4 Essential Digital Marketing Steps Your Business May Failing to Implement

It doesn’t matter what type of business you have or what stage you’re in, it’s obvious that digital marketing is simply a must-have skill for every business owner. While we have tons of free educational content available at our fingertips, the obvious is not always apparent. That’s why I’d urge you to take note of the following four steps you can take to kick off digital marketing in your business and start achieving your goals.

Let’s say you have some presence on the web. You have a website, and Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts. You post something on social media now and then, your website is quite good-looking, and you have some leads coming in from somewhere. Perhaps you have Google or Facebook Ads running and you know a thing or two about setting up advertising campaigns.

You’re making just enough to maintain the basic needs of your business and your lifestyle. You’ve heard that digital marketing and social media can be powerful things to leverage but you aren’t sure where to start. The potential problem isn’t that you don’t know what to do. Rather, you’re stuck in one of the most comfortable places of all — mediocrity. 

There isn’t much internal or outside pressure for you to take your business to the next level and you might be thinking that you take some time to find the right strategy or even hearing yourself say that you don’t have enough information.

But to take your business to the next level, it’s essential you get the fundamentals of digital marketing right, to be able to leverage all the most lucrative channels out there. 

1: Instal The Marketing Mental Make-Up

“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.” - Donald Rumsfeld

I see many business owners underestimating what it takes to market effectively on social media or in the digital space generally. And that’s not because they don’t want to, but more because they don’t always understand the cost of opportunity. You see, advertising or marketing is an investment. When executed properly, it can yield enormous returns. 

That’s why, as an entrepreneur, you should educate yourself on what makes a successful marketing campaign. A big part of that learning curve is realising what specific strategies, marketing tools, and content would bring results for your business. And to start understanding this, you should always begin by setting and aligning your organisation’s objectives with what you want to achieve online. 

2: Set your Marketing Intentions Correctly

Your success will always be predicated by what you set out to achieve. I’ve specifically highlighted the word ‘your’ because it’s so easy to follow someone else’s marketing strategy and believe that their organisation’s goals should be yours as well. 

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be learning from and analysing the successes of others, which is important to some degree. But you’ve got to ensure your digital marketing objectives reflect the future direction of your business. 

While there are many goals you can outline in your marketing plans, some of the most frequently used marketing objectives examples include the following goals:

• Acquire new leads and customers
• Monetise exciting leads and customers
• Increase problem and solution awareness
• Build a community
• Build brand awareness
• Develop brand loyalty
• Build industry authority
• Grow your digital presence 

Whether your business relies heavily on referrals and wants to start getting into the online space, or has challenges acquiring new customers, you’ll almost always want to begin by learning about your ideal customer. 

3: Understand The Larger Market Formula 

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself." - Peter Drucker

The mainstream techniques to finding your target audience often advise that you should focus only on the people most likely to buy your products or services. In reality, this approach is less effective as it doesn’t give you a bigger picture of what works in the real world. 

To be able to skyrocket your sales through digital marketing, you want to find a way to appeal to a larger market. TLMF (The Larger Market Formula) gives you a breakdown of an entire audience of buyers, in any market, into four key categories: 

The fundamental idea is to market to the 37% of people who are either gathering information or problem-aware. And to do that, you want to start educating them by providing valuable information. One of the main goals of this technique is to change the psychology and dynamic of the prospect’s relationship with your business. 

But how about the biggest market slice (60%) who aren’t problem aware? You guessed it! We educate them too and convert them into loyal customers by instilling the right systems and processes. 

4: Learn The Basic Psychology of Consumer Behaviour

“Enter the conversation already taking place in the customer’s mind.” - Robert Collier

All we want to do is follow the attention of our customers and put the right message, in the right place, at the right time. To do this successfully, we need to get good at understanding what our customer thinks about. And you don’t need to be a human-behaviour specialist to do it. You just need to explore and breakdown the behaviour of your customers.

Use your empathy skills and ask yourself these ten market diagnosis and profiling questions:

1. What keeps your customers awake at night? Indigestion boiling up their oesophagus? Eyes open, staring at the ceiling? 

2. What are they afraid of? 

3. What are they angry about? Who are they angry at? 

4. What are their top three daily frustrations? 

5. What trends are occurring and will occur in their businesses or lives? 

6. What do they secretly, ardently desire the most? 

7. Is there a built-in bias to the way they make decisions? (example: engineers are known to be exceptionally analytical) 

8. Do they have their own language? 

9. Who else is selling something similar to them, and how? 

10. Who else has tried selling them something similar and how has the effort failed? 

Dive deep with every question, go and read Amazon reviews, go onto forums like Reddit and Quora, read YouTube comments, go to Facebook and LinkedIn groups, etc. Do the work. 

Go to answerthepublic.com to find invaluable insights into what your customers are thinking. It’s a powerful keyword toolbox which will generate a diagram of related searches in your country for you. Let’s type in “how to sell” as an example. It will show us all the questions people ask related to this phrase.

The result

Once you have the answers, you can better understand your buyer's persona. It will help you tailor your content, messaging, advertising, and overall marketing strategy. Now, write a paragraph summarising your findings.

I know it’s a bit of a job to do, but do you want to drive more sales and grow your business? Remember, this is not something you do once and then forget about it. You should constantly keep your finger on the pulse of your customers. Meaning you should come back to this exercise every three months or so, in order to continually improve your marketing efforts.

So what’s next?

If you see the value in these tips and would like to find out more about driving revenue using the principles I’ve described in this article, let’s talk!

If you decide not to move forward after our phone call, that’s fine too. Worst case scenario, you would have received some free advice from my team which will help you generate more traffic and sales.

Ultimately this is for people who take action and know a good opportunity when they see one. If this is you, today is the day you step up and take your business to the next level.

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