Digital Marketing Tips

At GoldHat we organize digital marketing into what we call the 8 Sectors of Digital Marketing. This is simply a way of organizing the workflow, and understanding the different areas of digital marketing. The point of understanding these 8 parts of digital marketing is to organize your planning and management of digital marketing activity. Let's take a look at the list of 8 sectors of digital marketing, and then read on below for example of how to use this list in a practical way when managing your digital marketing.

Checklists can be a very effective way to keep things on track in your work. I like to use a daily checklist divided into 2 parts, the first is a list of actions or tasks. Basically a standard To Do list. I then add to that results, or targets.

When your seeking capital for your new business, forget the business plan and create a slide presentation instead. At least that is the growing trend, especially in high tech startups today. Having a written business plan might still be important, especially if it is brief and an easy read. But most potential investors simply will not read it at all, or they will heavily skim it reading only a small percentage of the total plan. So if your reliant on making the deal based on a skimming of the information in your business plan, how can you raise the capital you need using a presentation?

Existing customers are the life blood of your business. And the thing about that phrase "life blood" is that just like the blood in our veins, we should expect the customers to keep giving life and vitality to our business. It is never asking too much (unless you go too far and really ask for too much). Generally speaking, your customers are happy to keep helping you and giving to you because your existence, your service, your products and services are helping them in some meaningful way.

Here are 5 important things you should be asking your customers for.

At GoldHat we use 3 CMS systems most often, Drupal, WordPress and the newest addition Concrete5 (C5). We are very excited about C5 because it is the only one on this list that promises to bridge the gap between CMS and PHP Framework because it provides MVC (Model View Controller) architecture.

Drupal is still our standby for most situations. We highly recommend it especially when an ecommerce system is needed alongside other features. It offers exceptional development capabilities. The taxonomy and field module provide great publishing power out of the box.

Did you once learn to classify customers as A, B, C and D class customers? Maybe based on how well they fit your target profile, or how much they spend? Well I think this type of thinking is useful, up to a point. But if your frustrated dealing with difficult customers, maybe feeling fed up, wishing they would just take their business elsewhere, here is something to consider first. Be grateful for every customer. Be extra grateful for every difficult customer.

Your logo is the cornerstone in your branding so you want it to be designed for versatility. You might start with letterhead, then a business card but soon your logo will be involved in more complex designs with different layouts demanding different sizes and where your logo is next to different elements. So choose a logo design that will look good not just standing alone on a showcase sheet but inside your website header and footer, on a bus stop bench, maybe even on the side of a building!

Drupal comes with the taxonomy module as part of its core. Taxonomy is one of Drupal's most innovative and practical modules. It is used to categorize or tag content. It support trees of categories such for a car site: Make > Model > Trim.

User testing to used to be reserved for the big budget website developments. But today anybody can afford user testing. Actually the real question should be, can you afford NOT to do user testing on your website?

UserTesting.com starts at $39 per user tester participating in your testing. Currently they also have a $30 off promotion on tests over $100 for new customers. So you could get 3 user testers for $87 including the discount.

You can also select whether your user testers will use their PC or a mobile device.

Having valid HTML, XHMTL and CSS code in your website is important for a number of reasons including the potential impact that errors have on search engines ability to parse and index your website. So make sure that your site has "valid code". Your webmaster or web developer might do this for you already. But just in case they have not, you can do it yourself for free.

Twitter hashtags such as #atlanta or #smallbusiness are an interesting invention created by the users of Twitter. Their purpose is to add context to your tweets so that related tweets can be found grouped together by the same hashtag.

Hashtags can be invented by anyone tweeting on Twitter, just by including a new hashtag in their own tweet. Many times your going to want to use an existing hashtag that another tweeter created so that your message becomes part of that larger conversation.

Simplicity is one of those deceptively difficult qualities to actually implement. When it comes to emails for instance, there is a tendency to want to do too much. A lot of company emails become a hodge-podge of conflicting messages. As a recipient, you might be asked to buy 4 or 5 different products, and go to an event, and leave feedback, and read articles, and so on.

Make sure the emails sent from your website, or your email marketing software all match your brand in terms of color, layout and overall styling. Too often companies use email templates that are different from their main brand and this creates inconsistency in the brand message.

Email subject lines need to tell the receiver what the point of your message is, and that point needs to be crystal clear. Your open rates will improve if you value this clarity and direct writing style over cute, creative or offbeat subject lines. There is a time and place to "get creative", and a subject line is the wrong place for it. You just don't have enough space, or enough attention from your audience.

So make your email subject lines descriptive, clear and focused.

According to Entrepreneur Magazine the latest CEO success buzzword is "openness". This was based on a study of more than 1,700 CEOs surveyed. Transparency and employee empowerment also ranked highly.

A content mix is the % of different types of content you create and publish. For instance on your Facebook page you might choose a content mix that looks like the following:

1. Reposted articles (40%)
2. News snippets (30%)
3. Links back to content on our own site (20%)
   
4. Relevant quotes (10%)

What if your also in the habit of making videos a few times per month? Add this content type to your content mix and estimate the % changes:

Image marketing is on the rise on social media networks and we should not overlook the option to have your images found on Google Image Search. You can do this by making sure your images have good meta data, this means using the "Alt" and "Title" tags. Also name the image in a description way, rather than using numbers or abbreviations.

Make this part of your SEO effort and in addition to having your images indexed it will also help search engines index the pages that include your images.

There are 3 main elements to most websites:

1. Design
2. Content
3. Features

I've listed these 3 main site elements in the order most people see and understand them when using a website. First they notice the design, then they begin to read the content, and then they become aware of features such as a contact form.