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Toolkit 1

Digital Marketing Toolkit for Start Ups

July 18, 2016

The idea of Digital Marketing strikes fear into some start-up companies who view the process as ‘Witchcraft’.

Well if that was the case, people like the amazing talented team at Venture Stream would all be wearing black pointy hats and travelling to and from meetings on the latest broomsticks.

Digital Marketing is something that requires expertise and know-how yes, hence why agencies like us exist, but there are things that you as a start-up can put into place to begin the journey.

To begin with, we’ve pulled together a few basic things you can do as a start-up company to get the ball rolling.

 

Website

Sounds obvious and basic enough to say ‘Get A Website’, but until you know what the goals of your site should be, you can’t really know what type of website you should build and what it should offer.

The old acronym of SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Results-focused & Timed) is mentioned so many times in whitepapers and training documents, but I’m going to use it again. Your website should have SMART goals that will allow conversions on your site to be completed with ease.

Asking yourself ‘what is the point of my website’ should be the first thing you do. Is it there to allow people to buy something? Is it there to allow people to subscribe to something? Or is it used simply as lead generation, so therefore you want to grab potential customers’ contact details.

Depending on the answers to the above, and many more goal related questions you could ask yourself, will lead you to choose the type of CMS (Content Management System) to build your site with.

WordPress is a scalable and well-supported system used internationally and perfect for lead generation businesses. From an e-commerce point of view, the likes of Shopify & Magento are favourites of ours here and are our recommended platforms.

 

Content

‘Content’ could mean anything and everything when it comes to digital marketing, but if you concentrate on two specific elements of content you will build yourself a good foundation.

Page Elements (Meta) – Every page on your site, including your homepage should have its very own title talking about what that page is about. For example, if you are selling ‘Men’s striped shirts’ you could have a title that reads something like:

Men’s stripe shirts | Striped shirts for men | JC.COM

From there your URL will hopefully follow a trend of ww.jc.com > Men > Striped Shirts for example.

This allows you to have a page talking about Men’s Striped Shirts and hopefully start to rank for that term.

Along with a Page Title, every page should have its very own Meta Description. This piece of text will appear within the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) and is there to give a snapshot of what you are offering on that page to potential customers.

Although the Meta Description is not a ranking factor per se, it is your chance to highlight any USP’s (Unique Selling Points) you have and pre-sell to that potential customer who is searching for companies just like yours.

Sticking with the striped shirts theme, an example could read like this:

Discover men’s stripe shirts with JC.COM. Shop from hundreds of different men’s stripe shirt styles. All orders dispatched same day with FREE DELIVERY ON ALL ORDERS.

Page Content (Body) – You should now have a specific Page Title, URL and description for each page, the next step is to look at the content that is placed on the page that your potential customers will see. The first thing to look at is something called the H1 Header, this, as its name suggests, is the first header on the page and should follow the theme you have set for that page. For example, on our Men’s Striped Shirts page we’ve created, an H1 Header of Men’s Striped Shirts will be perfect.

Following on from your header, some content specifically written for that page is a great next step. War and Peace is not needed, just a simple paragraph or two, explaining the range of Striped shirts you have available in various colours and sleeve options, again keeping to the theme you have set for that page and keeping to the idea that if potential clients will find this valuable to read then it’s good to have.

Some tools of the trade when writing content for your pages are: https://adwords.google.co.uk/KeywordPlanner this will allow you find out how many people on average are searching for the terms you are wanting to use on your site & http://www.seomofo.com/snippet-optimizer.html this will allow you to play around with your Page Titles & Meta Descriptions to your hearts content and allow you to see what the potential finished article will look like.

 

Analytics

Google Analytics is critical to all businesses out there; at the end of the day, it is pure data of what is happening on your site that will allow you make the correct business decisions.

Analytics underpins everything within your digital marketing strategy and set-up correctly will allow you to answer the below questions about your business:

How are people reaching our site?

What are people doing on our site?

Which pages are being looked at? And which are being ignored?

How long are people staying on our site?

How are people navigating around our site?

And importantly, are people completing the goals of the website?

 

So you now have a website that fits our business, we know the goals we want our visitors to complete and we have a data backed analytics suite.

All we need now is traffic to our site!

 

If this is something you would like us to help you with, please email [email protected]

 

Written by James

James is Venture Stream’s Chief Commercial Officer, with 15 years’ account management and business development experience in digital.

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