The Bare Essentials of Digital Marketing with Rich Brooks

How to reach out to Rich:

With 20 years of digital marketing success with small- and medium-sized businesses and a successful podcast, Rich Brooks, of flyte new media, is concise. He has condensed his deep knowledge into the BARE Essentials: Build, Attract, Retain and Evaluate.

Rich shares the best ways to promote your company in 2018, tactics for website visitor conversion, his favorite tools for measuring marketing success, and more on this week’s episode.

Build

You need to build a platform that converts visitors into customers. For the vast majority of companies, this vehicle is your website.

Of course, you already have a website (if not, get on it!). However, it can be tweaked to better cater to your audience. Rich advises using the tools of psychology to trigger an action from the user.

Increasing site speed, utilizing color consistency in calls to action, and even having the website photographs look where you want your audience to look are tactics to better build your platform.

Attract

“Looking into 2018, SEO continues to be a critical piece.” Rich notes that the majority of his client’s traffic comes from search engines and, of course, mostly from Google.

Digital marketing and advertising, both paid search and paid social, have become increasingly important as an attraction tool. These are better bets for lead generation as they do not rely on organic social traffic.

Rich reminds us that these tools are specific to the client. He works with a company looking to attract teachers. A social media marketing combination of Facebook ads and promoted Pinterest pins was successful. However, that same strategy would fail for a client looking to target entrepreneurs. Here, SEO and Linkedin prospecting is actually the right choice.

Looking for a fail-safe approach?

SEO.

“Blogging and SEO are the cornerstone of our marketing.” Investing significant time in quality content followed by even more time on content promotion is a valuable, long-term strategy for the majority of businesses.

Retain

Once someone has visited your website, you need to retain their interest.

Rich’s preferred tool?

Email.

Aim to capture their email address during their website visit. You can use a signup, a blog action, or even a pop-up offer (annoying but work well when done right).

“When they’ve given you that email address, they’ve given you access to the most valuable piece of real estate on the internet, which is their inbox.” It’s a commitment from the visitor’s end. Email allows you to send them new information, advice, even an autoresponder mini-course. This access allows you to retain communication and better be able to convert.

What happens if you can’t get their email?

Then launch a retargeting campaign. This type of campaign allows you to stay in front of that user elsewhere on the web, and driving them back to your website.

While email marketing is preferred, retargeting is a useful, cost-effective way to stay in front of somebody for days or even weeks.

Evaluate

“The other thing people don’t do enough of is measure.”

Looking at your marketing objectives with an analytical eye improves performs. Ask yourself: Did this ad work? Did people resonate with Photo A or Photo B? Can I try a new headline? A different offer?

To manage these measurements, Rich recommends the deep but invaluable tool – Google Analytics. In order to use it, you need to first set up the tool properly.

Filter out your own traffic from yourself, developers, etc. Then, set up reports based on the goals you’re looking to track. Each business has different goals ranging from email sign-ups to page views or otherwise.

Once it’s set-up, then you can dig deeper. You can look at current trends. You can determine how they compare to last year to understand your business cycle. It also shows the pages and posts that are ranking well and those with high conversion.

Good analysis comes from good data. So, ensure you are measuring, and set up your chosen tool to get the right data.

KEY INSIGHTS

Building a platform (likely your website!) that turns visitors into customers.
Use SEO and digital ads to attract people to your platform
Stay connected with that audience through email marketing or retargeting.
Always evaluate whether your marketing plan provides a positive ROI. Google Analytics is a great tool for this but must be set up properly.

RICH’S TAKEAWAYS

“Don’t just do something, measure it.” Make sure you’re measuring as much as you can to get an idea of what’s growing your business and what’s wasting your time.