I know it’s hard to trust a brand you’ve never heard of. So to prove the awesomeness of these strategies, I’m sharing the first strategy I did when I began offering this free service. You’ll find each section of the strategy in a separate tab below. So feel free to peruse the whole thing or skip to the sections that most interest you.
I think you’ll agree there is a huge amount of value in there.
Note that I’ve changed the name of the business, and other information that could potentially be used to identify the business, to preserve the business’s privacy.
This strategy deck contains the top three things you can do to improve your business’s marketing and move you closer to achieving your business goals.
These tips were prepared by Kelly Wade, a marketing specialist based near Canberra, Australia.
Kelly specialises in helping businesses tell their unique stories, connect with their target audiences, demonstrate their authority and leadership in their industries, and prove the value of the solutions they offer. In short, she conducts research and crafts strategies, content and copy aimed at helping businesses win more sales and grow.
If you would like to get in touch with Kelly, her contact details are as follows:
Email: info@kmwade.com
Phone: +61 439 367 421
Website: kmwade.com
She can also be contacted via an online call (using Zoom, Skype, Google Hangouts etc.)
Within this strategy you’ll find my top three recommended strategic actions. This is not meant to be a comprehensive strategy for your business but you should get good results from doing all three things. If you have any questions about these recommendations, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me!
You said your biggest business challenge is figuring out how to get to a point where you have enough work to hire another person on a consistent basis. As you’ve identified, improving your marketing is likely to be the biggest factor in making that happen.
You’ve identified that one of your biggest marketing-related challenges is keeping your blog updated with relevant and new content. As your blog is going to be one of your most important tools for attracting potential clients and converting them into satisfied clients, your first action is going to be related to your blog.
You’ve also identified ‘reaching new customers via social media’ as a challenge. Your social media profiles and blog can go hand in hand, working together to help you attract new customers. But your social media profiles can also act as a vehicle for improving client advocacy. Since word-of-mouth recommendations are particularly useful for tradies, your second action is going to be related to your blog.
You have not yet set up a Google My Business profile. This is one of the most important things brands can do if their offerings are tied to a geographic area. As such, your third action will be related to setting up and optimising a Google My Business profile.
I’ve listed your actions in order of importance. But I recommend you do action 3 first because it’s a quicker, more discrete task…
You’ve been posting one new blog post each month for a few months now after a bit of a gap. But finding the time to update the blog is a challenge and figuring out what to write about is also a challenge.
Search engine ranking
Ideally, every blog post you publish should be designed to answer one or more questions your ideal clients have. Most of the time, this means they should show up in search results when your ideal client googles an answer to their question. And therefore your blog posts should be SEO-friendly. However, in some cases, your ideal client isn’t going to google their question — e.g. a solution-aware prospect/lead might want to know whether you’ve done a project just like theirs before and they’re unlikely to google ‘has John Smith Electrical Services done a factory LED lighting installation before?’. When you produce blog posts that answer those kinds of questions, your SEO is going to be less important. But you can still answer more ‘generic’ questions within those posts and optimise your SEO particulars to help them rank for those kinds of questions.
As such, every one of your blog posts should have some SEO basics. These are listed below with links to pages that provide further details about what they are (in case you’ve never heard of them).
SEO particulars
Other SEO-friendly things
Blog posts for your whole sales funnel
This is a huge topic, but in brief, your sales funnel goes like this:
And the buyer journey goes like this:
When you put the two together, you get something like this:
Your blog posts can help you market in every part of this process, except for the point where the actual conversion happens — the point when you tell someone to buy. At that point, you need copy…
At the moment, most of your blog posts are appropriate for people who are looking for a specific solution.
You’ve started posting more regularly on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and you use a few different types of posts. But you struggle with reaching new customers through this medium.
You don’t have a Google My Business page/profile but having one is really important for ‘local businesses’.
These things are going to put you on the path to success, but there are of course other things you can do to get your marketing really working for you. Here are some other top priorities.
Your site speed is pretty good but there are 50-odd SEO ‘errors’ on your website, 25 of which are considered critical. As such, I highly recommend you do a full SEO audit to help you identify and fix issues that are negatively impacting on your website’s performance.
Who should do this?
Your website currently only has 2 backlinks (links from other sites back to yours). Backlinks boost search rankings and drive website traffic — and one of your two strongest competitors already has 189 of them. (The other only has 2 but I’d say they have a Google My Business profile that’s boosted their position in the local search results.)
A basic strategy for attracting quality backlinks could really amplify the results that you’re getting from your website and blog so I highly recommend developing one as a high priority (after actioning the recommendations from a site audit).
Who should do this?
As you start to figure out what works and doesn’t work for your particular target market as well as for the way you work, you can start developing more detailed strategies for each aspect of your marketing activities. As these become more sophisticated, you’ll see increasingly better results from your marketing efforts.
Now that you’ve got this mini strategy as a starting point, you may be able to develop your own strategies. If you’d like to have a go, I’ve got a document that may help you get started (link removed to protect intellectual property). It’s actually the template that I give all my clients when they want me to deliver something for them. But most of my clients also find it’s super useful in terms of helping them clarify how they need to approach marketing in their own minds. When you’ve done the other tasks in this strategy and are ready to start your next marketing project, fill in a blank copy of the template and create your own brief. You can then use it internally to create a strategy and plan for your project or you can give it to someone else if you decide to outsource any aspect of the project.
If you need some help, I can jump on the phone and talk through your challenges (consulting is $100/hour) or I offer a range of marketing services that might suit your project.
If you’re unsure about anything in this strategy, send me an email or text, or give me a call and I’d be happy to answer any questions. If you want to explore additional areas of your marketing, as noted above, I offer one-on-one consulting ($100/hour) and a range of marketing services.
I’ll check back in soon to see how you’re going with this strategy and to ask for your feedback so I can make this service the best it can be. So expect to hear from me again soon! 😊