Small Business Marketing Assessment Thank You
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Low score
You received a low score but fret not! Though there is some room for improvement, we can help get you on the right track.
A lot of small business owners hear about the latest trends in online marketing—AI, paid marketing, marketing automation—and begin to feel overwhelmed. There are already so many channels and tactics to consider, and it seems like there are new ones dropping every day.
Of course, your business could be taking advantage of all the available channels. But there’s no point in trying to jump ahead to the latest and greatest technology if you don’t have the basics under control.
Based on your answers, here are the first three items on which you should focus to jump-start your marketing.
1. Marketing Website
The first step to getting online is building your website. A small business can’t survive today without one. It is the hub of your organization’s online presence. The key is not just creating any old website. It’s about building one that is modern, accessible, and gets your story out there in a way that inspires your audience to take action.
Websites today must be mobile-friendly. Mobile sites are getting indexed first by search engines, and the vast majority of searches are now happening on mobile devices. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, you’re starting at a deficit.
Once you have cleared that first technical hurdle, you need to ensure that your website clearly articulates your promise to solve the greatest problem your audience has. It needs to tell the story of why your audience should trust you to do the job. If those most essential elements are missing, you shouldn’t pass go.
The other key to creating an effective website is having your full editorial plan and SEO approach in place before you begin the design or build process. Your website, content, and SEO techniques have all risen to the strategic level in terms of marketing importance, so your plan to get your website up-and-running must seamlessly incorporate those three critical elements.
2. Approach to Content
Your content must all work to tell the story of why a prospect should choose your business. This means leading with your value proposition on your home page. Each subsequent core page should build upon that message. Leveraging the power of video can help articulate your story and ensure that you are reaching the widest audience (not everyone just wants to read online).
A review funnel should also be a central component of your content program—particularly if your organization serves a location-based audience. Review funnels make it easy for your happy customers to share their thoughts on Google, Yelp, Facebook, or any other platform of their choice. Reviews also tun into material you can share on your site, and provide opportunities for you to further the relationships you are building with your clients—transforming single purchases to recurring revenue for your organization.
Once you’ve built your content, you want to make sure the meta data (the titles and descriptions that display on search results) are keyword rich. It should be clear exactly what you do in your title tags, so that prospects looking to solve a problem understand immediately that you offer a solution.
3. Search Engine Optimization
SEO sounds intimidating, but in reality the foundation is pretty straightforward. The most essential SEO component for any local business is making sure your business’s name, address, and phone number (NAP) are correct on your website, and that that information is the same as what’s displayed on your Google Business Profile page and other portals. To start, simply do a search in Google for your business and claim your business (click the “Own this business?” link) when it appears within the results (this option should display at the top of the profile on the right). Then make appropriate changes and keep your information up to date to get a jumpstart on your Local SEO performance.
If your business has moved, you’ve changed your name, or you find that there is conflicting information online, you can use a service like BrightLocal or Yext to ensure that your data is correct across all of the directories out there on the internet.
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The best next step is to schedule a call to review your score and discuss the best plan of action to set you and your team on the track to success. Sign up below:
Medium score
You received a medium score, way to go! You’ve built a solid foundation, now it’s time to amplify that.
Your website, content, social media, SEO, and email marketing will always be your primary tools to improve your marketing performance.
Since you are using those tools let’s move to add paid lead generation, sales enablement, and customer experience improvements that can really make a difference in your organization’s marketing performance.
Website, content, social media, SEO, and email marketing are the five, primary marketing channels. Now that you’ve done a good job of building those foundational elements, it’s time to add some fuel to the fire by engaging paid lead generation, sales enablement, and customer experience improvements.
1. Grow Your Website
In the initial, Build Phase, you established a modern website. It has a clear promise and is mobile-friendly. Now is the time for you to improve your organization’s story to better capture the hearts of your audience. By incorporating your customer into the experience—making them the hero of the story and giving them specific “next steps” to guide their journey—you will transform people from just visitors who know you into those who like and trust your organization. One way to help accomplish this step is to create audience segments in your marketing so that your new friends feel like the story you’re telling is speaking directly to them.
If you haven’t done so already, it’s important to address some technical, security concerns with your site. Ensure that your website is HTTPS secure. This is something that Google and the other search engines are taking seriously. In fact, visitors to your site using the Chrome browser now see a big “Not Secure” warning next to your URL if you haven’t switched to HTTPS.
Your website must also load quickly. Not only is this an important element in the customer experience, Google will also punish you in search rankings if your site loads slowly. Not sure where you stack up? You can check your site’s load times for both desktop and mobile with the PageSpeed Insights tool.
2. Get the Most Out of Your Content
Once you’ve begun the process of creating content, you want to use it as a lead generation tool. In the Grow Phase, the focus should switch from getting traffic to starting conversions.
In the Build Phase, you established a site with a review funnel, video, and core pages. The next step is to create hub pages.
Hub pages are the best way to create a content asset for your website. The pages bring together all of your relevant information on a given topic all under one roof. Readers and those researching solutions to their problems love hub pages and Google rewards them in their rankings.
3. Grow Your Email List
Hub pages have an additional benefit. Once you’ve proven your thought leadership and expertise on the hub topic page, you can marry these hub pages with content upgrades. Visitors will be charmed by both the quality and quantity of information on these pages that you are the subject matter expert, and so they’ll feel there’s a good reason to give you their email address in exchange for more information. This fuels the Bond Phase of the stakeholder lifecycle where your audience starts to like and trust your organization.
Once you have obtained their email address, you can begin to nurture your relationship with them through effective email campaigns—up-leveling these engagement with content tailored for segmented audiences.
4. On- and Off-Page SEO
In the Build Phase, you established your Google Business Profile page, ensured that data directories were all correct, and included descriptive, keyword-rich title tags and meta descriptions for all pages of your website.
As part of the Grow Phase, the first step is to master Google Search Console. This free tool from Google gives you remarkable insight into how and why people are coming to your website. Make sure your site is included in Search Console and submit your sitemap(s) so that Google can more efficiently index your site. Follow a similar step on Bing and Yahoo.
You also want to begin thinking about SEO beyond the bounds of your own website. How can you get other people to link to your content? Guest posts are a great place to start. Reaching out to relevant thought leaders in your industry and offering to write for their blogs (and asking them to contribute to yours) is a way to build up a network of external links—not to mention meaningful business connections.
Refreshing and updating your existing content is another part of the equation. For your evergreen content, what can you do to keep it relevant? Is there updated information that will keep this content useful for readers finding it today for the first time? Can you add new links that will enhance its usefulness and boost SEO? Updating old content is a quick and easy way to revive old materials to save you time and get your audiences up-to-date with the latest information about those subjects that matter most to them.
5. Social Media Engagement and Outreach
Once you’ve established your social media presence, branded it, and have started posting content, you want to begin thinking about generating engagement. This is about asking questions that get your followers engaged and to start conversations. Used most effectively, social media is a two-way street, not simply a soap box. Now is also the time to think strategically about how to get people to like and share your content.
Media outreach can be a part of this next phase of social media as well. Are there publications in your area that you can share your content with? This will open you up to their established readership base, and introduce your name to new people who might be interested in what you do. Reaching out to influencers in the industry can be another effective outreach tactic. How can you get those who already have the attention of your ideal prospects talking about your products or services?
Want to learn more?
The best next step is to schedule a call to review your score and discuss the best plan of action to set you and your team on the track to success. Sign up below:
High score
Congratulations, you are on the right track with your marketing! We help high-performing teams reach their fullest potential and would welcome the opportunity to take your marketing to the next level.
Now it’s time for you to build on the foundation you have created and go even higher—expanding upon the elements that will grow your business and you adding a final layer that will amplify and ignite the work you’ve already done.
Expand On Your Website and Content
With a fully functioning website, your focus now should be on optimizing the various elements even further. You’ll want to track your conversion rate and test adjustments to improve those numbers. This is also where you should think about ways to further segment the content you create. An great tactic for segmentation leverages the building of micro-sites on top of your larger website, with content that is targeted at specific groups and buyer personas.
Finally, you want to think about harnessing your existing content for specific stages of the customer journey. How can you use content to ignite sales? How specifically can it assist in cross-selling and upselling? And how do you create content that gets shared to establish viral loops?
Add to SEO
Once you’ve created your on- and off-page SEO systems, you can continue to build on those gains. This is where you can start to add other types of content—like a podcast or video channel—to increase your authority and ranking within search results. Appearing as a guest on existing podcasts allows you to build up even more links to your materials.
Continue to dive deeper into your Google Search Console data. Take what you learn there and use it to increase the organic click-through rate to your website. This data can also help you to make changes that will allow you to appear in voice search and featured snippets, both of which are becoming increasingly relevant in the Google landscape.
Build Social Media Campaigns
Now that you have a presence across all relevant social platforms and have begun to boost posts and take a stab at paid advertising, now is the time to create broader campaigns. You might even look to create your own community online, with groups that encourage your fans and customers to come together. This could take the form of creating groups on LinkedIn if you are a B2B company or on Facebook if you are more B2C.
Live video is another critical element in social media, and a lot of business owners are tempted to start putting out video content immediately. In reality, it’s not worth adding live video into the mix until you’ve done the work in the Build and Grow phases and have the basic framework of your social media presence in place.
Enhance Email Marketing Campaigns
In the earlier stages, you cleaned up your email marketing list and ran reengagement campaigns. This is the phase where you can begin to further segment your audience and run more and more complex campaigns to appeal to a very narrow, but very engaged portion of your audience.
Grow Your Paid Search Approach
The next step with paid search is to build an even more robust approach to your Google Ads. Establishing landing pages on your website that are tailored to specific campaigns is a great way to enhance the personalization of your messaging and encourage prospects to engage with your brand. You can also add display ads and re-marketing to your paid approach.
Establish Processes Around Sales Enablement
In the Ignite phase, you’re able to get even more strategic about the way in which you present your offers to prospects. What gives you the greatest shot at making the sale? How can you best nurture leads that come in? If someone is already a customer, what can you do to get them to repeat?
You can also consider adding speaking engagements into the mix, here. Like what you did earlier in establishing a partner network, speaking allows you to tap into others’ existing networks and grow your brand’s reach even further.
Delight as Part of the Customer Experience
A top-notch customer experience is about delighting your audience so much that they not only repeat but refer your business. What can you do to stand out from the competition and win their repeat business? Maybe this is something like the talk triggers that Jay Baer advocates for, which not only encourage repeat business but create word-of-mouth marketing. Maybe it’s an event that offers a unique experience or access to valuable information to your existing customers.
Whatever it is, you should be using customer feedback to inform these marketing decisions. When you understand how your current customers feel about the service they receive from your business, you can create future campaigns, events, and products that directly address their needs and any gaps they’ve identified in your current approach.
You also should establish a concrete way to generate referrals; this is where a thoughtful referral program comes in.
This is what a fully realized marketing maturity model looks like.
It’s the groundwork for your marketing plan moving forward. Use this as your roadmap, and in some cases, it can be your three-year marketing plan.
In addition to going even deeper into the channels you’ve already established, here you should tune up your efforts by leveraging the power of a CRM, marketing automation, and analytics and tracking.
- A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool can help you further organize and track all relevant customer data.
- Most CRM tools today include a marketing automation component. This allows you to track behavior, score leads, and create and launch campaigns that are triggered by specific behaviors or actions.
- Hopefully, you installed Google Analytics on the very first day you created your website. But now that the site is up and running, you must move to set-up conversion goals within Analytics. determine the KPIs you should monitor, track your results, and tie all advertising activity back to what happens in Analytics.
Want to learn more?
The best next step is to schedule a call to review your score and discuss the best plan of action to set you and your team on the track to success. Sign up below:
