Building an online business can be stressful, particularly if you’re only conversant with a few aspects of it. For instance, you might be a good coder who is able to design a beautiful website but does not have knowledge or experience in many of the technical aspects of putting together a digital marketing campaign for your business.
However, in order to be successful, it’s not enough to know how to set up a business; it’s also necessary to have a plan in place to promote the business. Without significant marketing efforts, you have no opportunity to grow a viable business.
So, one of the first questions you have to ask before embarking on developing a digital marketing plan is who should do it. If you know what elements to include and what to ignore, then by all means do it yourself. If, on the other hand, you only have a vague idea about how to persuade people to find your business online, then it’s best to partner with a data-driven marketing company, like SearchBloom, to achieve your desired outcomes.
Whether you decide to do it yourself or get some help, here are three crucial steps to ensure that you build your digital marketing campaign with a clear understanding of what you want to accomplish:
Step #1: Start with a mission statement or paragraph.
For the sake of illustration, let’s imagine that you’re a bestselling Kindle author, have created a Udemy course in how to use Amazon’s Kindle platform, and have now decided to create a membership website where you will personally mentor aspiring authors.
Given this scenario, can you describe your grand plan to another person?
While you already have a general idea about what you hope to accomplish, writing out your mission statement will help you to articulate your overall purpose. Without a clear purpose, your marketing will lack direction.
So, since your website teaches people how to write and publish books on Kindle, then your mission is most like to teach people how to become self-published authors.
If you like, you can simply settle on a mission statement like, “I want to help people become self-published authors.”
You can also ask yourself why you think it’s valuable for authors to become self-published. By expanding on the benefits of developing passive income through self-publishing, you will be able to create a broader description of your mission.
Step #2: Develop your unique selling proposition (USP)
Why should people buy your services? In order to answer this question, you need to analyze your past and review what you’ve learned from your mistakes. The answers you get will help you develop your USP.
When you review your own author’s journey, you will also be able to develop ideas on how to go about promoting your business. Here are some examples of things you might discover:
- You noticed that your books began to sell well once you developed a Facebook fan page; so, one takeaway from this insight might be to increase how many followers you have on your Facebook fan page. You can then announce on that page that, besides selling books, you now want to teach people your secrets to success. You might also decide to place Facebook ads to drive people to your landing page so that they will subscribe to your email marketing list.
- Another thing you realized was that your book sales increased when you used well-researched keywords in your blog posts. This insight could be used as a selling point on your landing page. Your copy could talk about how you want to help aspiring authors set up a blog, develop a content calendar, and improve organic search results through good SEO practices.
Keep on asking yourself what you’ve learned in your own journey to make you a bestselling Kindle author. By noticing what you did right and what mistakes you made, you’ll develop a whole list of marketing ideas and selling points to attract traffic and improve conversions. When people respond to your Facebook ads and come to your landing pages, they will immediately understand why you are the right person to help them with their literary aspirations.
Step #3: Create a customer persona
By getting crystal clear on why you’re the best person to teach others how to be successful authors, you will also be getting a better idea about other writers like you. By understanding your own personality, struggles, and thinking style, you will be able to develop a fairly good persona for your ideal client. You can then fine-tune this persona with surveys.
These 3 steps will form the framework of your digital marketing campaign because you will get clear on what you want and whom you can help with your services. You can then fill in the details of your campaign like a Facebook fan page, Facebook ads, a landing page, an opt-in offer, a sales page to your membership offer, and so on.
