Digital marketing and websites the smart way

Digital marketing has never been more accessible. There are countless cost-effective methods to include in your marketing strategy. It’s also never been easier to build a functioning, customer-friendly website.

So why are many small to medium businesses coming up short? It comes down to thinking the smart way about digital marketing. If you follow certain steps, you can improve your chances of sales and marketing success.

Explore your target customers

Targeting the right audience is crucial. Start by brainstorming and prioritising two to three target customer groups. Then create buyer personas for each — semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers including their goals, motivations, frustrations, technology usage, and preferred channels.

Get some insight

Although making assumptions is fine, using real insight brings extra magic to your personas. Think about a handful of questions to ask your target customers to help tailor how you market to them. Approach a couple of prospects or existing customers and offer an incentive to speak to you or fill in a survey.

Do some keyword research

Keyword research is the process of understanding the language your target customers use when searching for your products, services, and content. Start with primary keywords that most closely describe your business, run them through a keyword generator tool, then collect a series of secondary keywords with the highest search volume. This can validate your buyer persona thinking and give you great ideas to kick-start your content marketing.

Check out your competitors

Check out their websites and social channels. Find them online and see where they’re at on Google, along with the keywords they’re ranking for. Use your findings to spot opportunities for gaps in the market and areas where you can step in where competitors can’t.

Think about goals and buying journeys

Think about the goals and buyer journeys of your fictional customer personas. The purchase process is progressive and consists of multiple touchpoints. Consider how your marketing is targeting potential customers at different stages of the sales funnel: awareness (TOFU), consideration (MOFU), and decision-making (BOFU).

Wireframes, content planning and your marketing plan

Wireframing creates an overview of how your website should be structured to meet user and business needs. A UX designer can help create wireframes at reasonable cost. From there, turn your customer journey map into a marketing and content plan — working backwards from your customer persona goals to define channels, content types, and website requirements.

Build it

When it comes to building your website, strong mid-market contenders include WordPress, Webflow, and Shopify. Don’t forget to implement the right marketing tech stack. Basic automation and scheduling tools will be enough to start — integrating your CRM with marketing tools to automate common activities.