Caha: Digital marketing for new business owners: A how-to

Digital marketing becomes more accessible every year with the growth and development of new tools and platforms for businesses to reach customers. New business owners must master some key digital marketing technologies and techniques to make the most of their investment to keep up with the competition. 

Build an eyecatching and organized website

Your website is the foundation of your digital presence, and just like in architecture, a flawed foundation can be catastrophic. A poorly designed site will not only fail at attracting customers, but it can also cause you more time and money than necessary with maintenance worries like updating content or fixing bugs in code. The importance of a well-organized website cannot be overstated when it comes to the success of your business. If someone has trouble understanding what you are selling or how to buy from the site, they will leave, and you will miss out. A well-designed and organized website puts you immediately ahead of competitors and gives your business an instant competitive edge that other companies just don’t have.

Step up your social media game

Your social media presence will be the way to drive potential customers toward your freshly-built website. The number one secret of social media is to keep posting: Events, blogs, sales, new products, and more should go up on your pages multiple times per week. Every platform has different requirements or limitations on what content can be shared, so be sure to know what you need to change between Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn before hitting the “Post” button. As you master your posting, learn how to queue up or schedule content so you can spend more time on your content and less on getting it to your feed on time. 

Content is king

Nothing drives social media and SEO success better than having excellent content. Your business should be seen as an expert source of knowledge and insight into whatever field you’re in. Google ranks sites by the credibility of their content — your rating improves as other sites reference and link to your content. Importantly, people will purchase your product if they trust the content you produce.

Use your data

Everything you put on your website or social media will generate data from users. By collecting, organizing, and analyzing this data, you can see what your most popular posts and products are, where your customers are coming from, what demographics they represent, and what the customer funnel looks like. Using your data well will lead to growing your sales, increasing lead conversion, and generating better content and products for your target customers — who will generate even more data.

Google my business

Google processes more than a billion searches every day, and getting your business to the top results of those searches is a huge marker of success. Google My Business is a service that helps you improve your rating in Google’s search algorithm and increases customer engagement by allowing your users to review your website and services. It contributes to your data collection as well, giving you information about what terms customers used to search for your business. Many other tools exist that will help you get more and/or better data. Still, Google My Business is particularly potent for new business owners to get the best results possible for a relatively low investment of time and money.

Analyze and iterate

When you’ve finished analyzing a big batch of data and adjusted your digital marketing plan to focus on your core customers and produce even better content, it’s time to start analyzing and refining your data again. Using data to improve your business strategy is a continuous process. Staying on top of that process will help you optimize your marketing for the fast-paced and evolving modern digital marketing trends. 

David Caha, Ph.D., is the managing director of Ad Science Lab LLC, a data-driven marketing firm. He can be reached at david@adsciencelab.com, or 720-439-9764.

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