Starting on a Digital Marketing Plan

Now it’s time to bringing it all together and there’s one thing you should keep in mind. Starting with your blog and moving forward, you will be thinking about one business and that would be yours. I am going to be speaking in generic terms as we approach this thing.

All sorts of businesses can use the strategic plan we’re putting in place here to grow, even if your business is B2B. Please…be assured of that.
Well, here we go – you remember this?

The Company Blog

The hub of your strategy, the center of your strategic plan. Everything revolves around it. It’s got to be good.

Get it set up. If you can design and develop, do it. If you can’t, no worries, there are several open source content management systems (CMS) out there. Now don’t get scared on me, we’ve gotten this far. I’m talking about platforms that literally walk you through getting your blog set up and ready to publish. I use WordPress. You will need some tech savvy and some time. That’s where someone like me comes in.

Maybe you already know what to write about. Good. Get started. Write a few pieces and then run them by someone you trust. If they are engaging, interesting and what your audience wants, get your blog set up and publish. Try to keep posts at 500-700 words.

But what if you haven’t got a clue where to start? I’ve got a few ideas:

• Talk to your customers. Tell them what you’re doing, ask if they’d follow you and find out what they’d like to see.
• Poll your employees in the same manner. Be sure to ask them about your customers. Who knows them better?
• Poll your vendors in the same way for the industry perspective.
• Start looking at the sites of other businesses like yours
• Google your industry and subscribe to notifications
• Talk to any strategic partners in the same vein.
• If you don’t know where to go from there, talk to me.

The number of posts (and types) you need to write before you launch will depend on the scheme you use to approach your audience. What you do NOT want to do is to launch an anemic site and make a terrible impression of your company. If you feel that this would be a daunting task, call me. We haven’t even touched social media yet.

A few ideas for your blog:

• You and the history of the company should be on the “About” tab
• Maybe a “Staff” tab containing the bios of key people
• A post about the history of your industry
• How your industry works
• A post about what you like most about owning your business
• Contests
• DYI posts.
• Posts don’t have to be about business – community interest stuff, calendar of events, review/coverage of events
• Community member of the month
• A day in the life

Things to remember would be to keep it fresh, use social media to get it out there, follow related blogs and to have fun with it. Your customers will feel it.

Next up: Bringing it all Together (The Networks) Part 1