Good morning and welcome to the Monday Morning Marketing Podcast, I'm Esther.
And I'm Melanie.
And today we're talking about what's in a digital marketing strategy.
Yes, a very topical thing for us to be doing. It's something that's being requested a couple of times. And we got around to doing this week, something I'm asked an awful lot down here in the Republic of Ireland, because we're doing trading online vouchers quite a bit down here to upgrade and update people's websites and the digital marketing strategy. Do you have anything similar up there in Northern Ireland?
I've heard of a few schemes with the local councils, but nothing as big as what you guys have done there. We're feeling a bit left out up here, actually.
So, you know, it's nice that we get our time in the sun briefly. And so, yes, it's something that's been asked a lot and it's something that every business who has a online platform for their business needs to entertain. So let's get started. What do we need for digital marketing strategy, Esther?
There are so many things you need for your digital marketing strategy, but number one at the top of the list is a plan. Can't do anything without a plan.
Exactly. And quite closely, second to that is whatever your plan is, it has to be primarily customer focused.
Definitely. Definitely. There's no point in talking about something that people aren't actually interested in because...
It needs to solve a problem, doesn't it?
Definitely. Definitely. Can even... Needs to solve a problem that people don't know that they have yet either.
Hum...
You know, or they don't want to admit that they have possibly.
It sounds quite accurate, but so once you've got your plan and its customer focused and you're answering some pain points, you need to have some understanding of where your bearing is on all of this. So we would both encourage you to do a SWOT analysis.
OK, SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.
So it's basically you breaking down and trying to be as honest as possible, your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. And if you can, in some ways, answering those opportunities and threats and fixing them or utilizing them.
Yeah, definitely. And honesty is in every sense the best policy. But definitely in this because you don't want to be. Faffing around and wasting your time on something that you're not fully 100 percent being honest with. OK, so it's best to just knuckle down and go right? Where can you really help people? What is your number one strength and your number two strength? And just keep a list of everything that you can do. And part of that, too, is then choosing if you have a number of topics or a number of services or products that you have, choose the ones that are most needed at this time. OK, so it's like we talked about in a different episode, if your audience is mothers with small children right now, they need somebody to come and help them get through the summer or get through the homeschooling or get through the going back to school or get through. OK, so know where your audience is at and know what pain points they have at that time of year and focus on that. Choose it. Be very specific.
Your digital marketing strategy isn't just the buying process either. They're just like you see in Facebook ads. There's awareness, consideration and conversion. Other people describe it as a sales funnel. It works the same way, exactly the same way. So there's sometimes three steps or even up to 10 steps in a sales funnel. So it might be worth having a look at some of the sales funnels available online, just to give you an idea of how to start and move people through the process of your digital marketing strategy.
Yeah, and that's also a good place to then see where people are falling out of your funnel and get them back into it. We'll talk sales funnels in a different episode. So stay tuned. What else then would you recommend that people do, Melanie? And how often should they choose and plan their strategy?
Well, I know some people who literally redo a strategy every three months, but strategy can be a, you know, a month, two months, three months, up to a year. Now, a big brand would do a year long digital marketing strategy, but, you know, if that's not necessary for smaller businesses who want to get people to purchase sooner and obviously they've got less money to put behind building awareness and graphics and ads and that sort of thing. So we need to make our clients potentially go through the journey slightly faster. So I think what would happen next is doing like a social media audit now, a couple of episodes ago we did that was episode twenty-nine, "How to do a social media audit". So, do listen back to that, because if you if you're not starting from a good place in the first place, your messaging is incorrect. You know, you're not displaying the right kind of images and, you know, just not being ready. None of this is going to be, you know, working for you.
Absolutely. And another thing that you really need to look into is what your competitors are doing. Our competitors analysis. Yeah, analyze what they're doing, go on to their social media, go onto their website, see what they have that is working, see what they have that people have commented on and see what they have that has, you know, tumbleweed rolling through it as well. All of that gives you a good idea of what is working and what isn't right now. So you can then use that to your advantage as well.
So we're not doing this in order. Sorry, but the other thing is, is, ok you're customer focused, but you need to understand who your customer is. Now, we can all guess who your particular customer is. But if you can do some research, if you can create a client profile or a customer avatar or customer, you know, so many different names of the same thing,
Buyer persona as well.
Exactly. We did a podcast about it.
We did, a couple of weeks ago as well. We're really good at remember which one it was.
So, yes, if you if you check out what your buyer persona should be as well, because then you can target better. But, you know, it's not just understanding the pain points and who your audience is. You also need to deliver stuff that they're going to find useful and help you move through the process. So what kind of content could we put up as part of a digital marketing strategy, Esther?
There are so many and we will be covering them more in-depth in a couple of episodes time, but definitely videos, images, blogs, blogs, podcasts, audios, webinars, going live. I was trying to avoid that one "laughs" short messages, short just like little one liners of what you offer, links back to your website, links to your blog, links to your where people can buy from you, links to other social media where they can find you as well.
Yeah, I mean, you can guess blog or you can put your business products, let's say, on an online directory. So many different ways you can do it. It's just so time consuming.
But there has to be a plan behind it. You can't just go throwing everything out and no plan behind it. So once you, when you have it planned and you've chosen your course of action, you need to implement it. So whether that be on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tik-Tok, just your website, email marketing, whichever one you choose to do, implement it, do it and start it. If you're running ads on Facebook, on Twitter, on Google, implement it, ok? There's no point in just sitting around waiting for the perfect moment to come along. You need to implement it and after you implement it, then you need to measure the results.
But if you don't benchmark from the beginning, you can't see where you're going. So before you start, you need to benchmark. I'm so glad we organized in such a short way, Esther. Just so clear as mud for the people who are listening.
Well, we've gone through a lot of this stuff in other podcasts.
We have, yeah.
Basically bringing it all together in the one. And we'll talk more about content and content plans in the next couple of podcasts as well.
Oh, so you got all of that right? You all sorted?
Everybody sorted? Yep. Yep. I can see their heads nodding, yeah.
Well, we wanted to cover it because it is something that we were asked a lot of easy to arrange for other people or to train people in as well, I've been doing some online courses and I've been doing obviously a few of these trading online voucher quotations as well. But there's lots of different ways you can get hold of these things. Now, there's a business continuity voucher that's available down here as well. And the local enterprise offices down here are also running courses to help people. Now, I know we've got an international audience, and I'm hoping that wherever you are, you're getting similar support. We would love to hear from you if you can tell us how you know, how how much support is being offered to the small business owner in your country as well. So do let us know.
Yeah, and I've just actually got an email from one of our local colleges up here that is offering social media training and implementation and a few other digital skills courses. So that's good to see that they're actually getting onto the ball now. But do come and find us. Leave us a message on the website, on our social media anywhere that you can find us. The website is TheMondayMorningMarketing.com. And from there you can go to all our social media links
And we've got loads of awesome Google My Business reviews if you want to add yours. We have no problem with that at all.
Thanks very much for tuning in. We'll talk to you next week. Bye, bye
Bye.