Digital Marketing can most easily be understood using a more tangible analogy – The Apartment Complex.
Why is this a good analogy?
- Apartment Complexes are fiercely competitive (just like the world wide web)
- They depend on location, curb appeal, and modern sleek design and appliances (just as your website does)
- They get a lot of people who are “just looking” today but could be interested in the future (just like your website visitors)
- Tennants rarely rent multiple units (Winner take all)
- The average person only uses 3 mobile apps every day. And time is finite. You’re competing for a fixed amount of attention and time a person has to devote to the internet each day.
In this discovery process, we will explore the following questions:
- Can people find me?
- When people find me, do they want to stop in for a tour?
- Is it easy to take action?
- Do I have a process in place for people who “I really need to talk to my wife?”
- How can I grow exponentially?
So, without further ado, let’s begin this discovery process.
1. Can people find me?
You can have the most amazing apartment complex in the world, but if no one’s driving by and no one can find you online, you may as well not exist.
Consider for a moment, how your son or daughter might shop for their first apartment complex.
- Might they use google maps to find one in a specific area of the country, state, or city? (Very likely)
- Or might they search online for “Best apartments near Dallas”? (Likely)
- Or will they just jump in the car and start driving around the city until they stumble upon a community that looks nice? (Less Likely)
Some practical questions to ask:
- Have I registered my business on google maps and do I actively monitor, maintain, and update it? Do I respond to reviews? Do I read reviews?
- Have I done my part in making sure search engines know who I am, what my site is about, and that I want to be found by the public?
- Do I have profiles on major search engine webmaster consoles?
- Have I submitted / do I regularly submit updated sitemaps?
- Am I monitoring and receiving email updates from search engines about your performance and possible issues with your web experience?
- The fact is, no one is using the url bar to type in the domain they want to visit, all real traffic goes through the gatekeepers (Search Engines). We are at their mercy to make sure they are happy with our website. I don’t like it, but it’s the way it is. And Google alone is likely driving over 90% of your organic traffic – so doesn’t it make sense to have a good relationship with them?
- Do I know what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is and to what extent am I using it to drive organic traffic to my website?
- When I finally get a visitor to my website, do they like what they see?
- Are logos crisp, clear, and correctly sized?
- Are my fonts easily readable, effectively sized, responsive to the users device size?
- Is my mobile experience better than my desktop and tablet experience?
- Is my website fast? Or does it appear fast?
- Is my website easy to use, navigate, share?
- Am I using the right 3rd parties to complement my traffic from organic search?
- Do I have any social media presence?
- Why did I pick that or those platforms? Is it because I like using them myself or because I know that my target demographic is heavily represented on them?
- Do I really understand how hashtags work and am I using them effectively?
As mentioned above, if people can’t find you, you can have the most beautiful website and most important message in the world, but it won’t matter because you don’t exist.
2. When people do find me, do they want to stop in for a tour?
You can have thousands of visitors landing on your home page every day, but if your website isn’t responsive, attractive, clear, and easy to use, it’s like throwing your big net of fish into a boat with a big hole in the bottom.
Your website is the very first impression most young people will have of you or your business. If it is not absolutely exceptional, you’ve been written off as someone who doesn’t care about the little things.
How will your son or daughter decide whether or not to go into the visitor center at an apartment community?
- How does the complex look from the outside?
- Is it welcoming for new visitors with their own parking spot and easy to find the visitor center?
- When they walk inside, how does it smell, look, feel? Is there someone popping up out of their chair to come say hello?
- Is it easy to take a tour of the units? Is the pricing, floor plan, etc clear?
Some practical questions to ask:
- Do I really have curb appeal?
- Do I have a compelling look, feel, and message to win the customers interest during the 15 seconds they spend on my home page.
- Have I carefully thought about the 3 or 4 things that a visitor might be most interested in learning about me while on my website?
- These could be:
- Mission or founding story
- Location or hours of operations
- Services, products, resources
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Pricing
- These could be:
- Does the experience a user has on my website tell them that I care about their experience? Or that their digital experience with me is an afterthought and priority is on “in-person” interactions.
- Am I standing out? Is my messaging strong, clear, and concise? Can a user gather who I am and what I do within the first few seconds?
3. Is it easy to take action?
Have you ever been ready to buy but can’t find an associate anywhere? The product is in the back somewhere and no one is at the register?
If you’re trying to accomplish an objective with your website, you must plan to reach your hand out the second a visitor lands on your website and hold their hand all the way through the desired action of your site.
Little Timmy, your son from the examples above, loves the apartment complex and wants to sign up immediately. What does the process look like from here?
- Is it easy to get signed up for a unit?
- How quickly can he get moved in?
- Does his parents need to co-sign? Is there a credit check?
- What’s the down payment?
Some practical questions to ask:
- What exactly do you want your visitors to do on your site? Have you defined your desired actions?
- Is it one thing, multiple things…? These are called your “Goals”.
- Have you intentionally designed your website to make it easy for a user to reach this desired action?
- Think of this like different trails from a single trailhead. Are users getting lost? Do they know what their options are? Do they have a clear route with each desired destination?
- Are you tracking success and failure?
- This goes back to installing an analytics provider and monitoring your web traffic. Your traffic tells a pretty clear story too. But are you reading it?
4. Do I have a process in place for people who are interested but need to “Talk to my wife?”
It’s a cop-out I use all the time. But more important is the process used to stay in touch with people who haven’t gone all in yet.
Not all your interested visitors are going to jump in a car and head to your 9:00 Sunday morning service. But they might be interested in “Staying in touch” by providing their email. But more likely, they’ll only provide an email in exchange for a product of tangible value (ex. A small book written on a pressing topic).
Some practical questions to ask:
- What am I doing to continually engage my lukewarm buyers/visitors/prospects?
- What information do I want and is it necessary to produce my desired outcome?
- Am I wanting emails, phone numbers, addresses?
- Why am I asking for phone numbers if I only have an email list?
- Is there a clear reason that you’re asking for information?
- People aren’t just looking to share their email with anyone, there needs to be an exchange. Something for nothing doesn’t work.
- Do I have a system in place for staying in touch with and cultivating the interest of my lukewarm prospects?
- Do you have a big email list that you use to send out email updates?
- If so, on what time basis?
- Are the prospects divided up into any sub-buckets?
- What is the ultimate goal of the email list?
- Do you have a call center and a phone bank that you’re using to reach out to people?
- If so, how often and for what purpose?
- Is there a clear objective for the caller?
- Is this system working? Do you track its success / failure? How does your conversion compare to the industry? What story is your data telling you?
- Do you have a big email list that you use to send out email updates?
5. How can I grow exponentially?
For the purposes of this document, let’s assume there are really 2 types of growth – Linear and Exponential.
Linear growth
Linear growth is commonly known and thought of as push growth. This is the kind of growth where $X dollars spent or X time spent can produce Y number of new prospects. Your growth can be thought of as linear when it requires a use of fixed capital (Time or Money) to produce a new visitor.
- You might want to grow by purchasing ads on google.
- I pay $4.50 each time someone clicks on my link after searching for “Best hamburger in Phoenix.
- You might want to grow by calling your friends and family and telling them about your new venture.
- You spend 10 minutes calling one person to generate 1 new referral.
There is nothing wrong with linear growth, because as anyone will tell you, growth is always good! But this is not smart growth and it’s not effective growth.
Exponential Growth
Exponential growth is commonly known and thought of as pull growth. This is the kind of growth where an action taken to produce a digital asset can drive a virtually infinite number of visitors.
You write a blog post titled “How to Flip Houses in 2020” and upload it to your website.
Now, assuming you’ve laid the groundwork described in step 1 and 2 and the search engines like you, you will be served as a relevant result to people using a combination of the following keywords on a search engine “How to”, “Flip houses”, and “2020”.
It’s almost impossible to know how many people will search using this combination of keywords and for how long into the future. Assuming you figure out how to capitalize on that, that can produce exponential growth.
Some Practical Questions to Ask:
- What type(s) of growth are we currently leveraging?
- How much of our growth comes from linear vs exponential channels?
- What channels are working best for growth?
- Why are those working better than others?
- What channels are failing to produce meaningful growth?
- Why are those failing?
Digital Assets
Imagine for a moment that you’re in the rental home business. How do you make more money?
Increase prices or increase lots.
For the purposes of this analogy, let’s focus on the increasing lots part of growth.
Every single time you post on a blog or YouTube, you are creating a digital asset that sits on a lot in a city called the World Wide Web (WWW).
Whether people will find that asset or not is up to the strategy you have in place on picking relevant topics, titles, keywords, and clear writing.
This leads us to the topic of Content Marketing which is very much a science and can be done well by anyone interested enough in learning it’s tactics and crafting and executing a strategy.
Some Practical Questions to Ask:
- Do we have someone on our team who knows how to use the power of Content Marketing?
- Do we currently have a Content Marketing strategy?
- What are the channels we are using to drive our desired Action (step 3)?
- What is the cadence of our Content Marketing strategy? (How, when, where?)
Wrapping Up
These are 5 great questions to ask to assess your digital marketing strategy. I hope this has been helpful.