How to Get Clients with Digital Marketing

To continue creating impact in your community or in the lives of your clients, you need stay in business. Without a continuous flow of clients, you don’t have a business. So the math is simple: attract quality clients, over deliver and scale your business.

But how do you get clients without spending thousands of dollars you do not have in digital advertising? Think digital marketing.

1.  Understand Your Buyer Persona

Your prospects currently, are doing either of the following:

  • Browsing the web for the products and services that you are offering
  • Educating themselves on how to use the products in your niche
  • Browsing social media just for fun and social connections (they are humans, remember?)
  • Participating in social media groups around your niche
  • Opening newsletter emails centered around your market niche
  • Browsing forums such as Quora and Reddit where pertinent questions in your niche are being answered
  • Reading eBooks on the topics under your niche
  • Visiting blogs centered around your market niche
  • Browsing online tools that help them achieve their goals

Now, as a prudent business strategist, you know that you need to go where your market is, and establish your base there. The instances above is a good place to start.

All the strategies formulated that aim to reach your target market via the platforms above is what is called Digital marketing. It refers to all strategies and efforts that a marketer undertakes in order to attract the right customers with an aim of having them take a certain action with monetary value.

Below I discuss some of the most effective strategies that will help you get clients through Digital Marketing:

Digital marketing revolves around creation and distribution of quality content in order to attract the right prospects whom you can then convert into customers. This therefore means, you have to know your buyer persona really well in order to develop content that resonates with them

To understand your ideal customer, take time to answer the following questions as accurately as you possibly can:

·        Who is she and where is she from?

·        Where does she get information from?

·        What books does she read

·        Where does she hang out on when free?

·        What’s the main problem is she facing in the niche you are in?

·        What’s her level of education and income range

·        What’s her goals and aspirations?

·        What are her possible objections to buy?

To break this further, let’s say you run a web design company focusing on helping local small businesses to build their online businesses and adopt the power of ecommerce. Your ideal customer, Grace, can be profiled as follows.

Grace, a small business owner in Texas city, is a single mom of two solopreneur who chuckles in between running her business, homeschooling her kids and family affairs. She hopes to better streamline her business so that she can have more time in the production and expansion rather than logistics.

Yours doesn’t have to be as complicated, but you get the gist. You can then further profile her using the table below:

Demographics

Sources of Information

Goals and Values​

Perceived Roadblocks


Name:
 Grace, the small business owner


Books: 

1. Becoming by Michelle

2. The Business of One

3. Bootstrapping


Grace hopes to:

1. Get more online orders


Grace is challenged with:

1. Having a likeable brand that people want to buy into

​Age: 32

Magazines: Forbes, Entrepreneur, Busymoms, Homeschooling Academy

2. Having a fully functional website where people can place orders for her products and services

​2. Having a fully functional website where people can place orders for her products and services

​Country: US

​Blogs: Copyblogger, Smart Passive Income

3. Get more quality family time

​3. Having an easy way to track and update order progress for great customer experience

Education: College graduate

​Influencers: Mare Forleo,

​3. Make more sales​

​Few sales of her digital products

​4. Create more quality digital products​

​Rising blogging and business costs

​5. Add more email subscribers​

​​Not enough quality subscribers to Grace's list

2. Develop content that talks to your buyer persona.

Content marketing is a huge part of digital marketing and that’s for a good reason. Content is a really powerful asset that any business can leverage to boost brand awareness and sales.

However, not every type of content will have the same impact in your business. You need highly informative content that seeks to educate your prospects about certain topics in your industry.

When developing content for marketing purposes, pay attention to the following key aspects of content writing:

Value: the content that you create should have real value to your reader. You want your prospects to see you as an authority in your market, and thus someone whom they can trust their products and services. Value can be achieved by including actionable advice that others can implement in order to achieve certain results.

Depth: Thin content has messed up the search world, and the search engines like Google are now developing algorithms that detect really valuable content and prioritizes them over thin content.

Thin content do not necessarily mean short 500 words article. You can have a massive list article of 20+ items spanning over 2000 words, but yet doesn’t really solve any problem that it purports to solve. Thin content overpromises and under delivers.

For instance, in this article, instead of just mentioning that you need to create valuable content and expounding why that is important (something you perhaps already know, I’m instead choosing to rather go deeper and show you how you can achieve that depth in your writing.

Other ways to achieve depth in your marketing content include:

·        Make use of the most relevant examples and case studies

·        Include supportive statistics within your content

·        Avoid fluff and generally known facts

Search Engine Optimization: we can’t talk about content marketing without seo. The main aim of all of your content development efforts is for your target customers to find your content when searching the web and click through to your website.

There are types of search optimization, but since we are talking about content development, then we will focus on on-page Seo.

Basically, it means how you can help Google to better understand what your content is all about in order to gauge relevance for the search queries that users are querying the platform.

Quick tips for on-page SEO:

·        Do keyword research to find highly relevant and less competitive keywords to target

·        Use main keyword in your Seo title, meta description, post url and a few times within the content

·        Add internal links to create a cool structure, pass on SEO juice and improve user experience

·        Include semantic keywords within your content

·        Ensure that your content meets the user intent for that search query.

Writing great content that eventually ranks on Google is something that is totally within your grasp. You just need to commit to excellence.

Off-page SEO tip: Once you’ve created highly relevant content, consider building a few external links from authoritative sites either through link building outreach, or offering to guest post on authoritative sites and then linking back to your content. Backlinks are important ranking factors in most search engines. Just make sure that you focus on quality. You need links from reputable websites within your industry. So, if you run a real estate business, then consider getting links from home blogs, real estate websites to link back to you.

3.  Build a targeted list

If your business doesn’t have an email list yet, then you are really missing out on a really good marketing method.

I’ll reiterate again, every digital marketing strategy you adopt should focus on quality. The aim is not to build a list of 50,000 generic email lists, but rather a list of highly engaged 2000 subscribers who are more likely to become your customers a few months down the road.

To do that, you need a great offer, and no, by great I don’t mean a 100page ebook given away for free. Even if it’s a simple checklist, it has to be of great value to your target market.

The more niched it is, the better. Some of the popular offers you can give away may include:

·        Simple guides

·        Statistical reports

·        Actionable templates

·        Toolkits and resources

·        Discounts and coupons

·        Free consultations

·        Checklists

·        Worksheets and workbooks

·        Case studies

The next thing you need to do is to lay out a customer journey and the nurture sequences to take them there.

For instance, once someone has downloaded an eBook, they are then added to a group. Upon adding this subscriber to a group or a list within your email service provider such as ConvertKit, an automated sequence is triggered with a series of 5 emails, most of them educational. On completing the warm up sequence, they are then introduced to your main offer over the next three emails or so. If they end up buying, they are tagged as customers

Frankly, there is a lot you can do with your sequences.

After completing the entrance sequence, you should then move them to a group for your weekly or bi-weekly newsletter where they can continue being educated in topics around your niche as well as occasionally receive offers from your business.

4.  Establish your online presence.

In a world where 70% of the purchases begin with an online search, having a profound and trusted digital brand is now really a necessity. By establishing your online presence, you are increasing your chances of being discovered by your potential customers.

There are several ways to do this, but I’m going to outline 3 main channels here:

Build a functional website.

If you don’t have a website as yet, then are literally winking’ your business away. But it’s not enough to just have a website. You need a fully functional modern and nicely branded website that showcases you as a professional firm.

Think of the subtle things like:

·        User experience: how easy for prospects to navigate through your website

·        Minimalism; too many options and your visitors will just hit that back or exit button. Show the main pages only on the navigation, use less but powerful text copy.

·        Employ the power of visuals. Let your website be in motion. Show life!

·        Coherence: make sure that your branding assets such as colours, buttons, logos, fonts etc are consistent across your website

·        Functionality: make sure that ll of your forms in your website are properly set up and well integrated to your email service provider where applicable.

Other things you may want to consider include device responsiveness and the loading speed. Many people are using smartphones to access the web every day, so if your site is not looking great on mobile then you are driving away business.

Also, you need great copy. The content that goes into main web pages such as home pages, product pages, service pages etc. have to be exceptional. You can only achieve optimum results from your website when both the web copy and the design have had great thoughts gone into them.

Interact on social media. Depending on the type of business that you run, you will find that networking on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram may have rewarding effects on your business. Now, don’t try to be everywhere. Since you did your audience profiling, just have a look at your ideal customer avatar. Where do they hang around the most? Double down on that platform. It still makes sense to build your social profiles on other platforms and link them on your website, but always know where you need to focus your marketing efforts on.

Get listed in online directories

Google, in a way are prioritizing featured snippets for directories when it comes to local searches. Don’t believe me? Try typing restaurants near me, or bookshops in Texas.

Conclusion

When approached intentional, digital marketing can really be a powerful tool to boost your brand and increase sales for your website. Choose channels that work with your ideal customer avatar and double down on them. Once established, you can then venture out to the other channels.