Marketing your business effectively requires a multi-faceted approach. It makes a massive difference if you take your strategy and break it down into every level of your audience experience.

Audit Your First Impression

Branding: Every encounter your audience has with your business should be well branded, so they can subconsciously identify your business identity from your competitors and recognize subliminally what sets you apart. All of your ads, products or service deliverables, emails, your website, etc. should all tie in together through your branding.

Messaging: Every written word must serve a purpose. Each word is an opportunity to convince your viewers to take the desired action. Viewers are constantly bombarded with advertisements and marketing prompts, so it’s important to make sure your messaging is more effective and more relevant than any of your competitors. Strong and persuasively conversational copywriting is worth so much more than catchy phrases and bold, “salesy” claims.

Visuals: Every image you choose to represent your business must also serve a purpose. Pay attention to the feelings your graphics evoke, the color psychology, the layout of graphics in relation to your text and most importantly, make sure your visuals work cohesively together. Overall they should support the theme of your messaging and enhance the viewers experience in a compelling way.

Visibility: You’ve probably heard it countless times, but you’ve got to implement Search Engine Optimization. It’s boring but it’s crucial… you need to optimize the absolute hell out of your website and your content. Every page on your website, every blog post and every image needs to take search engines into consideration. Everything you post of Facebook, Instagram Pinterest in relation to your brand needs to be keyword savvy and have at least some focus on SEO.

Audit Your Engagement

Which social media platforms are you utilizing? Where are your ideal clients hanging out online? Are you posting consistently and providing helpful content for your audience? Are you replying to comments on your posts to fuel the conversations? These are key factors to implement.

If you’re just getting started with social media, or unsure which platforms would be best for your business, check out your competition – which ones are they using and where do they get the most engagement? Maybe their Facebook is blowing up, but their Instagram is stagnant, or vice-versa – either way, you can easily see where they’re getting their best results.  

Audit Your Website

Overall Impression: Make sure your website has your branding, messaging and visuals on point, and everything blends well and functions properly. Check your links are all working correctly and check your site speed too.

User Journey: Lead your viewers through your pages and content, (don’t just slap all the options into menus or sidebars). We are partial to home pages that include highlights from the major pages of your site and have the graphics and design arranged to lead the viewer down visually.

• Other pages on your site should serve a specific sequence of purposes. For example: the about page (if you go that route) should have: 1. an overview of your business, 2. relevant graphics and 3. a prompt to reach out to you if the viewer wants to make a tangible connection.

• Some viewers may never venture past your homepage, or whichever destination page they arrived on during a specific visit, so make sure their experience their still leaves a solid impression. It may take hesitant new viewers a few encounters with your brand before they are ready to commit to learning more about your business, so it’s important for long term prospects, to build their affinity with your brand slowly, so try not to overwhelm with options or confusing design.

Ease Of Navigation: Make it easy for your viewers to find what they’re looking for, but don’t give them too many options. If you have a lot of links to make available in the navigation, utilize drop-downs organized by category and label each link clearly.

Calls To Action: Use strong calls-to-action. Sometimes you literally need to tell your readers what to do, but it’s better to do it creatively, rather than having a bunch of lame “Buy Now” buttons all over the place. Invest in strong copy and utilize powerful calls-to-action.

Check Out Process: Please, please, please make this process easy on your customers! People are impatient these days. Let them get through check out quickly and don’t give them a reason to abandon their cart!

Destination Pages: Landing Pages, Opt-In Pages, Sales Pages, Special Offer Announcements, E-Commerce Listings… These all need to be well designed, well written and well organized. We also like these destination pages to be pre-primed for specific ad traffic. We want them fine-tuned to match up the incoming audience with the offer.

Use Analytics: These are crucial to understanding where your visitors are going throughout your website. Look for trends and consider reorganizing your navigation or content to make it a more fluid experience.

Mobile Design: These days, mobile traffic is blowing desktop and tablet traffic out of the water. It’s not even close anymore. Design for mobile users!!! Your site may look amazing on a desktop, but it’s irrelevant if your audience is on a mobile device, and considering that we’re focusing on social media marketing, the bulk of traffic is coming from users on their Facebook app, Instagram app, Pinterest app, etc.

Most traffic is arriving from a social media platform’s MOBILE APP, so plan your design accordingly. Pay attention to what “above the fold” means for a mobile browser, it’s not even comparable to desktop.

Audit Your Funnels

Solid Sales Copy: Persuasive words sell things, but it also helps to have a sales copy framework that follows a proven formula.

Compelling Visual Aesthetic: Support your sales efforts with graphics and images that help push the viewer into that coveted persuaded-mindset that we’re aiming for. (Take your audience demographics into consideration here.) Keep images on topic and make sure they blend into the style of the page.

Focused Calls To Action: Each page of a funnel has one action goal (an opt-in, a purchase, an upsell/downsell, a thanks & redirect, etc.) so make sure the focus for any specific page is that one primary call to action. Don’t distract viewers with other options. Leave the “Recommended For You” or the “Other Items You May Like” distractions for your blog or ecommerce pages – they do not belong on your funnel pages.

Deliver What They Want: Give them a great experience with your business. Over-deliver, exceed expectations and impress them with your value.

Follow Up: Once you have people on your list, or who’ve become new customers, you’ve got to remain in contact with them. Use a well crafted email sequence to butter them up and lead them to new purchases. Keep them engaged and interacting with your brand.

Pulling It All Together

Your viewers’ visits are usually triggered by:

• Seeing one of your ads (on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.)
• Finding you in an internet search (google, yahoo, “Hey Siri…”, etc.)

From these, they will either:

• Click from the ad to your linked destination
• Click on your searched link depending on your SEO prowess

Lastly, they’ll arrive on a specific page and either:

• Bounce, cause your site (or sales page, or your copy) actually sucks
• Or stick around and consume your content, probably buy from you, book mark your pages to come back for more ~ all because you’ve mapped out the perfect experience for them

Your job is to make sure ads resonate with your target audience and lures them to your site (or funnel), and then your design and copy keeps them interested enough to explore your content and persuades them to take your desired action.

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Want Us To Implement All These Strategies For You?

Our team can create a custom plan for your business. We call it the Project Road Map service. It’s a very affordable exploration of what your business needs to reach your next level. We perform audits of your business assets, conduct research specific to your industry/niche and lay out a mapped plan of customizations according to your individual needs. There’s no obligation to purchase the more complex and custom services we recommend, but we’re pretty confident that you’ll see the value for yourself.

Learn more about our Project Road Map.