The Digital Marketing Library of Opertaions

We’re gonna go over the entire library, as I call it, with digital marketing, from idea, a concept of business, and/or established business that just hasn’t quite launched yet, in the digital world. The first step is basically idea or a business, right? 

So, you can have a story and a history as a family-owned business and/or product, service or product, but you haven’t really launched it onto the internet yet. If you haven’t done that, if that’s your case, I hope that you catch up soon. 

Or you can have an idea that, and you would like to launch your business online first and foremost. Very first thing that needs to happen there is, basically, the logo, identity, and your unique selling point.

Your logo needs to be, hand-sketched is a great way to do it. And then after it’s hand-sketched, you need to go to a designer and/or somebody that knows how to have your logo, take your logo from your concept, your hand-sketched concept, into fruition, and to have it digitally archived, I’ll just call it. 

And a great place for this is 99designs. We use 99designs, and/or we help our clients manage the entire process of 99designs, with a tiny bit of a markup fee. 

And it’s a great place to go and get your logo designed as long as you know, and you have some type of idea of where to start with your logo. 

Your identity is…identity and your unique selling point is another thing that just includes your story, where you’re coming from, where you’re from, why you’re doing what you’re doing, and what makes you different than the other competitors out there.

The next step in this process is market research. Your market research includes looking at other companies that might already be doing what you’re doing, and finding out where they’re advertising, what kind of content they have, what kind of websites they are operating their business under. 

What kind of trends, using things like trend tools, like Google Trends, AnswerThePublic, things like that, Ahrefs, Semrush, and using those tools to start digging and finding and serving up data based on these tools…the traffic that’s in search, traffic that’s in social media. 

If it’s a product, a great place to go is Amazon, finding comments, things like that, for, you know, looking at pain points that people have, and seeing how you can offer solutions for those pain points.

The next phase would be developing personas. Especially if you’re going to be launching a product, personas are key to being able to convert your squeeze and your funnel pages, being able to speak to the right audience, and having at least a few different personas panned out and developed out so that you can have your different ads, and do split testing, and funnels, things like that, so that you can develop your strategy when you do get to the point of launching.

At that point, you wanna start thinking about content, and content creation. This includes video, audio, text, images. And make it good, too. You’re the business owner. 

You’re the person with the idea behind this new launch, right? And you wanna make sure that your content is awesome. And it doesn’t have to be shiny bells and whistles. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t have to have, you know, tuxedos and suits and perfect studio lighting, but it has to be authentic. 

And try to make sure that the audio on, if you’re doing video-first content, make sure that the audio is there. But behind the scenes, you know, just really good… So, the most important thing with content creation is just make sure it’s authentic.

The next process would be website development. And really, until you have that logo finished and you have some type of content, you’re not gonna be able to really start too much of your website development. 

Now, whoever’s managing the website development and all that can obviously get the hosting setup, get your domain registered from GoDaddy or wherever it might be, and, you know, at least create a staging site, and get some of the basics set up, name, address, phone number, all that’s really important. 

You’re gonna have to have that stuff in play. But until you have content, images, things like that, it’s really gonna be hard for a web designer to be able to move forward unless he has that stuff, so keep that in mind.

Social channels would be next, once the web design is 80%, you know, developed and designed. 

And you’ve got, you know, your homepage, your about us page, your contact page, terms of service, privacy policy, your footers built, your header and banners are built, your navigation’s nice and streamlined, the architecture’s in play, you have your services silo all laid out, you know, or your product pages laid out, and serviced, and all that structured. And again, that’s really where that market research comes in. 

The market research…and, by the way, you really need to have SEOs helping you with the market research. It’s just imperative that you do proper market research, so that you know how to architecture your website. You don’t wanna just put services, and just have a sloppy developed website. 

And a lot of the times, if you go to a web designer that doesn’t have some type of SEO background, you’re gonna get yourself in trouble because it can become a sloppy website, and it’s not gonna perform well in search.

So make sure that you have SEOs that are helping you with this point of the process, of the market research, so that the SEOs are able to communicate to the web designers how the website should be structured. 

That SEO…the SEOs should know enough in this market research that they’re developing the architecture with sitemap, we use DYNO Mapper, so that you have some type of visual architectural blueprint in play before you get into the website development.

At that point, you got all these things in play, you got your social media channels plugged and played, communicating with the website. 

They’re connected to the website, they’re verified with the website, YouTube channel, Facebook, Twitter, all those places. And you wanna make sure the branding is very consistent throughout here. Name, address, phone number, logo. Name, address, phone number, logo. 

Message, tagline. You gotta make sure you have a tagline, all that, your “about me,” all that’s connected, and it’s very, very consistent throughout this process, okay. That helps your brand visibility. And that’s when you start the process of digital marketing.

Now we can get into the fun stuff, digital marketing. Content, again, going back to content, video, audio, text, images, you name it, load it up, get it into a central place, we use Google Drive for pretty much everything, so where your team can access that. 

You wanna make sure that you have, inside of that central axis, you have a folder that says “Published,” and then you have a folder that says, “Not published.” And that “Not published” folder is where everybody that’s under the sun in the business, on the business side, the internal operations, is uploading everything they can, so that the SEOs and the publishers…most likely the SEOs and the publishers are the same thing, are able to get that content quick, and they are able to be efficient with that content. 

That way, we can start publishing, right? We wanna start publishing that content. And at the time of publishing, you wanna make sure that it’s SEO’ed. That includes formatting, and all the gazillion things that the SEOs do when they’re publishing your content.

And that’s where social media comes into play, too. Remember, we developed some social media channels here, right? In this part of the process, you wanna make sure that you’re not just leaving those social media channels empty, but we wanna make sure that those social media channels are, in fact, becoming aged assets as well. 

Obviously, on your website, too, you’re publishing content. On your website, try to make sure that when you’re publishing real content that your publishing goes to your website first. It’s indexed in search. It’s owned by you. If you only publish content on social media, guess who owns it? The social media platform owns it. You don’t own it. So just keep that in mind.

The next thing is management and reporting. You wanna make sure that every time you’re publishing, or at least 30 days, or minimum quarterly, you have some type of management going on. And this can be management in strategy, in your brand strategy, or anything like that, but you want somebody overseeing these things. 

You want some type of reporting dashboard that shows you analytics, to where you can pull in Google Analytics, you can pull in Google Search Console, you can pull in Facebook Analytics, you can pull in your SEO analytics, you can pull in all of these things. 

You can measure that way, and you can see what’s working and what’s not, and then you can amplify what’s working, and disengage on what’s not working. Remember, this whole content stage is really about developing content. 

And, again, it can come from your iPhone, and you can serve it up into the [inaudible 00:10:38] folder. And that publishing is really about publishing and dissemination of your content, right? And that’s where the SEO comes in, the social media, and all that. So, remember, managing and reporting, extremely important.

Development. This is if you really have the budget for it, if you wanna develop apps, back-end stuff, or if you need a front-end customization on your website that, you know, is, like, interaction-based. That’s where development comes in. And technology. 

All this technology, you need somebody, and that’s why all these management reporting kind of goes hand in hand, you want somebody that knows technology, and a lot of the times, the SEOs definitely know technology. SaaS tools, things like that.

Ads are kind of over here, but they are very much connected to SEO. But it’s not the other way around. You don’t want an advertising firm telling you that they can do your SEO. 

But if an SEO says that they can do your ads, it’s probably not too bad of a thing, unless that SEO is really focused on SEO and you’re running high-volume ads. If you’re running less than $5,000 a month in ads, your SEOs can definitely handle the ads, and they can manage your ads. 

If you’re running over $5,000, and you’re getting into the $10,000, $20,000, $30,000, $100,000 a month in ads, you want a real ad agency to be running those because you’re gonna wanna be doing split testing, layered audiences. You’re gonna wanna know what your return on ad spend is. You’re gonna wanna know all those things. You wanna have segmented audiences, all that stuff.

Another tool to use for that, if you’re kind of a do-it-yourself type of business owner, is AdEspresso. You can run a lot of split tests and things like that, if you don’t mind writing a lot of copy and managing all that, and get away with doing a lot of high volume. But if you’re just doing, like, low volume, local-type stuff, brand awareness, visibility, stuff like that, SEOs are definitely capable of doing that. 

And the reason why SEOs are great at running ads, as long as it’s not too much split testing, things like that, is because SEOs can look and measure ad results and ad relevancy for pages that those ads are going to on your website, and they can optimize the landing pages on your website to play in relevancy scores with ads, especially with Google Ads. So, keep that in mind. Google Ads, especially SEO, they go hand in hand.

Email, whole different ballgame here. You’re managing a CRM. You need content, you need good copy, and you need to know how to measure your click-through rates and your open rates at that point. Design comes in here. You can have, you know, design for website, design for ads, design for copy, infographics. You might want to add, you know, full-featured HTML email templates. 

Design comes in there as well. Thumbnails on your YouTube videos drive more traffic and conversions. You want designers that know what they’re doing. We use Canva, even though we are first and foremost, publishers and SEO publishers, we use Canva because it’s great. We can throw up the right type of formatting and templates. For ads, SEO, landing pages, social media, Canva’s great. Look into Canva if you’ve never used Canva.

Getting into the more expensive stuff, PR. This might include a full-featured article in “WSJ,” or “Forbes,” or “Inc. 500.” That kind of stuff is super expensive. Again, SEOs can manage some of this, but not all of it. If you’re into the very high-profile stuff, where you’re…you know, definitely go to a PR agency. 

Don’t go to ad agency for PR, and don’t go to a SEO agency for PR unless it’s more of the low-end PR, but if you want straight-up PR, go to a PR agency. Grassroots, PR, they go hand in hand. 

Reputation management, again, SEOs can dabble in reputation management if it’s, you know, pushing things down on the first page of search. Managing your reviews, that’s super easy. You know, things like that. 

Social media management, things like that. SEOs, social media companies, they can handle that kind of stuff. But if it’s, again, if it goes into high-profile stuff, if you’re a celebrity, and you are absolutely 100% needing to keep any and all negative PR out of press, and Twitter, and off of Google, then you need a real rep management or PR agency.

So, those are the nuts and bolts. Those are the different departments in digital marketing. Again, a lot of people will say, or a lot of agency, I should say, [inaudible 00:15:49] “Well, we’re a catch-all agency. We’ll do it all. We’ll do it all.” 

The problem is, if you go to a so-called generalized digital marketing agency, and they say that they can do it all, but they aren’t being transparent with you, 100% transparent with you on hard costs, and maybe even who they’re sourcing to for getting, let’s say, magazine inclusions, or that full-featured article in “Forbes,” or they’re saying, “Oh, we know SEO,” but they really don’t know SEO, or they’re saying, “We’re social media marketing. 

We can do social media marketing for you,” but all they’re doing is regurgitating and publishing content, and it’s, you know, generalized stock imagery, and it’s just, you know, high loads of vertical publishing, you gotta be aware of that stuff, and a lot of the times, these catch-all digital marketing agencies will say they do it all, but what’s happening is that they’re outsourcing.

And they’re outsourcing, and then, the people that they outsource to are also outsourcing, and they might even be outsourcing. And so you’re getting, all the way up to…and it’s like the food industry, right? Where, by the time you eat that carrot, it’s probably been through 10 to 12 different hands, from farmer to table. 

And so, it’s very similar in the digital marketing world, where, by the time you’re actually talking to the tech that’s got hands on, you could be seven people away, and middlemen, you could be seven middlemen away before you’re actually getting that. 

So, if an agency is charging you, you know, for 10 hours, you might only need to be charged for two hours, if you have a well-built relationship with an SEO company, or you might…

So, my point is, is don’t go to a digital marketing company to have them design your website, or to design a beautiful infographic, or to design your next squeeze page. 

Go to a designer. Go to a design company for that. And don’t go to an advertising agency for SEO, and don’t go to a PR company for SEO either. So, the good thing about what…the good thing about finding a strategic, like, a streamlined SEO/publishing company is that SEO pretty much blends into most of this stuff, with the exception of maybe high-profile reputation management, high-profile PR, grassroots stuff, and deep back-end development. Everything else… 

And maybe a little bit of email. SEOs usually don’t dabble into email too much. But everything else, like, SEOs, are really good at designing. SEOs are really good at ads. That’s not their expertise, but they can usually pull that off pretty well. But yeah, just keep that in mind.

So, and then, you know, breaking down all this stuff, you know, again, content, you get the video, audio, text. You got SEO, you’ve got all this stuff, right? SEO, we’re really working on the user experience, the performance of your website, performance of how this content is performing, right? 

Each landing page served up in queries and search. Really, we’re just communicating with the bots, right? The architecture of your website, the visibility, what kind of brand visibility do you have? What kind of keyword visibility do you have? Product or service? How are we getting served up versus your competitors? And the extensive list of all that boring technical stuff that won’t go into.

And design. Look at all these things that overlap with SEO. Design, you have your user experience, your landing pages, banners… There shouldn’t be a star in front of that. And two banners. Great. Thumbnails, infographics, and images. With publishing, you’ve got publishing to your website, social media, repurposing content. You ever take a video and repurpose it? You can. 

You can repurpose video, from video, to audio, to text, to images. That’s why I love video. I think video’s king of content. However, it’s trending that most people are listening to audio now, because they are too busy to look at anything else, so they’re just driving and they’re listening to audio. I’ve seen a lot of people actually listen to videos, and they’re actually just listening to the video. They’re not watching the video.

Podcasts and syndication, press releases, product listing. This is all publishing, right? Which goes hand in hand with the SEOs, because SEOs know how to publish. They are machines when it comes to publishing, because they know how to publish well. 

They know how to optimize what they’re publishing. Social media. And again, publishing, content/copy, scheduling, consistency. Ads. You got copy, audience targeting, SEO, split testing, lead gen, platforms, your return on advertising spend.

PR. Again, here, full-featured inclusions, magazines, billboards, commercials, sponsorships and partnerships, trade shows, public speaking. And then you’ve got your app dev, back-end website for your development category, custom functions, that’s front-end website, custom functions. 

Systems and ops, company emails, internal SOPs. Your email marketing includes content/copy, lists, you know, list management, split testing, segmentation, list segmentation, tracking, CRO, scheduling, segmentation, all that. I said segmentation. Split testing. Technology. SaaS tools, analytics, API integrations, setups, hosting, CRM systems.

Management and reporting, you wanna make sure you have some type of go-to place where you don’t have to log in at Google Analytics to see your Google Analytics, and you’re gonna log in to Google Search Console you see your Google Search… 

You gotta log in Facebook to see your Facebook Analytics. You want all that in one place, which is why I love our dashboard. We can serve up all that information in one place. Social media channels, ads, you name it, we got it all. Email, email analytics, call tracking, everything. We love our dashboard that we serve up for our clients.

Heatmapping is also very crucial for high-traffic websites that are really looking to keep people more engaged on their website. Click rate optimization. Also, this goes hand in hand with SEO. All this management and reporting, most of the time, SEOs can handle this stuff. So, very, very interesting concept, from idea or business, to launching a brand, to actually getting into the digital marketing stage.

The reason why I wanted to put this together is because of the pain points that SEOs, in general, and we see happening and trending, where you have these catch-all marketing companies that are…they’re not actually serving their clients with the right…with the best stewardship possible for the budget, right? 

You take a budget, you wanna make sure that you get the best possible output for that budget. You have any type of system, you have your input, and then you have your process, and then you have your output. 

Well, if your process is diluted, if it’s diluted and you have a design team saying that they’re doing SEO but they’re really not, then you’re going to have a diluted output of SEO, and you’re not going to be ranking the way you want. And it goes hand in hand with all these departments.

So, I hope that helps you in searching for the right agency, and searching for the right company to help you with your brand and your company growth moving forward, and into the future. Thank you so much. God bless. This is Josh Johnson with “Head Flood.”