Digital Marketing for Entrepreneurs & Changemakers

Digital marketing: critical to any business growth. Learn the tools + tactics whether you are a beginner or seasoned pro. I list basics for quick wins you can implement NOW. My experience as a technical digital marketer enables me to speak on needle-moving tactics surface-level marketers ignore. Explore and grow!

PPC for Digital Marketing

PPC is incredibly important because organic reach is difficult to achieve and AI is serving answers fast. You need to get in front of people: PPC lets you do that quickly.

PPC is the umbrella term for online advertising. Pay Per Click (PPC) is the traditional model. You list an ad in Google Search, you pay when users click on the ad. Simple. PPC, and PPC in combination with other advertising methods like social media and display advertising (media placements) can be incredibly complex.

You need lots of strategy, technology, and content ready to accept users, track their activity, and attribute their conversions to the appropriate source.

For small advertisers that I manage, I keep their accounts simple. I keep the strategy simple so they can get the most results with the least amount of cost.

Realize that Google and other large platforms persuade you to spend more money by disguising "optimizations" or "suggestions." Optimizations are often money grabs. They usually expand your target to reach more people. With a small budget you shouldn't do that or can afford it. Large corporations will spend more than they need. Often, no one is looking resulting in billions of dollars of profit for the ad platforms.

I spoke with a Google account rep once when I managed an ad account spending millions a year. I told him that despite my account exclusions, money was spent on ad placements in horrible, spam and fraud-riddled locations like online games. The rep reached out to Google engineering, "yeah, there's a problem." Was it a problem, or beneficial oversight? How many billions of dollars did I save advertisers across the globe? Look out for yourself or hire me to help you.

Spend Your Ad Budget Wisely

How can you spend your ad account dollars wisely?

• Start with a small budget you can afford to lose.
• Use basic text ads only
• Only use the search network - no third parties or display networks that will place your ad on spam sites
• Target locations you want to sell to
• Target certain demographics if applicable
• Use exact match search keywords
• Monitor and add negative keywords regularly as you receive new information

These tips should help you start. As your budget increases, you scale up to more locations, ad types, and multiple platforms through retargeting.

Email Digital Marketing

I saw the power of email marketing back in 2003 when I monitored email submissions for music artists with Universal Music. There was massive demand. We knew who was interested and what they were interested in. With an email signup form, you can ask anything you want. Sometimes, you just want an email address for a newsletter. Other times, you want more info so you can segment and target.

Some uses for email marketing for businesses:

• Top of mind communication
• Sales, offers
• Events

Segmenting + Targeting for Email Marketing

Segmenting, targeting, and knowing your customers is critical to reaching users that want to hear from you. Central to customer information is a CRM system - Customer Relationship Management. I currently use Hubspot for this. A CRM system can give you the entire customer journey. Standard mail tools won't give you the full customer picture.

Why Email Newsletters Are Special

In addition to informational emails, most businesses that want to grow will need a newsletter delivered regularly.

Why is an email newsletter unique?

• It's focused: it takes on a single topic
• It has a spin - if it's by a single author it has that author's experiences and opinions... which should be unique in the marketplace
• The infrequency means it was crafted

Don't end up in a spam folder. Tell users what to expect. This is VERY important. If you don't meet subscribers' expectations they will unsubscribe. If you are off-target, even by a little, they will report your mail as spam. I've had this happen to me at times and it hurts. It's an indicator you need to focus.

Websites / Landing Pages

I love Websites. I've been building them since 1999. Websites have a lot of competition today, but they are still the home base for any marketer. What's the secret? Content + tracking.

Websites let you keep all your knowledge online for the world to see. Your expertise is on display. Any custom tools or videos can live there as well. You also own a Website -- something you can't with third-party platforms like Facebook and YouTube.

If users are interested in what you have to say on other platforms, you can drive them to your site to signup for a newsletter, fill out a contact form, buy a product, or schedule a consulting session. All while tracking them with your analytics platform to see what's working so you can effectively market to them.

Landing Pages are similar to websites, but often are just 1 simple page with a core purpose. Usually, most people will have a platform that creates landing pages for them. It could be a marketing platform like Hubspot or some other CRM-like system.

Landing pages have 1 goal: make a user complete an action. IT could be signing up for a newsletter, buying a product, or scheduling a demo for software. I've built hundreds of landing pages of the years. There is a mix of elements, colors, and copy that will work. It's all experimentation.

SEO for Digital Marketing

SEO has changed over the years, and now it's mostly about clarity and conciseness of content.

• What is your message?
• What's in it for the reader?
• What can I offer for free to get an email address in return?

Site Structure for SEO

Clear heading structure, bullets, and spacing are all critical to improve readability. If your content is hard to read people will move on. Reading on screens can be difficult. Some people might have low-quality devices that make reading a struggle.

Font Sizes for SEO

Another way to improve readability is font sizes. You may have noticed Web sites providing larger fonts to improve readability. Think about it -- most websites provide information in text form -- make it easy for your visitors. Aging users will appreciate the larger fonts and older users typically have what YOU want: money. Help them.

Author Profile

WHO writes the content matters. Prove a real person wrote the content so search engines can give weight to content. The modern way to do this is Schema markup. I implement this on kenmorico.com. It's hidden content on the page that describes the author, their profile page, social profiles, and other background info like credentials.

Social Media Digital Marketing

I'll be honest, social media can be challenging for business owners, entrepreneurs, and large companies. Here's the cool part: you don't need to be good at it. You can just use it a vehicle for display ads and retargeting.

Social media takes a lot of time. You need strategy, content, and targeting. The audience is there, though. And you can bring that audience to your site where you can sell.

I like the hub and spoke method of content creation for social media. You create a long-form piece of content like a newsletter or blog post, and then turn that into tweets, Instagram posts / carousels, and LinkedIn text posts. This allows you focus on a core message and tweak it for all the different platforms. You don't have to think about different ideas for each platform. It's all waiting to be distilled in the long-form content.

If you want to learn more, won't you please schedule a free consulting session, sign up for my newsletter, or follow me on social media?