When starting a business, there are multitudes of important aspects to consider – what need your business fills; who your customers/audience are; your vision, mission and goals; and so on. However, starting a business now relies on digital marketing. Where can you be found? Who is searching for you? What keywords are they using to find you? And what are you doing to keep up with the constantly changing environment?

  1. Google Analytics for Data

Take a look at your online business model – where are you succeeding? Where can you use improvements? Don’t know? Check your Google Analytics. This tool can help you focus on improvements to your content, cut content that is unnecessary, create wanted content and, overall, build your website for your customers. Check out these guidelines for using analytics:

  • Look for relationships in your data such as keywords and high-performing content
  • Find trends – cyclical, or otherwise, that can help pinpoint what content is best when
  • Use those trends and data to create models for future use

  1. Search Engine Optimization for Your Foundation

Google Analytics ties directly into using Search Engine Optimization to its full potential for your digital marketing plan. Optimizing your website content with keywords to get the eyeballs, clicks, likes and purchases is one of the smartest ways to promote your brand. Research how people search for you and what words they use – and use those words in your content. The more you use them, the better (but beware of over-optimization!).

Build a simple and easy-to-understand website so that search engines can quickly know what your business is all about. Optimize each page to the specific content you want your readers to know and understand. Do this with the content itself and in the keywords on the backend of your website. If you sell fudge, make sure the word “fudge” is in your headlines, page titles, navigation, photo descriptions, etc. The higher and more visible your descriptors are, the easier you are making it for search engines to know you sell fudge and anyone who searches “fudge” + your city will find you without having to dig through the clutter.

  1. Google AdWords for That Extra Push

Google AdWords connects the three together. With a little money behind a search, your website will get the boost it may need. Plus, you only pay if a person clicks, so you only pay if you have a potential customer. Since this is another offer from Google, your Google Analytics will show what traffic is being driven to your site based on these ads as well as how to invest in that traffic to make it even more successful through other Google AdWords campaigns.

  1. Facebook

Finally, Facebook. Social media may be killing the next generation’s actual social and interactive skills, but it sure does help with a digital marketing platform. Facebook can be used not only to get your name out there and get followers who can see your daily posts and specials; it can also be used as an advertiser. This may not be the best route to go (Facebook is very much a “pay to play” medium) but when you are first getting started, it is the way to go to get recognized. Request your friends to share your page with their followers. When you do this, make sure there is interesting content available to explain who you are, what you do, where you come from and what benefits you can offer over your competition.

Keep posts short, with visuals – those are the posts that are the most successful for just about every business type in every industry. It catches their eye, they read what you have to say and maybe they click the link; or maybe they click the link AND share your information.

Once this starts to slow, you will need to consider whether it would be optimal to pay to promote your Facebook ads to those who follow you and those who don’t. Those “sponsored posts” that we all love to hate, but it can be effective if you have the dollars and the audience.

Some helpful hints

  • It’s good to note here that most visits on websites these days are on mobile devices, so build that into your marketing plan. Most sites have an option to create mobile and desktop versions of your ads.
  • Facebook’s newsfeed and right-hand column ads should be used differently. Optimize them for your content. The ads in a person’s news feed can be more visual with less text, where the right column ads have a specific structure to follow – square photo, blurb, link.
  • Test images. Use different images for your ads and see which one gets the most play. It seems trivial, but people respond to your image first.

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  • Have a call to action. Send your audience somewhere and let them know what you want them to gain from that. Whether that is “learn more,” or “sign up,” etc.

You can check out more in-depth suggestions here.

In the end, it’s these four pillars of digital marketing that will ensure you’re successful. You have to make sure you’re putting in the time for all of these aspects to be high quality, thought-out strategies, but if you do nothing else this should be enough to bring you success; especially as a startup.

How did you ensure that your digital marketing strategy hit the ground running? Was there another aspect that you started with first? Let us know your thoughts and your story in the comment section below.