Have You Mastered the Digital Marketing Basics?

You have to have up-to-date, relevant content. Does your site tell your story? Are your hours, products, and services current? Are you regularly updating with fresh content?

Mobile is just over half of all internet traffic, and we see mobile traffic for our customer sites ranging from 25% to 75% of all visits. Google likes mobile too! It's important for Google indexing and your customer experience that you offer a seamless experience – one that works well on mobile, but offers the same content as the desktop.

This is another ranking factor and also a trust factor with your site visitors. When you apply SSL to your site, visitors see a little lock icon in the browser next to the site address. This means that traffic between the visitor and your web server is encrypted. It is not passed in plain text which could possibly be intercepted and in some cases changed by a man-in-the-middle attack.

Your browser shows a lock icon if your site is using an SSL certificate. If you are not, the browser states “Not secure” in its place. Visitors may also get a warning when entering data that this connection is insecure and recommend not proceeding. This is not good for developing the know, like and trust factor that is so important to customer relationships!

Your site has to be fast - especially on mobile. Google is now using this as a ranking factor, too. We are impatient and want a site to load in two seconds or less and will hit the back button if it takes much longer.

A recent study found that a one-second delay in loading time results in 11% less page views, and a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction. Amazon reports that one second of load lag time would cost them $1.6 billion in sales every year.

Claim and verify your listing with Google (and no, Google doesn’t call you unsolicited so you can ignore those annoying spam calls that say your listing is in danger or there is a spot on the front page of Google reserved for you).

Remember, if you are a service business who goes to customer locations (a plumber, for example) you don’t have to show your address - you can target the area you service instead.

Google has added a number of ways to enhance your Google listing. You can add services, post offers, announcements, and events, and upload photos and videos.

You can also respond to reviews, add special holiday hours, and share a link to your listing and reviews.

With so many searches providing answers right in search results, it is important to keep Google up-to-date on what you are doing. They provide a free tool for you to do that, use it!

Have in place regular processes to add customers and prospects to your email list. This can be through customer interactions, networking, events, your website, social media, and advertising.

A regular schedule keeps you top of mind and expected with your audience. Consistency is one of the best ways to get traction from your efforts. (Note this is true for social media as well.)

Emails should be short and too the point. We want snack-sized content not a full meal. It's better to be shorter and more frequent than to have too much information your audience will not take the time to read. A Constant Contact study has found 21 lines of text at most (remember mobile lines are shorter), and only 1 - 3 links get best results for you.

Use a call-to-action button to provide more information or get a response.

To get people to pay attention, you have to see them and their concerns. Think about the questions and problems you hear about all the time, and how you can best communicate your value.

It's important to provide people the information they are looking for at whatever place they currently are in the buyer's journey.

This involves understanding what content you currently have versus what your audience may need, and having a plan in place to create this over time in coordination with promotions and any seasonal aspects of your business.