Digital Marketing for Skeptics

Digital Marketing for Skeptics

Lesson 7 – It pays to be skeptical, but also strategic

Hi there, and welcome to the seventh and final lesson in the series Digital Marketing Tips from a Skeptic.   Hopefully you have already listened to the first six and you’re eager to learn from our final lesson.

As always, I am Kelly Berry, your resident skeptic.

In the last two lessons, I started sharing my Six Tips for connecting with your customers.  As a reminder, let’s review the first five tips.

Tip #1 – Make sure your existing website is customer friendly to your target customers 

Tip #2 – Research and Prepare Detailed Target Market Descriptions for your customer types

Tip #3 – Become a source of valuable information for your prospective customers 

Tip #4 – Find customers where they are

And Tip #5 – Figure out when your customers are ready to buy

That brings us to our final tip for this course.

Tip Number 6 – Make Personal Connections

This probably seems obvious to you as that is what most businesses try to do from the start.

Let’s look at this from several different angles.

First – when you do post messages on social media or share information online, try to personalize your messages as much as possible.

Include videos or audio that help your potential customers feel like they are getting to know you – that you are no longer a stranger.  I don’t mean that you should address individuals by name – other than in emails that go out – but you should be friendly, and you should provide specific examples of how your services or products solve problems by customer type.

Let them see you as a person and not just a company trying to sell to them.  The more personable you are in your messaging, the easier it will be for people to feel connected to you.

Next – use your existing connections with current customers to help you grow your customer base.  Do you ask for referrals or reward them at all?  What about testimonials?

Referrals and testimonials can go a long way to introducing you to prospective new customers who already know your existing customers.  And testimonials also provide social proof that you have happy, satisfied customers, which helps when making new connections to potential future customers.

Finally, consider your existing network of  non-customer connections – whether those are people you know from Linked In, or in-person Chamber of Commerce or networking events, or even alumni from your school.  I expect that you already have a wide range of connections.  Can you reach out to some of them with some more specific asks?  Maybe they know someone who you’d like to meet that they can introduce to you.  Or maybe they can invite you onto a podcast or Linked in Live event or some other promotional activity that increases your visibility.

The idea with this final tip is that ultimately, we all know that we have the best success selling to people who know, like and trust us.

Personal Connections vs Online Outreach

Focus as best you can on ways to make personal connections to get to the stage where potential customers are ready to buy and ready to buy from you.

Should you stop posting on social media, sending out emails or optimizing your content for search?  No – but should you try a more customized approach to getting in front of your customers?  Absolutely!

Is this a simple and cheap solution to your digital marketing woes?

Not completely.  What all these tools and tips require is time – to test things out, reach out online directly, and to truly understand your target audience and where they hang out online, so you can position yourself right where they are.

And then if and when you’re ready to boost a post or pay per click for some long-tail keywords, you know you’ll making a well-thought out decision specific to your target customers.

What are YOUR next steps?

Take some time to think about what your next steps might look like.  How can you set aside time to follow through on these tips and enhance your personal connections through online sources?

Some tips to help you get started:

• Ask for an outside opinion on your website to get an unbiased look at how you describe your business from someone who doesn’t know all about it
• Put together a calendar to help increase your activity on any social media channels where your customers are hanging out so you already have topic ideas mapped out in advance
• Take advantage of the many tools available to help you increase your online presence – from ChatGPT to help generate drafts of content to email tools for automated outreach to social media scheduled posting tools

Does this feel overwhelming?  Not sure you have the time to take all this on – or the budget to hire it out?  Then consider joining your fellow small business owners with the same issues in a program to help you make incremental progress weekly – Your ROI Club!

Join the next cohort of business owners focused on incremental progress, accountability and problem solving – for online marketing and more!

Sometimes we all need a ‘nudge’ or reminder to step away from the day-to-day and spend at least a little bit of time on something more strategic.  Consider the value of regular friendly nudges in a community of other small business owners.  Make a small investment in time and money, and see a big return on that investment with Your ROI Club.

Thanks so much for joining me on this audio journey to learn more about Digital Marketing for Skeptics!  I hope to see you in Your ROI Club!

One Thing to do Right Now – Take 5 Minutes

Reach out to five past customers and ask them for a testimonial that you can post on your website.  If they are not comfortable revealing their name or company name, that’s OK.  Just get the quote and share a job title and industry.  Do you already have plenty of testimonials?  That’s great!  Where can you put them online in more places to increase their visibility?

Next – click on the link above to learn more about ways to keep the momentum going!