In my previous post, I gave a quick overview of the basic framework for digital marketing to give you the general process and reasoning behind spending time on this for your business.  Today I will talk about activating your website with advertising and promotion to drive traffic and conversions.  You’ve probably heard this as a phrase many times if you’ve done any research on digital marketing recently!  Important to understand though.  Whilst a website is a great tool for marketing your business, relying on that alone will generally result in a very slow path to growth.  The real fun begins when you leverage your website for better results and that requires promotion.  This is where most of the questions that small business owners have around marketing come into play because it’s the visible part of marketing I guess.  Although there are a gazillion options I’m going to talk about the top one’s that I’m personally using for my clients.  You won’t be surprised to learn that promotion mostly happens in Google, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. So here is part two and a little on what I think about the social media and search channels for online promotion. Continue reading →

If you run a business in Brisbane I’m sure you hear or read the words digital marketing on the daily.  Even so, its fairly common for owner-operators to feel slightly lost when it comes to understanding what this really means and what’s involved.  So today I am going to give you a quick overview of the main aspects of digital marketing so you have a clear understanding and can confidently organise this for your business, direct your team or hire someone to take care of it.

There are five basic areas that are important. Continue reading →

When websites were first going mainstream in Australia, the word  ‘strategy’ was a bit strange and unknown.  It was used by high-level brand managers from the old print / radio / outdoor media advertising crowd but wasn’t really applied so much for websites.  At that time, hardly any other designers knew how powerful Google was (including those old school ad people) and it was really just a matter of reading the Google patent docs to find out what Google wanted.  You’d then put your optimised web pages up (Home, About Us, Services, Contact, Privacy, Terms –  remember those basic sites?!) get some good titles and keywords in there and voila – huge traffic, much enquiries.

Not so simple today hey?!  Now we have external signals to contend with and a complex digital system with many more website and marketing tasks to attend to – and a lot more competition.

This is why strategy is now standard.  We need to spend time on what’s most effective.  Let me walk you through an example that shows the value of strategy. Continue reading →

Have you noticed competition is heating up?  If the number of ads I’m seeing on the socials are anything to go by it seems like the pool must be getting smaller with the same number of people fishing.  Many organisations are now putting extra effort into marketing.  For small business owners it’s quite often social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn that get attention first.  Usually a page and organic posting and then moving on to advertising.  Whilst there will always be something new on the list of social media options, remember that social media is designed to be ‘social’ and marketing fundamentals still apply if you are using social channels for business.

So lets look at a couple of situations I see that can easily be improved when using social media as part of your online marketing strategy. Continue reading →