hosting events, you’ll still be able to get your message out there. However, remember that in order to reach your target audience, you need to evaluate the best ways in which to get your message in front of them.

At a high level overview, you can use a variety of different methods and channels to reach your target audience. Digital marketing is just that – advertising by means of a channel. Whether you use radio, phone, or the internet, you should be able to communicate your message to an audience. Of course, when it comes to reaching your target audience, you’ll have to get a little bit more specific.

For example, if your target demographic consists of millennials, it’s best to utilize social media content generation, search engine optimization (SEO), blog content, paid traffic (such as Facebook and Google Ads or PPC), as well as email marketing, so that you stay at the forefront of your audience. By doing so, you’ll be able to create awareness for your business, actively engage prospects, increase sales conversions, and generate more word-of-mouth referrals for your business.

Types of Digital Marketing

There are various types of digital marketing, and it’s important to gain a basic understanding of how they all work together in order to create an effective marketing campaign. Digital marketing is an all-encompassing term used to describe all of the different types of online marketing options. Digital channels like Facebook (or any social media platform), Google search, email marketing, and electronic newsletters are all different types of digital marketing strategies you can use to get your business on the map.

Inbound Marketing

“Inbound marketing” refers to the act of generating and maintaining strong relationships with prospective buyers and sales leads. Essentially, you’re making your business more accessible and cultivating more brand awareness. There’s a variety of ways in which you can accomplish this, including content marketing (such as blogs or articles), establishing your presence on social media, and even providing quality customer service. All of these methods can greatly increase your overall engagement with your target audience.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is more specific in terms of strategy. While inbound marketing involves a variety of methods to reach your target audience, content marketing is more specific, in that it’s a strategy that involves distributing content in order to attract new prospects. By sharing insightful information (for free), you’ll be able to better establish your brand as an authority figure in your specific area of business. Credibility within your consumer base can go a long way, especially when you’re looking to generate brand awareness.

MMS vs. SMS marketing

Mobile marketing is another must-have for your digital marketing strategy. Nowadays, mobile phones are like an extra limb for many of us. In 2019, 40% of online purchases were made via mobile device. With mobile technology moving faster than ever before, it’s safe to assume that these numbers will continue to climb. There are two different types of mobile marketing: “SMS” and “MMS”. SMS (Short Message Service) marketing allows you to send a text message limited to a 160-character limit. MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) allows you to send a message containing pictures, audio, or video content. There’s no limit to how many characters when it comes to MMS messages. Depending on what type of content you’re trying to communicate and how, either of these text message options are suitable for reaching your leads, as your content is quite literally in the palm of their hands.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a great way for businesses to stay connected to their consumer base. From being able to promote new offers to sending out newsletters with business updates, re-engaging your audience will be easy with content that is customized to their purchasing preferences. According to Experian, transactional emails get eight times more clicks and opens than other types of email, and can generate up to six times more revenue for your business.

PPC and aid Traffic

“PPC” (Pay-per-click) and paid traffic both go hand in hand. In both cases, you’re essentially paying for digital traffic to your website or business. There are a few different types of paid traffic, but all of them are there to help you accomplish the same goal for your business. With PPC, you’re paying for each click your ad gets when placed on popular websites and search engines. These types of ads are usually determined by bids placed on specific keywords on search engines, and will appear at the top of the first page of search results. Ads on websites, however, will have a set cost as opposed to having to bid on its placement. Other forms of paid traffic include social media ads, Google ads, and any other kinds of display ads that will reach your target audience and ultimately expand your reach.

Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Optimization (also called “SEO”) is exactly what it sounds like. Technically, it fits in under the umbrella of paid traffic, but it’s also an effective strategy in and of itself. You are essentially paying for visibility for your website on search engine results pages (aka “SERPs”). It’s a critical strategy for expanding your reach just like paid traffic, however it’s also very cost-effective in that you are paying for impressions, resulting in visitors to your website. As a matter of fact, a vast majority of new visitors to a website are led there through typing specific keywords when performing a search. Keywords are important, as search engines use algorithms to identify the most relevant results for the user. The most relevant results are often paid to appear at the top of the page, making it so that the user is far more likely to click on them.

That’s great – but how do I implement these strategies?

Many of these initiatives encompass other tactics that are effective on their own, but in combination they can make a digital marketing powerhouse.  In terms of implementation, coming up with a well-thought-out data-driven strategy will be absolutely fundamental when it comes to driving measurable results. In order to come up with an effective strategy, you first have to think about why you’re doing it in the first place. Why do you want to drive traffic to your website? Why do you want to generate leads through social media ads? The “why” will dictate how you execute your plan moving forward. Here are three important steps you’ll need to take if you want to see a successful turnout:

Step 1: Get to know your audience well 

Being well-acquainted with your audience’s demographics and lifestyle preferences is essential to delivering a message that will resonate with them. It’s wise to contemplate who your ideal customer is, and even come up with a fictional character that encompasses the traits of your buyers. For example, if you’re running a child care business, you’re most likely dealing directly with parents on a regular basis. It’s important to note their main concerns and the reasons why they chose to place their child in your care. In this case, your standard customer would probably be a busy and protective parent. This is just one example, as there are plenty of different types of audiences to which your business could be catering. The important thing is that you identify your customer base’s demographic, personality types, and best ways in which to reach them.

Step 2: Set a realistic goal

Setting a measurable and realistic goal is one of the first steps when it comes to figuring out how you can reach that goal. Next, you’ll want to make sure that you understand why you’re setting that goal, and the steps it will take to achieve it. This is where metrics come into play. Reviewing your metrics on certain initiatives can paint a visible picture of what’s working and what’s not. Digital marketing analytics can give you a comprehensive view of your efforts thus far, and help you determine where you need to adjust some of your efforts. For example, if your leads from Facebook ads are beginning to decline, you may want to change up your ad copy, change up your target audiences, or increase your ad spend. If you’re able to pinpoint where your efforts are successful and are still driving your results, you’ll know where to focus your attention and amplify your efforts accordingly.

Step 3: Keep your friends close, but keep your competitors closer

There are different types of competitors, but every business has to deal with them. Direct competitors refer to businesses that have the same services or products as you do. Indirect competitors are businesses that compete for the same budget type or audience type as you. There are plenty of ways to stealthily research your competitors so you can compare what you’re both offering. For example, you may search key terms and see who pops up on one of the first results. Pay attention to where they are funneling their ads. You may even look into online tools that can analyze your competitor’s performance, as this will give you much needed leverage.

It’s important to note that utilizing these methods will take time, patience,  and consistency. When you’re first starting out, more often than not, don’t be hard on yourself if you don’t get everything just right. However, the more you keep up on moving the needle with your metrics and keeping a close eye on which of your efforts are most effective, the better your results will be in the long run. All things considered, setting expectations and having an attainable goal in mind will set you up for success.

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5 Effective Digital Marketing Strategies for Business Growth and Success

Digital marketing is a very broad topic, and it may seem like there’s an endless list of available methods or techniques for improving your business. Regardless of your company or industry size, digital marketing strategies are essential. While you will hear plenty of suggestions about which ones may be most effective, you’ll need to determine the best strategies that will best suit your business needs and be relevant to your target audience.

When it comes to creating a digital marketing campaign for your business, you don’t want to choose the wrong strategy and end up wasting your time and effort. You also need to ensure that you don’t lose track of your goal and stay on top of your lead generation activities. With so many other tasks and activities on which to focus on and accomplish, how can you effectively craft, create, polish, and maintain a robust digital marketing strategy?

Here are some effective digital marketing strategies you can use to help you increase brand awareness, improve your digital presence, and eventually generate more leads.

Build your buyer personas 

Whether you opt to utilize a traditional or digital marketing strategy, you need to know who your audience is and to whom you’re marketing your products or services. The most efficient digital marketing strategies are built upon comprehensive buyer personas, and your first step is to build and create them.

Buyer personas are generalized representations of who your ideal customers are, and they can be created through research, surveillance, and interviews from your business target audience. Keep in mind that this information should be derived from real data as much as possible since assumptions about your customers can have a negative impact on your marketing strategies. You can have as little as one to two buyer personas, or as many as 10 to 20, depending on the type of business you have. It’s best to start small, as you can always modify and create as many as you can along the way.

Google My Business

One of the most powerful things you can do for your business is rank your Google My Business (GMB). As a matter of fact, if you run a local small business targeting clients within the community, this is probably the most powerful strategy available for your business.

When potential customers search online, they will normally see a paid ad first, followed by three GMB listings, before the normal organic search results appear. If you can rank your GMB listing in these top three results, you are guaranteed to pull in an ample amount of qualified leads on a daily basis, without the need to spend too much on paid ads. Ranking your GMB listing is not that difficult to do — you just need to optimize your profile and collect citations and reviews.

Affiliate and associate programs

Through associate or affiliate programs, people who have faith in your company and your products/services can help grow your market by sharing information on a market-based platform. An associate or affiliate program may not be the best option for every business, but if used correctly, you can see improvements in your marketing efforts without the need to spend too much on advertising, or having to do much of the legwork on your own.

Email marketing

You have probably done some email marketing as one of your digital marketing strategies, but are they really effective in reaching your ideal target audience at the right time? When implemented properly, email marketing can be a powerful tool for generating more leads and increasing sales and conversion rates.

Additionally, with email marketing, there is no need to spend as much of your marketing budget since it is one of the most cost-effective methods unless you are using outdated services. Being one of the most integrated digital marketing methods, email marketing can also be combined with media by adding social share icons and implementing a referral rewards system. Ultimately, when using compelling content, email marketing can help you shorten your sales cycle.

Use content marketing for lead generation

Lead generation can be done in various ways. However, one tried and tested method is by providing your audience with valuable content and properly distributing it. When you link your articles and blogs to a specific offer through your winning landing page, you can increase your sales conversion potential.

In today’s competitive times, you need to focus on creating not just compelling content, but content that can stay evergreen and solve pain points. Always keep in mind that “Content is king.”

Conclusion

With so many methods available to help promote your business, there will always be some great strategies you can utilize that would be a great fit to help you achieve your goals and objectives. For more digital marketing strategies to help your business grow and succeed, contact us at No Joke Marketing.

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E-Commerce Marketing — Top Digital Marketing Strategies to Boost your Business

Despite living in the digital age, many e-commerce sites are still experiencing many challenges. With millions of shopping options worldwide, competition is fierce. Additionally, Google has made it easier for consumers to check and compare prices quickly, compare your company’s products or services with competitors, and decide what they’re going to purchase before they can even visit your site. No matter what type of e-commerce business you have, these kinds of challenges make it harder and even more expensive to attract customers.

In today’s world, you need to utilize the most effective digital marketing strategies in order to make your e-commerce business stand out. You also need to use these strategies so you can attract new customers and entice existing ones to keep coming back to your store.

Here are some proven simple yet effective digital marketing strategies to help you start driving more online sales and increasing your ROI all across your e-commerce funnels.

1. Retargeting Campaign

Every marketer should know that retargeting campaigns are great money-making opportunities. As the term suggests, “retargeting campaign” refers to targeting and showing ads to those prospects who have previously shown interest in certain products or services that you offer on your e-commerce site. Let’s face it, most people who have visited your website for the first time are unlikely to make a purchase during that particular visit. However, if they are reminded of your product or services again at a later time, the likelihood of them eventually making a purchase dramatically increases.

This is where your retargeting campaign comes in — it serves as a gentle reminder to that potential customer to reconsider buying your product or service they had initially checked out on your e-commerce site. If you have a well-executed reminder, sent at the right time, you can re-ignite a prospective buyer’s intent to purchase, which can eventually lead to a sale. Retargeting campaigns have been considered to be one of the most successful digital marketing strategies for consistently providing positive outcomes.

2. Optimize the Checkout Process

Optimizing your business’s online checkout process is vital if you want to decrease cart abandonment. A strategy that is often neglected by many businesses, this is probably one of the most important tactics. Remember, trust is important in order to gain that customer’s attention. You spend a lot of time building that trust with your prospects in order to get them to buy your product or use your service, and you must continue building that trust until the very end, which includes all throughout your checkout process. When you have a checkout process that is smooth, convenient, and trustworthy from start to finish, your conversion rates will definitely increase and cart abandonment will decrease.

3. Up your Cross-Selling Game with Pop-ups

Pop-ups are also one of the most effective digital marketing strategies to boost your e-commerce business. By definition, pop-ups are those little windows that temporarily take over your visitor’s screens, presenting them with additional offers or products. You can use these pop-ups to attract prospective buyers with something like a discount offer or an additional product they can add to their cart. Pop-ups may not always have a positive impact on some users — they may have a bad reputation, so to speak. But there is a reason why they’re so effective — pop-ups actually work. If you use pop-ups with legitimately relevant offers, such as limited time offers or a buy-one-get-one sale, they can ultimately drive a ton of sales and increase revenue for your e-commerce business.

4. Customer Feedback and Reviews

Reviews and ratings can significantly impact a potential customer’s decision when it comes to purchasing your products. Create a user-friendly environment in which customers’ feedback and insights are highly encouraged. Instead of just using social media as a means to respond to customer queries and maintain a two-way conversation, leverage this platform to open up a discussion forum between customers. Gather feedback and proactively ask for unbiased ratings and reviews from customers, which you can share on your site. Encourage them to provide a review of your brand and have them promote your products. Most often, potential buyers are more interested in hearing about your business and what you can offer from people who have previously purchased them, rather than from your marketing or sales team.

Conclusion:

With so many available digital marketing strategies, you’ll never run out of options. The key is to test these out and try what works best for your business. Ready to grow your e-commerce business? Get in touch with us today at No Joke Marketing.

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Digital Marketing Best Practices during an Economic Downturn

Running a business can feel like riding a roller coaster — it has its ups and downs and may have sudden plunges or immediate jumps. As a business owner, it is crucial to understand the challenges you may face along the way, even in a healthy economy. Your patience, determination, and skills as an entrepreneur will be put to the test especially in tough economic times. Right now, the economy is falling — we are all in a freefall, and it can feel disconcerting. You might need to consider using digital marketing best practices to help ensure that your business stays afloat and is able to survive an economic downturn.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had adverse impacts on many industries — staying indoors, working from home, and surfing the internet has become the new normal for many people. The problem is that none of us knows when this will end. That’s why it’s so important for companies to start looking for ways to deal with these economic challenges.

There are plenty of strategies that can help business owners like you drive up profits, even during an economic downturn. Here are some digital marketing best practices you can use during a recession:

Email marketing 

One of the most cost-effective marketing channels you can use to build trust and loyalty among your customers is email marketing. When you own a business, it’s important to create a list of current customers as well as prospective customers. Eventually, you can use this information to gain insight into what your customers need, and it will help you speak to them directly as well. Through this list, you will deliver appropriate content to your customers and prospects, since you know who your target market is and how you engage best with your business.

You can segment and personalize your email list based on demographics, types of products, and services your customers need. You can take advantage of this email strategy that addresses your target audience’s specific needs, which can ultimately generate increased sales, even during this period of recession.

Re-marketing

During a recession, re-marketing can help you retain more customers. While cutting your marketing budget may seem like the most practical option, you need to know how your customers redefine value and react to the crisis accordingly. For a business to survive, it needs to develop a compelling value marketing strategy that provides value and helps retain customer loyalty.

Statistics show that during a recession, retaining existing customers is a lot cheaper for a business than finding new ones. The ability to anticipate opportunities, threats, and risks allows you to minimize the consequences better — foreseeing them, and planning corrective actions and strategies ahead of time.

Adjusting your pricing strategies

During a recession, consumers are forced to tighten their wallets and are more likely to be shopping around for the best deals. Cutting down drastically on your prices is not necessarily the first option; however, you may need to offer more price promotions temporarily, price smaller pack sizes more aggressively, reduce thresholds for quantity discounts, and/or extend credit to long-standing customers. This will attract more consumer support than regular promotions, such as mail-offers or sweepstakes.

Gather customer testimonials and user reviews

One of the essential components of any local SEO marketing strategy is customer reviews, and during a recession, this is truer than ever. Positive reviews and testimonials have the power to influence a new customer’s purchasing decisions since they significantly strengthen your company’s reputation.

As a business owner, you need to understand that a recession means that customers’ trust and confidence are low. Few people are shopping and looking for products and services. To make matters worse, many are anxious about making a mistake with whatever limited purchase they make.

With that in mind, you need to do everything you can to ensure that you build trust and loyalty with your existing customers and prospects. You need to dedicate more time, effort, and energy so you can increase the number of testimonials and user reviews from previous and current customers, and leverage these reviews in all of your content marketing efforts to power your digital marketing strategies during an economic downturn.

Conclusion:

No one is ever adequately prepared for any economic downturn, but as a business owner, you will be faced with tough decisions as you experience the negative impacts of a recession. You may need to reduce your marketing budget, cut costs and expenses, and even lay off employees so your business can survive. This challenging time will put many businesses and entrepreneurs to the test, regardless of the type of industry they’re in. With so many factors out of your control, remember that there are still digital marketing best practices you can use to survive in this difficult economic situation.

To learn more about these strategies, feel free to contact us and speak with our team of expert and professional marketing consultants about the options available to you.

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The Art of Strategic Planning

Today’s topic is all about planning.

Recently, I’ve been getting a lot of questions around planning, and I wanted to go into a few different areas that correlate back to this topic.

When I look at the topic of planning, there are lots of different types of plans that you can execute. I’m going to give you what I have found to be the most valuable types of plans that can really get your business moving in the right direction.

What I’d like to see you tackle first is more of a long-range plan that is focused around the vision that you have. I like to call this document a painted picture. I did an episode all around putting together a painted picture, but essentially, this is looking out three years and starting to talk about your business as if things had already happened. What is your revenue three years out? What are you doing in the company? How was your culture? How many employees do you have? What are your products and services? All that good stuff, but it’s written to be dare I say, more emotional. It’s also meant to be an inspiring document to just get things out of your head and to show the rest of your team. Sort of like showing them where you would love to be in three years. I highly encourage you to start with that particular document.

Now, after you have that done, I want you to consider doing a couple of different types of plans. The first one is just with everything that’s going on in this world today. Things are really fluid, they’re changing day in and day out. Putting together documents that are full-blown planning documents of what is the day by day or week by week going to look like over the next six months, it’s not really going to be that helpful. Basically, what I want you to do is to look at where you are today and I want you to look at where you want to be in the next 30 days — simply start with 30 days.

Now normally this is a financial goal, but it can be anything that you want that correlates back to your business or even your life. If your personal goals include losing some weight, getting healthier, or having more time with your family. If you look at your business, and if you did $100,000 last month, you want to get to $130,000, or whatever those goals are, you need to look at them in 30 days from today. Then what I want you to do is to start to backward plan and back yourself into how you’re going to achieve those. While the painted picture is a great document, it’s not a how-to document nor a step-by-step this is how this happened. It’s not the vision of how things look three years out but it doesn’t explain everything — that’s the missing piece to that.

However, if you start to take this in bite-sized chunks, so 30 days out, for example, you can then backward plan week by week and day by day the activities that you’re going to need to execute in order to hit those goals. If you want to get a website project done, what are you going to have to do day by day, week by week? And it allows you to start to see this really becoming a reality.

When the brain is able to see things in bite-sized chunks, it just starts to make it a little bit easier to accomplish, but then it also allows you to start to see if you are executing the activities that you need to hit those goals. From there, you would see if it’s going to really come down to an activity-driven problem, or an activity activity-driven solution.

Did you execute the right activities to hit those goals? Did you do them enough and then you can continue to adjust and correct this plan, month after month after month. What if you didn’t hit your $130,000 objective despite the activities you had planned and execution every day like clockwork? Well, then something needs to change on the activities for next month. Everything is about at least having a long-range, visionary type of plan and then having shorter-term sprint’s 30-60-90 days on the high side that allow people to kind of see things in the here and now and it’s not just a document for you. It’s a document for your team so that they know where they should be focusing.

The last type of plan that I encourage you to consider putting together is a financial plan. This financial plan is a pretty simple document in the sense of, I want to know what are your expectations for the month in terms of your sales and expenses? How much are you going to pay yourself? How much are you setting aside for taxes or for-profit? I want you to be able to have this plan so that you know what you’re working towards. You need to be tracking these numbers and measuring because sadly, far too often business owners have their head buried in the sand when it comes to the financial numbers. Then a few months into things or a year later, they realize they haven’t been making any money or they haven’t taken a profit. They haven’t paid themselves a salary. Growth in a business does suck cash, but the business is there to serve you first. And you need to make sure that that business is taking care of you.

So I want you to put together this painted picture document — go back and really listen to that episode. The second thing I want you to do is to start to plan 30 or 60 days out from today, where do you want to be 30 to 60 days from today? Then I want you to back that into a day by day, week by week plan so that you can measure the activities against the results. Are those activities leading up to the results — yes or no? Finally, I want you to put together a financial plan so that you’re able to start to forecast out what you are going to do for the next 30 days or 60 days? What does your cash flow look like? Because I want to make sure that you do not run out of cash.

I finished interviewing 120 entrepreneurs and I submitted my master’s thesis on Sunday. Ultimately, the number one reason entrepreneurs went out of business was due to cash. The second reason was the failure to plan. That is why this planning that we just talked about is so important. Get out there, take some action.

 The post The Art of Strategic Planning appeared first on No Joke Marketing.

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The Speed and Quantity of your Follow Up – How Much is Too Much or Too Little?

Today’s topic is all about “how and when to follow up”.

One of the questions that I get asked on a regular basis is “Michael, how much follow up is too much?” or the opposite end of the spectrum, “How much follow up is not enough?”

As we talk through the content and the actions and the tactics today, the big thing that I want to point out for you is that there is a direct correlation to the speed and quantity of which you follow up.

For example, if a lead comes in and that lead could be someone that calls in and leaves a voicemail before or after hours, send in a message to Facebook Messenger, fill out a form on the website or send you a direct message on one of your social media platforms, or even live chat. Basically, you can get leads from any of the different places that your prospects and customers can communicate. Once they start raising their hand, the time clock starts. And the longer the time clock goes, the more likely you are to lose that potential or repeat customers or that new order.

There’s been a lot of different studies of how fast do people follow up. You can look at all different kinds of metrics, but typically 30% of people follow up the same day. 45% do it within 24 hours and then it goes down from there. So it’s gonna be like, 75% of people in the first 24 hours, and then after that, you’ve got about 16% that are 48 hours, 4% 72 hours, and then 5% to 6% will say, they’ll do it within the week.

Now, if I look at it and if you know that 75% of people are going to follow up in the first 24 hours, I want you to have the first-mover advantage. So not only do I want you following up on the same day, I want you to follow up as fast as possible to when that lead comes in.

Let’s say, a lead comes in at noon, I want you to have systems and processes in place so that you’re able to get notified and that you can start your follow up process.

So for example, if someone submits something to your Facebook page, you can leverage a tool called Zapier that can trigger one of a couple of things — that can trigger an email or a text message. It can even trigger a voicemail to go to you and say “hey, you have a new lead — please follow up”. So depending on the method that you tend to be glued to, which is always your cell phone, as that lead is coming and it can go to whomever on your team should be responsible for Following up.

The first thing that you want to look at is the speed of following up from that initial request. And you need to make sure that you have all of the different holes taken care of. So for example, if there are people that are sending Facebook messages, and you don’t look at those until the end of the week, but you look at emails once or twice a day, then you know that there’s a hole with Facebook Messenger. So you want to leverage software, tools, and technology to make sure that all the different methods that they could contact, you are going into one bucket, and then it’s notifying whomever to make sure that they’re able to get in touch with that lead the quickest — so, that’s step one.

Step two is the other big question is how much is too much or how much is too little? And in all candidness there really isn’t a thing of too much. Now, I’m not saying that you should be calling every 15 minutes after the lead comes in and call them 50 times on the first day. But if someone submits a lead at noon, I would expect you to try and call them as close to noon as possible. Maybe again at three and then maybe again at six o’clock before you head home for the afternoon or the evening rather. So calling three times on the first day isn’t out of the question.

However, the secret sauce is not just to rely on one method of communication. I want you to not only call three times on the first day, I want you to send a couple of emails. And I also want you if you hopefully have their cell phone I want you to send to, on the high side three text messages, on day one. And then from there, I want you to make sure that it’s built into your routine to follow up once a day with those particular tactics.

Now, a lot of times you can go down to phone and email rather than all three, but you want to look at where you think you’re going to get the best response and that really depends on the nature of your business, we’re seeing much better results with text that, again, makes the assumption that you hopefully have their cell phone number, which usually people are using for their direct lines anyways.

There really isn’t a way to be overly aggressive because even if I were to tell you that you should be calling 15 times a day, the likelihood of you actually doing and executing that are slim to none — it’s not going to happen. However, I’m typically starting to find that the tipping point is after you’ve communicated between six and 10 times. You might contradict and say, “Well, Michael, why would I have to call, email, or send a text message to someone six to 10 times just to get them to respond when they contacted me initially? It’s just the nature of human behavior. A lot of times they’re contacting multiple businesses in the same industry, and that’s where that whole first-mover advantage comes into play.

However, keep in mind that you can’t just assume that if you can’t get them on the first day or two that it’s a dead lead. Why would they take the time to fill in their contact information, if they at least didn’t have some kind of inkling of curiosity? People don’t just randomly click on things and submit their information unless it’s to enter some kind of contest. But, if they’re opting in or they’re asking for information on XYZ product or service, they’re going to have some kind of interest level. So, I want to make sure that you’re doing everything you can to get them either on the phone or to respond through text message, email, Facebook Messenger, or whatever you can do to get them to at least respond and start to engage in the conversation.

Once I’ve taken them from lead to some kind of engagement, then I really start to determine them as a workable lead. From there, I’ll start to continue to increase my follow up and make sure that I’m staying on top of those leads, like white on rice. And what you can do is you can leverage marketing technology and software tools to help automate a lot of this stuff.

There can be automated text messages that go out and automated emails and voice broadcasts. We actually built our own customer relationship management tool (CRM tool) to do all the things that we’re talking about and we use it in our business. We also use it with our clients’ businesses, because we know that life will get in the way of how much follow up you can actually execute.

If you’re doing manual follow up in tandem with marketing automation, that is when your results will really start to pivot in a positive direction. The key to a successful follow up is the speed of that first contact — the faster you get back to them, the better. The second key is contacting them six to 10 times or more, you’ve got to stay on top of them and continue to leverage multiple methods.

Get out there, improve your follow up game, and your sales will follow. Hope you enjoyed today’s episode. As always, please like it, share it, comment, leave some feedback, and send any questions that you may have. I am here to support you.

The post The Speed and Quantity of your Follow Up – How Much is Too Much or Too Little? appeared first on No Joke Marketing.

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How Will Your Business Survive If There Are No More Live Events?

Today’s topic is this — is this the death of live in-person events, live in-person conferences, and all the other big events we all used to have.

A lot of people that are in home services have been asking me what do they need to do if they get 50% of their business from a home show, for example. Or perhaps they are in the b2b space where they get almost all of their orders a year in advance from a particular trade show. Most of these small business owners are very much worried and confused. Sadly, I mean, a lot of small and local businesses right now are paralyzed with fear of just the unknown and not really knowing what steps they should take next.

What I’ve been encouraging local businesses to do that have a heavy in-person marketing strategy is to do a couple of things.

First, I want you to contact the meeting organizers and the organization of the events that you would be attending. For example, locally, there’s the Buffalo Home Show at the Buffalo Convention Center and it spans across multiple days. There are, I was gonna say hundreds but it probably could even reach thousands of different businesses from home services, pools, blinds, cleaning, gutters, roofers, water filters — anything and everything that relates to your home — your yard, inside, outside, and everywhere in between. 

Or there’s the buffalo bridal show. And there’s a lot of vendors that would go to that — wedding cakes, wedding dresses, limousine services, and a lot of these vendors that I’ve talked to because I go not only to look for vendors for myself, but I go just to talking kind of provocatively asking them about their marketing strategy. And I mean, there are some of these businesses that have said, “Well, we get more business than we can handle at this one show and we’re busy for the whole rest of the year.” So what if that doesn’t happen, given the situation we are all facing right now?

I want you again to first contact the show organizers and to see if they have any plans. Now, if they reply back and say, “well, we’re still waiting to see what happens and what’s going to take place.” What I would encourage you to do is to ask this simple question. “Are there any other promotional opportunities available to my business and myself that I could do beforehand?”

The other thing that you have to keep in mind with these associations and these organizations that are putting on these events — they’re obviously hurting pretty substantially as well. Because if their entire year is built around one event and all the sponsorship money they get, for example, and that event may or may not be happening, that organization could also be folding-up.

So, if you approach the organization and say, “Are there other sponsorship opportunities that I could do now?” Most likely, they’re going to either say:

“Yes, here are the options”

“I’m not sure. Let me get back to you.” 

“I don’t know.” 

So what I’m looking for you to do in a perfect world is come up with a couple of different offers and or opportunities that you can present back to them. Let’s say you’re a roofer. Maybe you could do a webinar, for example. The organization would blast their email list, saying you’re going to be doing a special webinar on XYZ topic. And the topic should be something that’s educational, that then ties into your product or your service.

You’ve got to keep in mind, the topic shouldn’t be a little bit broad. The topic shouldn’t be “Do you need a new roof? Yes, attend this particular webinar.”

Perhaps maybe it’s all about the unforeseen challenges of your roof that could be presenting and if your roof isn’t sealed correctly, it could leak, and that causes mold. Basically, you want to obviously bring some of the topics related to your service. Roofing isn’t the sexiest of webinar topics, but what you want to look at is if there is something that you could demo? Is there something you could do before the event? Could you give away some kind of special prize? It would have to be done and executed well because you don’t want to have one of those standard ones that I hate. It’s when people offer a grand prize of $5,000 in home renovation. So you get hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that put their information in, and then I’m assuming they give someone the grand prize, who the heck knows. But then everyone magically comes in second place, and they’re going to get $1,000 credit towards any job over $10,000. It just, to me, it seems like a little bit of a bait and switch, but maybe that’s because I’m a marketer.

What could you do with these organizations to help yourself and to also help them because they’re probably also starving for content? Could you guys do some social media posts on your platforms and their platforms? Is it an email blast? Is it a Facebook live where you’re showing up and doing some great content to that particular association. You’ve got to get creative because my concern is that most of these events most likely will not be happening and that is our reality right now.

So if you want to make sure that you’re proactive, the first thing again, that I would do is contact the meeting organizers and see what else you can do. 

The second one is I want you to look at how much money you were planning on investing at that particular event and look at how you can start to spread that money out digitally. Can you start doing Facebook ads? Can you do Google Ads, sponsor some videos on YouTube, or perhaps Instagram ads? Is your brand a little bit more fun and upbeat? Maybe you look at doing Snapchat or literally even Tick Tok ads. What are some things that you can do with that money? 

And it’s not just all — if you pay $1,000 for the booth that’s only $1,000. If you’re there for two weeks, you got to factor in your time you got to factor in all the swag you are giving away or all the meals that you’d be eating out. If there’s someone else most likely that’s at your booth with you, then you got to factor in that salary for two weeks. And now you got two people that are probably eating breakfast, lunch, dinner out every day for two weeks. So like these don’t just go from $1,000 sponsorship. I mean, there are thousands and thousands of dollars of investments. How can you leverage that money to start working for you now?

Because unless your business is backlogged with hundreds or thousands of customers around the block wanting to do business with you, you need to take some action now. However, I can tell you that very few people are proactively reaching out to these associations and these events, the Chamber of Commerce — start reaching out to these people and just get creative. And then your second action item is to leverage that budget that you had planned and start to put it in place.

Now if the event ends up happening, hopefully in a perfect world, everything that you just did from a digital standpoint works, and then you can double down on yourself and still invest that money should the event happen. But I don’t want you to wait around and hope that it’s going to happen because I hate hope marketing. I need you to have a system that delivers you reliable, consistent results on a regular basis.

Hope this episode helped you. I look forward to catching you back here tomorrow.

Get out there, make a change, and take some action.

 The post How Will Your Business Survive If There Are No More Live Events? appeared first on No Joke Marketing.

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How to Recover when your Marketing Sucks

Today’s topic is point blank and very direct that your marketing — the strategy and your game — sucks.

I’ve got to come at you with some tough love today and just some blunt honesty because I care about your survival.

I’ve been looking at metrics every single day for the last couple of months because for my master’s dissertation paper, I’m studying small business failure. I have put in there a hypothesis that the number one thing that I believe could save businesses from having to close their door is if they focused intensely on marketing. I’ll give you the little spoiler alert because I’m pretty much at the final stages of this paper — proofing, editing, and all that fun stuff, for which I have to submit on Monday. The conclusion that I’ve drawn from this paper is that while there are a lot of different reasons that small businesses fail, such as cash flow (running out of cash), unpredictable events (think COVID-19) — that if you had more customers and better customers, if you had more recurring transactions with your existing customers then that cash could help alleviate a lot of your challenges.

If a business will ultimately close due to running out of cash, that usually is that final nail in the coffin. If you know that to be true that you need to make sure that you are positively affecting that before you get down to that path. The way that you affect that is by driving more customers, more customers equals more cash, equals more opportunities to put some money aside for unpredictable events to hire a better person for your team to help take you to the next level. So, there are all of those cause and effect relationships.

The conclusion that I made was that I do believe that two things to be true.

The first one is that, had these businesses that were hit (I interviewed 120 different businesses across the United States) done more marketing? Have they had a little bit more operational experience that many of those businesses would be here today?

Now, do I believe that marketing can solve the lion’s share of those challenges? Definitely.

However, when I dug deeper with these entrepreneurs, there were a lot more issues that more customers would have been great to create more cash. If they didn’t know that the business or the market really didn’t have a need for what they were offering that wouldn’t necessarily have solved fixing things. If they didn’t understand how to read a financial statement that, yes, they might have been driving more customers on the top line, but they didn’t realize that they actually were losing money to fulfill a customer. So, there were obviously other things that would have to happen in tandem. At the end of the day, the way that you can really start to move things in your favor is through marketing.

When I started to just look at dozens of business’ marketing that I haven’t really looked at in the last week or two, I just went to Google and I leveraged a tool that allows me to change my zip code, making it look like I’m in different cities.

Here in Buffalo, New York right now it’s finally starting to get warm, so it’s going to be pool season for the people that have a pool. I decided to just type-in pool cleaning pool, service pool, and all things related to maintaining and managing a pool.

I looked in Buffalo, New York, and then I looked in other big cities — Orlando, Tampa, Miami, everything for Florida. Then I looked at Denver, San Diego, Chicago, and Des Moines. I looked at 15 or 20 different cities. What I did was, I kind of took a look at the first couple of businesses that came up. I went through just a really fast audit — I looked at websites, calls to action, social media presence, and their social media posting, how the website content was written. Basically, I looked at all of the outward-facing materials without ever physically visiting most of those locations. Candidly, most of their marketing sucks — it just simply sucks.

And I think what ends up happening is supply and demand because, in a lot of these locations, there’s not a ton of supply. Demand outweighs what’s there — it outweighs the supply that you can get away with — having crappy marketing, typos all over your website, only posting once a month on Facebook, and having a 2.5-star review on Google or Facebook, for example.

If you really want to take this stuff seriously, if you really want to make sure that your business is going to stand the test of time, that you can go toe-to-toe with whatever competitor comes in the marketplace, that you don’t get nervous if a new big-box franchise comes in because your marketing will destroy them — you need to start focusing on this and taking it more seriously.

My question and my action item for you today are “What’s within your marketing do you know and your heart of hearts that you have to go in there and just get this cleaned up — too often referred to as skeletons in the closet?”

Do you know that you need a different type of customer? 

Do you need to get rid of some of your customers? 

Is your signage broken outside your retail location for four years? 

Do you have to now adopt new cleaning protocols that you’ve been talking about for two years and now with COVID if you don’t do that, you’re literally not able to open and you’re definitely out of business (that’s more of an operational rather than a marketing-related but it ties back into your marketing). 

Is your website from 1999 and you know that it crashes on mobile. You actually open up this website on mobile, because you know what just is going to look horrendous. 

You don’t have business cards for your team. 

You don’t know your unique selling proposition. 

Your logo is outdated. 

I mean, whatever those are, it varies based on the business. What I need you to start looking at today is to just start to take yourself and your business more seriously, that I’m encouraging you to go in and just clean one thing up. Pick one thing to take action on this week, one and only one, that you can finally start to move the needle and just give yourself a little bit of momentum. And then you can start to compound on that momentum week after week after week.

If I look back again at all those businesses, I had some of the toughest conversations I’ve ever had. These business owners were literally destroyed when they had to close their business. Many of them were ruined financially. They ruined their employees financially, their partners. They had family members that invested. There are so much drama and negative ripple effects that are caused that I need you to make this work.

The whole reason that I continue to do this show is to tip the needle in your favor to encourage you and to tell you that marketing needs to be put above all.

Marketing creates opportunities, those opportunities turn into customers, customers turn into cash. When you have cash, you have momentum on your side and you can pivot as needed. You can hire business coaches, consultants, an operational man to fix your operations, a pricing expert to nail down your margins, or bookkeepers to teach you more about the numbers.

However, if you don’t have more customers, new customers, or repeat customers, none of this other stuff matters. Doesn’t matter how good your product or your services are if you do not have enough cash to do anything. You are sunk. You know your marketing sucks.

So now is your time to change it —that is my message. That is my action for you today. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I know that I sure did. Get out there. Take your one action today.

The post How to Recover when your Marketing Sucks appeared first on No Joke Marketing.

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Digital Marketing for Beginners: Your Ultimate Guide to Starting your Journey in Digital Marketing

As a business owner, surviving and thriving (which go hand-in-hand), are both equally important in this very lucrative market. One of the most important ways to ensure that you reach your business goals is understanding the role that digital marketing plays. In today’s world, where the internet is at the core of everything we do, the importance of digital marketing for your business is crystal clear. Here are a few key digital marketing for beginners’ tips that you can incorporate and start implementing to expand your digital marketing skills and ultimately grow your business.  

What is Digital Marketing?

First, let’s talk about digital marketing—what is it really about? By definition, “digital marketing” is the process of marketing or promoting your product or service via the internet. Basically, your goal is to reach more people and raise brand awareness through online marketing. This method for marketing leverages various digital marketing tactics. Examples include: 

Social media marketing 

Mobile marketing 

Email marketing

Search engine optimization 

Search engine marketing 

Content marketing 

PPC (pay-per-click) advertising

Affiliate marketing

What are the Benefits of Digital Marketing?

There are multiple ways that having a strong online presence can help you and your business:

Lower cost — as compared with traditional marketing methods, properly planned and well-targeted online marketing tactics can potentially reach more customers at a much more affordable cost.

Global reach — an effective website allows you to seek and find new markets and trade on a global scale for only a small investment.

Improved conversion rates — if you have an effective website, you can be assured that your customers are only just a few clicks away from making that purchase.  While traditional marketing and other media platforms may require people to make a phone call, mail a letter, or physically go to a store, online marketing can be immediate and seamless.

Trackable and measurable results —  a little help from the right web analytics tools and other various online metric tools, it will be a lot easier to determine and establish how efficient your marketing campaign has been. You will be able to observe your customers’ behaviors and how they respond to your marketing efforts. 

Openness — with the help of your strong social media content and carefully laid-out social media strategy, you can build customer loyalty and a brand reputation that ensures that customers will view your brand as one with whom being easy to engage with.

How can you use Digital Marketing for your Business?

The main question is where to start when it comes to digital marketing. One of the things beginners should know about digital marketing is that nothing is certain. Like all things in this world, everything is temporary. Technology and global trends change rapidly — nothing in digital marketing stays the same. The market is very lucrative with so many competitors joining the industry. Over time, algorithms change and market demands shift to adapt to technological advancements. In order to stay productive and sane in this ever-changing digital industry, you have to prepare yourself. The best time to start is anytime, wherever you can. There are numerous ways you can incorporate digital marketing into your business. It’s best to start by learning the basics of digital marketing. Here a few digital marketing tips for beginners:

1. Learn the skills 

It is important to learn some basic skills before actually starting your digital marketing journey. This includes, but not limited to: 

Keeping an open mind to learning something new

Staying updated

Networking

Becoming familiar with digital marketing “jargon”

Brushing up on your writing and editing skills

Learning basic “CRM” (Customer Relationship Management) skills

2. Post on social media platforms

Once you get the hang of the basics of digital marketing, you can test the waters and start sharing your content. You can either try organic social media posts or paid ads. Go ahead and try to implement your first ever boosted social media post — you might try sharing a video, doing a live stream, or posting a graphic — experiment and track what works best for you.

3. Build an email marketing campaign

Do you have valuable content that you believe your viewers would like to know more about? How about an ebook that you’d like to share with your audience and customers? What better way to promote your content by building an email marketing list? 

4. Start a blog

Getting yourself ranked in Google’s search engine is one of the most important goals of every brand. We aren’t talking about just any rank — high rank, the top page of the search engines. One way to do that is by improving your site’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization) through blogs. With digital marketing, it’s all about figuring out what works best for your business. For more tips and tricks about digital marketing for beginners, feel free to get in touch with us. We will be more than happy to share with you some proven and effective tactics suitable for your business needs.

The post Digital Marketing for Beginners: Your Ultimate Guide to Starting your Journey in Digital Marketing appeared first on No Joke Marketing.

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Trademarks — How to Protect your Business Name

Today’s topic is getting your intellectual property secured so that other people can’t poach or take all the interesting and unique things that you are building.

So intellectual property is a topic that I just have really found fascinating. And my disclaimer to you is that in no way am I an attorney. So please do not take this as advice, but rather firsthand experiences based on what I’ve kind of been working on over the last 10 years.

There’s a lot of things that when you’re going to start to hear the content today and then in this episode that you start to realize that you probably should look at how you can protect or secure it. So there are a couple of things that we’ll go through.

We’re going to start with the name of your company. Then, we’re going to talk about maybe some of the different processes, systems, or the likes, that you do and see if there’s anything that’s kind of unique.

When it comes to looking at naming a company, there’s a lot of different ways to approach it. And there is actually an episode that I did which was all about naming a company. I touched on the intellectual property stuff very briefly and I wanted to expand on that today.

Basically, when I am naming a company, I personally will not name a company that I feel I won’t have a shot at getting that name trademarked. Trademarks are going to be one of your first lines of defense, making it challenging for other people to be using that name or that mark for their business or for their products and services.

So let’s say you were going to start a moving company. And you’re like thinking of naming it “ABC moving”. I mean, it’s one of the most generic names and it’s been used by many people a lot of times, so wouldn’t be a great name by any means. But let’s say that was something that you really like calling your company.

What I would do from there before you approach an attorney is you can use the uspto.gov website and you can type in “ABC moving”. Check to see if that name is already trademarked. And what you’re looking for with trademarks, and this is where it gets a little complicated but I’ll keep this kind of at a one-on-one level for today, is that there are different classes to trademarks. What you’re typically doing is you are registering a trademark in a particular class.

For example, I own a digital marketing agency. So there’s a class of names that are for marketing. When you secure a trademark, it then means that that class that you registered it in is protected so that other people can’t use it in that particular class. With moving, for example, you would go and look through the different trademark classes and see which one fits and makes the most sense. And we’re going to, again, continue to talk through that.

If I were looking for “moving” and there are a variety of different classes, and as I’m looking through them in real-time, you’re trying to pick which one of those makes the most sense. In this case, there’s a class called vehicles or class 12, which includes mainly vehicles and apparatuses for the transport of people or goods by land, air, or water. What you’re looking for then to do is you’re trying to establish that class that your competitors would be in as well.

There are obviously other classes that make absolutely no sense. For example, in leather goods, it doesn’t really make a ton of sense to try and register “ABC moving” in that particular class.

Look for the class that makes the most strategic sense for you.

From there, you’re going to check again if anyone already has it secured. And this is where it gets a little bit complicated. This is where I like to look at leveraging an attorney to kind of give you a little bit of legal advice and information. They will do a more thorough analysis to see and check. Do they feel that that is a good trademark? Keep in mind, however, that good trademarks are a little bit relative. They can’t be descriptive in the sense of being too generic like you can’t trademark something that already exists that’s kind of generic like you couldn’t trademark the name “moving company” — you can’t trademark certain names. I mean, there’s a lot of restrictions around what actually makes for a good trademark in generic names and generic things tend to be very challenging to secure.

So when I’m naming, I want to make sure that I’m going through a variety of different lists and options. Then what I typically do is I’ll make a shortlist and I’ll send that over to my trademark attorney and I’ll say can you just give me a quick gut check on these five names? Are there any that are too generic that you’re like thinking it’s just not going to happen.

I like to be able to get that because then I can start to narrow it down a little bit. After I’ve done that, then you can ask your attorney to do his/her thorough research on these two names. Depending on your attorney, that could be $100 or up to $500 for an extensive search.

What they’re doing is they’re going to go out there and start to see if anyone else is using it. Has that ever appeared? Is there anything that’s similar to that name? Maybe somebody has the mark, “DEF moving company”, and when you submit it for a trademark, they’re going to say, “Oh, well, that’s a little bit confusing to yours”, and they’re going to deny yours. If you would have already named your company ABC moving, that means you’re never then going to be able to secure that mark, and you need to make the decision if you want to rebrand your company, or do you not care about it?

And when I go back to the “why” behind all of this, the goal is to start to secure assets so that if in the future you want to sell the business, not only will you have some assets that you can say and show are protected, but you also have assets that you’re able to defend.

If you’re starting to grab other things in addition to your name (I start with the name), but are there certain products that you offer that have unique names? For your restaurant, are there certain sandwich names that you want to trademark so that no one else can call your particular sub? Here in Buffalo, we’ve got chicken finger subs, and people have different names for those, such as Stinger subs and the likes. So, are there certain names that you would want to try and trademark so that if another sub shop opens up that they can’t call their sub, the chicken finger sub for example. Although I have to admit, chicken finger sub wouldn’t be a good trademark because it’s generically describing the type of sub. However, if you had a fun name for it, that is something that definitely would be trademarkable.

Ideally, I’m all about then looking for your products or services and looking for unique names, certain programs — if you have certain loyalty programs, you want to make sure that you are aiming to protect those.

Now, you’re all done in terms of the investment of an attorney and filing your market, and it’s about $1,000 per trademark. A lot of small business owners don’t take the time to do this. But then years later, they get a cease and desist letter that says “you’re infringing on our trademark”. And that’s a horrible thing to experience since now you already have that name built for your business. What do you actually do? Well, if it’s a legitimate claim, you’d have to rename your entire company and everything else from scratch. So to me, it seems like it’d be a good use of that thousand dollar investment to actually protect it upfront.

Now, the only other thing that I want to throw at you for this one-on-one episode is that once you’ve picked the trademark class that makes the most sense, if you want to look at extending that a little bit, you can also file for other trademarks.

So if you want to fly —if we go back to the moving company — there’s a trademark class that’s housewares and glass. Do you have a glass set that you want to have called “ABC moving”? Do you want to do anything around? Education? Are you going to have some educational stuff around “ABC moving”, and you’re going to teach other companies how to do that? Well, that would be, I believe class 41, which is education and entertainment — providing education and training. If you wanted to trademark t-shirts and have that name on those t-shirts, there are other classes of trademarks that you would end up securing. You’ve got to pay for each of those additional classes and continue to do the research to make sure someone isn’t using your name on that. But that’s another avenue to look at when you’re starting to protect your name or anything that’s unique.

I’m a huge fan of trademarks. I’m a huge fan of all things intellectual property. We’re going to talk in the episode tomorrow kind of about patents and copyrights and things like that. But I wanted to focus today on trademarks, which is one of the things that most local businesses don’t think about. And they can definitely get themselves in some hot water if they don’t protect their marks.

Thank you for tuning in today. Hope you have a wonderful rest of your day.

Get out there, make a change, and take some action.

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