Session 11: Setting up your online presence

In session 11 of A Marketing Podcast I discuss the role that your website plays in your marketing, as well as walking you through the set-up of your business’s online presence. I focus on setting up your visual brand elements, your website, social media, email marketing, and monitoring and reporting.

Session 11: Show Notes

Your website’s role in marketing

Your website is your marketing hub, and it should be able to handle online and offline traffic.

Even tactics that direct someone to your store, or to make a phone call, will likely result in a website visit before they take these actions.

Make sure you provide this basic information on your website:

* About your company

* Your products (if many make sure easy to find)

* Your services (again easy to find)

* Contact information

Any information in a addition to the above is extra. So make sure it has a purpose and provides value to your visitors. Content like blog posts, would be in this category. Blog posts are important for SEO purposes, but it should still provide value to organic visits.

Website role by tactic

Inbound Marketing

Your website provides the landing pages for your inbound marketing campaigns.  These pages are designed specifically to support a campaign, or provide value to generate leads/conversions. Landing pages are typically orphaned pages (not in your navigation), and because of this the SEO value of the page is decreased.

Social Media

The role of social media is essentially to build a community and drive them to your website. If you’re not working to get your social audience to your website, you’re essentially digital sharecropping. Which means to operate on someone else’s real estate. By doing this you are at the mercy of the social channel’s platform; whereas your website is yours to do as you please. Therefore, I recommend to my clients that they direct their social traffic to their website to perform specific actions.

Content Marketing

Your website is where the content goes. you may distribute content through your social channels, or other people’s websites, but that content should predominantly live on your website. Mainly for SEO purposes. Your website is everything in regards to what search engines think of your business.

Small business online presence setup checklist

You want to make sure your online presence is setup and ready to make the most of your marketing efforts.

I’ve created a checklist for you to walk through step by step to setup your online presence.

Visual Brand Elements

The visual side of your brand should be established first so that we have the elements we need for many of the items in the online presence checklist. Those items are:

* Company logo

* Colour palette – primary, secondary, and tertiary colors

* Font stack – a heading font and a paragraph font

* Brand image(s) – a single high resolution image will work just fine

Website

We discussed how important your website is, so we want to make sure it’s setup professionally and ready for our marketing as part of your online presence.

* Domain Name

* Web Hosting

* Your website

* Basic SEO setup

Google Setup

Google is all powerful and their services are now different. So setting up these google services is a must for many reasons.

* Create a Google Account

* Claim your Google business

* Setup Google Analytics

* Setup Google Search Console

Social Media

All businesses should have a social online presence. In the setup I focus on setting up the big 4 at a minimum.

* Facebook Company Page

* Twitter Account

* LinkedIn company page

* Google+ Page

Email Marketing