Let’s talk The Trifecta. If you’re a business owner and you want to use digital marketing, but don’t know where to start, you’re in the right place. If you’ve done some cursory searches, you know people make digital marketing sound confusing. We’re going to break it down for you, using our own digital marketing package as an example.
We offer our own clients, “The Trifecta”. It includes the three things that every business should think about. There’s a universe of channels and platforms you can use to market your business. Just figuring out where you should be can overwhelm. We want to simplify this process into our three key elements of digital marketing: social, search, and email.
Social Media
Picking Social Media Platforms
Social media can be one of the most overwhelming digital marketing strategies for business owners. If you’re just starting out with social media, you do not need to be on every platform. Start simple and just use the two most important: Facebook and Instagram. Facebook and Instagram are the market share dominators.
To this day, Facebook is still number one in daily active users. You might not think your target audience isn’t using Facebook, but the reality is most people in the world are using Facebook. So, even if not all of your audience is on Facebook, a good number are. Instagram captures a lot of the younger crowd and is the more visual platform. When you don’t have any social media presence, to begin with, we recommend starting with these big two.
Marketing on Social Media
Social media is what we call “interrupted marketing”. Consumers aren’t going to social media to see your content and advertisement. They’re on social media to connect with their friends, family, and influencers. There are two different ways to use social media for marketing: ads and putting out your own content.
Many business owners have come to us in the past and said social media marketing doesn’t work for them. This is, 90% of the time because they’re only using organic posts. They put content up on their feed, but don’t focus on ads. Ads are very targeted, they allow you to seek out your target demographic. In an ad you have a curated message and specific call to action. We recommend prioritizing ads.
Search
Google is the search engine. Yes, there are others out there, but the one to focus on is Google. When it comes to search you have organic and paid search results. What does that mean? Organic search results pop up because the website answers the query a user puts in based on the Google algorithm. Paid search results are found at the top or side of your search. 14% of people do click on these ads, and when they do they’re in “buying mode”. They know that they’ve clicked on an ad, so they’re expecting to be sold to and are more likely to buy. Your goal for search is to be present in organic and paid searches.
Google also has display and email ads. Google displays ads on various affiliate websites. Google uses the information of consumers to determine what type of consumer you are and target their display ads to you. Google email ads show up in your Gmail inbox like a regular email. They’re slightly apart from your actual email, but they’re a good way to draw consumers in with catchy subject lines.
Email is probably the most underrated method of digital marketing. A lot of people focus solely on social and search, but email actually has the highest ROI because of the low cost. People still interact with email. People still buy from emails.
When a business comes to us, they might have a small list of a couple hundred people or even less than that. So, we need to build the list to make email marketing viable. Building your email list is all about content. This means putting out lead magnets, value exchanges, and other valuable content. You have to provide something valuable enough for people to trade their email addresses for your free content. This is how we grow our email list from nearly zero to thousands of people.
Once we’ve built our list, we have to nurture our leads. We set up a sequence of emails to guide their journey with our brand. Even if they don’t open our emails, they’re still seeing our names in their inbox. You do NOT want to just send offers all the time. A general rule of thumb: For every 3-5 emails that give value, send one offer/call to action email.
For our business and our clients, we use the email software Mail Chimp. We love their service because they have a free version and integrate it across all your platforms.
Keep your digital marketing efforts simple when you’re starting out. Stick to the Trifecta: social, search, and email. If you have any questions about how digital marketing can work for your business, you can get in touch with us below to learn more about the Trifecta.
