So you have a business, you’ve got the name, the prices, the problem solvers. Now what? You get your name seen. The best way to do that, is to get online with digital marketing.Okay, so now you’re doing research. Where to be, where to post, when to post, how to post. Conflicting information, overwhelming posts, and overall confusion hinders your online presence journey. Below is a step by step guide to getting online, and profiting from it.

1. Buy A Domain
2. Logo
3. Website
4. Audience Profile
5. Marketing Strategy
6. Content Creation
7. Tracking Efforts

Buy A Domain

A domain is the address that a client would type in to find your business’ website and more information about you.

Your domain should be connected to the actual name of your business, as in your domain should say your company name. We suggest using Google Domains in order to purchase your domain. This way as you navigate which hosting platform works best for you, you don’t need to pay 12 dollars each time you move.
Buying a domain early on in your business will help you with SEO (search engine optimization) in the long run. Currently, domain age is a determining factor in where you rank in search results!

Logo

You should get a logo, it’s very important to visually recognizing your business. It should be used across ALL promotional materials, both digital and physical.

Website

Websites are the central hubs of online presence. Every avenue of marketing should circle back to your website. You need to pay for hosting for your website. Think of your domain as the address to your store, and the hosting as the building at the address.

• • We have a whole dedicated post to what you need on your website.

Social Media

Almost everyone uses some form of social media. Whether it’s to learn, work, network, or connect with loved ones, they are online. You can use these platforms in order to get your product, services, solutions, and the like in front of potential customers.

• Reserve your desired username on ALL platforms. Even if you’re not planning on using them. The main six platforms are:
  • • Facebook
    • Instagram
    • Pinterest
    • YouTube
    • Twitter
    • LinkedIn
• Make sure the profiles are all filled out and are linking back to your website.
• Make sure that they are all using your logo.

Audience Profile

Finding your audience profile is important so that you have an idea of how to format your marketing strategy in order for it to be effective.

Find your audience profile by answering these questions:

1. 1. What problem does your service/product solve?
   2. Who has that problem?
   3. Where are they? (Physically and Digitally)
      • This will determine where you put your marketing efforts.
   4. How do I talk to them? (Professionally, Casually)
      • This will determine the language used throughout your marketing efforts.

Marketing Strategy

Marketing strategy is loosely defined as all avenues of promoting your business.There are several different marketing strategies: content marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, search engine marketing, pay-per-click marketing, and offline marketing to name a few.

While determining your marketing strategy, you’ll use your audience profile to determine which avenue will be the best to put your effort into.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is one of the most widely used strategies, as it can be used on any platform. It’s a long term strategy focused on providing quality, valuable content instead of selling.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a great way to target potential (and existing!) clients that are already interested in your business’s products or services. For this, you should gather emails from your website through a subscription box or from customers when they purchase.

Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Social media marketing is probably the most well-known digital marketing strategy. Whether you’re doing paid advertising or just simply posting on your social media accounts, it’s social media marketing. When done correctly, this is a powerful strategy that can really make you money.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Search Engine Marketing is one of the most profitable options, if done correctly. SEM includes both paid advertising on search engines and organic results (search engine optimization). We have dedicated blog posts about these as well!

Pay Per Click

Pay per click is another well known digital marketing strategy. This is the most important to get right, as you don’t want to be wasting money on campaigns. To learn more about Google Ads and making it profitable click here!

Content Creation

This is probably the most time consuming part of a marketing strategy. All of your research on keyword and topics, as well as actual copy and graphic creation are part of this step.  You should determine how often you want to post and the type of content you want to post (video, image, text). Want to learn more about content creation?

Tracking Efforts

When it comes to tracking the effects of your marketing strategy, it’s important to know what and where to track it. By default, you should see an increase in overall website visitors of course. An increase in sales is also likely.

Some more nuanced things you should be tracking include:

• Keywords
  • keeping track of what keywords have the best conversion rate,
  • keeping track of what people are searching to find you,
  • optimizing regularly to ensure poor words are removed and replaced with better words.
• Engagement
  • Engagements are the most important metric to check, most people forget about these as they are most focused on vanity metrics. While it’s important to put effort into vanity metrics like followers and page likes, engagements are used in social media algorithms in order to show posts in home feeds. Facebook in particular puts a large emphasis on posts with high numbers of interactions.

You can use analytics software to track these metrics. For websites, Google Analytics will be the best tool. You should pay attention Insights, Demographics, and User Behavior. As for social media, each platform has their own analytics built in for you to track your metrics on their platform.

We will be posting a more in depth post about tracking marketing strategies in the future so be sure to subscribe!

Optimizing Strategy

Optimizing your strategy is the final step in your online presence. You’ll continuously optimize as you gather more data about your customers and visitors by doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

So there you go, a step by step guide on getting online. Stay up to date with our latest tips and tricks by subscribing to our weekly newsletter!