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The Digital Marketing Podcast
Digital Marketing on a Zero Budget
00:21:35
Following a question from Rick Toon, podcast listener on our LinkedIn group, Daniel talks us through how he’d approach the essentials of digital marketing in terms of services and essentials you should be using. Daniel also visits Keyword research...
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A
Welcome to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by targetinternet.com hello and welcome back to the Digital Marketing Podcast.
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My name is Kieran Rogers and I'm Daniel Rolls.
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And today, Daniel, we're talking about digital marketing on a low or zero budget.
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B
Yes. So quite regularly what we'll do, we'll go off to our LinkedIn group and we will ask you what do you think we should be talking about next? And what tends to happen is because we recorded something like, I don't know how many hundred and thirty episodes or one, I forget what we've recorded about previously, but we tend to kind of move on to advanced topics and those kind of things. And actually sometimes we take a bit of a step back and just actually try and bring some of these things together. Now Rick Toon came through to me on LinkedIn and said actually he runs a little B2B video production company and just asking if there are some key things that he should start with that he should focus on with very, very limited budget, where should he focus his efforts? And also what can you kind of forget about for now as well? So I want to talk you through what I think is essential and almost no budget, and also try and introduce a bit of a model that kind of get us thinking about these things as well. I would always kind of start in this situation where the ability business to business or business to consumer is you want some sort of hub to publish your content on. So you do need a website from that point of view. And as you probably already know, I am a huge fan of WordPress. If you go to WordPress.com, you can set your blog up. Now, the misinterpretation of this Quite often is WordPress.com is going to be something like YourBlog.WordPress.com and if you go to WordPress.org, you need a developer and then you can have a custom domain. But actually if you go to WordPress.com, you can set things up and for £15 a year you can register a domain and have that pointing through to your blog.
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So no one need know that you're.
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On WordPress.com Absolutely not. I mean, and with WordPress, we use WordPress, we use a massively customized version of it to do all the kind of stuff we do on our website, our E commerce and our client pages. But it is WordPress nonetheless. You can in the future move from WordPress.comto.org if you do need to massively customize. But it's A good starting point. If you, if you've got an existing domain, you can point that at WordPress for 11 pounds a year. So that's where I'd spend a little tiny bit of money. If you are going to spend some money on this, first of all, then what you need to think about, and I would split this off into three things, is what we refer to as hygiene, Hub and Hero content. And I'm sure a few of you have come across this before, but let me just explain for those that haven't.
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Hygiene Hub and Hero. Yeah, this sounds like a. I don't know, where are you taking this? Sounds like it might involve embarrassing rashes.
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No, this is not at all. This is great. Hygiene content is the stuff you have to have. It's the essential stuff. So hygiene content is the stuff that describes your product, but you need to be the most and the best answer to the kind of question of what is your product about? What is your service offering? And you want as much detail as possible. So that's the stuff you need to get right. As part of this, you're going to need to do your keyword research and it's one of the things I would always do. Before you really start with any digital activity, what is it that people are actually searching for and what are the problems and the challenges they're facing? Easiest way to go with that is probably the Google Keyword Planner. So it's part of the AdWords platform. You set up an account for AdWords, you have to go through the steps of setting it up, but then you've got access to the Keyword Planner tool. So when people are searching for your product or service, what are they searching for? Now I'll give you an example that we're grappling with at the moment. You search digital marketing elearning, which is what we sell, and we come number one and quite often number two in Google as well. Great. Reality is it's only about 30 people a month globally that will ever do that search. Because most people have no idea what digital marketing elearning is, let alone the fact they might want it. Digital marketing courses gets 1,600 searches a month. Now we have to make a decision how much we want to factor that term into our content. We are about digital marketing courses, kind of, but not quite. So it's important that you go through and really decide what it is that you want to rank for and what people are actually searching for. One thing we've been looking at a lot more lately as well, which is another Thing that I would set up that's free is the search console within Webmaster Tools from Google. So essentially if you just go in and search for Webmaster Tools or you search for Search Console, you'll get this up.
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So just to clarify, Google, I don't know why they did this, but they had this brilliant product called Webmaster Tools and they just decided to rename it Google Search Console.
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Yeah. And it confused the heck out of a lot of people. So go through, get that up. You need to set it up and it will basically ask you to clarify and prove that you own your website. You go through the step to do that, but it gives you some great things. It will tell you, for example, is the search engine spiders, these things that read your website, are they having any problem seeing your website in the first place? It will tell you that from my point of view, the thing that I like most is it will tell you there is a keyword list that it will tell you what it thinks your website is about and it will give you the top 20 first of all. And you can drill into it a bit more detail. But what this is going to tell you, it's going to look at your website and say, we think you're about these things. Now, if it's not listing the words that you really want to rank for, you probably need to add more content on the words that it's not listing you for. So it's a relatively straightforward kind of thing to look at. So I know, looking at ours, that it knows we're about digital marketing and elearning, whereas the word training and courses comes a bit lower down. So that's something we need to work on and we need to kind of build that up.
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Just to add to that, there's a very interesting part of the Google AdWords keyword tool that enables you to do a similar thing. So typically when you first go into that, you'll type in a few keywords separated by commas and it'll start generating lots and lots of lists. But just underneath that box, if you look people, there's another box that says give us your landing page. And actually you can use that in some really creative ways. You can use it to obviously work out what specific areas of your site Google thinks it's about. And that'll give you some indication of how well you've structured the page and the content and the information's there. But very interestingly, it works if you punch in your competitors websites or key landing pages or segments as well to see how their pages Speak. I know it is, but it's interesting. Why reinvent the wheel when someone else has done it? And you do need to pay close attention because you've got to pick on keywords that you're relevant for. So just literally lifting everybody else's is not particularly going to help you, but it is an interesting technique. And there's one more tool that I'd like to throw in there, which is ubersuggest, which is very powerful actually. It gives slightly different references to the Google AdWords keyword research tool. And I noticed recently if you go along to ubersuggest, they do recommend a Chrome plugin which, if you've got it, actually pulls in the volume data from Google's API, which is quite interesting. But it's a very great way of exploring very big kind of keyword landscape areas when you first start out.
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So your hygiene content is the stuff that you need. It describes your topics, it describes what you offer, and you need to make sure you're ticking that box and you're doing it effectively by factoring in the right keywords. The hub content is the stuff that you're kind of publishing regularly. So it's your blog post basically and hub content, again, you need to do keyword research, work out the problems, the things that people are struggling with. Think about your user journey. What is it might someone be searching for when they're not actually looking for your product or service? Think top of the sales funnel so we can talk about our product. We're blue in the face and we've got a hygiene content to do that. But the hub content might draw you in when you search for something else in Google. So. So if I was looking for some best practice tips or something like that, that's the kind of stuff we might create. Now my advice on this is that in a world of content marketing and huge amounts of content being published constantly, hub content's really important. But rather than doing loads of it, do less, but do it better. So I would generally suggest rather than trying to do a blog post every day, which is great, do one a week, but do a really good one and actually make sure that you're going to get more long term benefit from that. Because where you generally use your hub content is you then tweet it, or you Facebook it, or you LinkedIn it. If you are a B2B service, then you're probably, I mean, I would suggest off the top here. LinkedIn is a good place to start, as is Twitter. Facebook may or may not work, depending on who Your target audience is, but whatever channel you're using, it doesn't really matter. But it's really this hub content gives you something to point back to. So you're adding to the conversation by pointing back to it. But actually if you've got very low budgets, and when we talk about budgets, we're not just talking money, we're probably talking time as well because we're busy running businesses, creating content is not the easiest thing to do. And this is why I think there's a over focus on hub content, constantly getting stuff out there and there's less of a focus on hero content. And just to explain what hero content is, hero content is the stuff that grabs people's attention, it gets broader interest and it might get people coming back again and again. The examples that are given are quite often emotive ones. So if you think of John Lewis, their annual TV ad, their Christmas ad is very hero content for them. But actually it can be a lot simpler than that. So for us we have this one SEO tools comparison report and it's a piece of content we update twice a year. It's a very in depth piece of content. It's got reviews of 12 different tools and those sorts of things. But it's very much a hero piece of content. We don't just do it and then forget about it. It's updated and it drives thousands of visits a month through to the website. So actually one or two really good bits of hero content can be incredibly powerful over the long term. And there's quite a few bloggers that have done this. They've done your complete guide to blogging, which is a big investment in time to do it, but actually once it's done it will drive traffic.
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Or your complete guide to QR codes, which is true actually from mentioning, but.
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I had to get it in there. It's interesting. So Kieran, a number of years ago wrote this complete guide to QR codes and how to get your contact details into a QR code as well. And it still drives traffic to this day we have a very small piece of content on the website which is how to create a pre written tweet button. Basically how do you create a button on your website? Someone clicks on, writes a tweet for you? We wrote it three years ago, four years ago. Now it still drives hundreds of visits every month. So doing these kind of hero pieces can be really effective and actually when you've done that, you can talk about them reasonably regularly as well through social media.
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So I think that's A really interesting model. But if you're on a low budget or zero budget, I'd encourage all of you to take one step back from that. Because actually, where a lot of campaigns go wrong, particularly content marketing, we're all desperate to push as much content out there because some of it will stick. Right. And, you know, I go into some businesses and you sort of get talking to them about what their digital marketing strategy is, and they don't quite say it, but they almost might as well say, well, our digital marketing strategy is Facebook. No, no, Facebook is a platform. It's not a digital marketing strategy. It's not just somewhere you go to get as many possible people to look at random untargeted things. So actually, one of the biggest tricks really is to really identify who is your market, who is your audience. And you'll find lots of articles online that'll help you with creating Personas and profiles. Take note of those and really focus on that. Because actually, if you're on a low budget or zero budget, you short on time and you're sort of short on money. It's not a question of pushing out vast amounts of content to reach everybody. You want to reach specific people who are going to buy.
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Right? Exactly. I mean, what we did with this is we went off and identified we really creating this content. But do we know who our audience are? And we split off into three key Personas. So one Persona, for example, is a loan marketer or a business owner. They don't have a team around them. They're trying to kind of get this stuff done. We've got people that are marketers or digital marketers or marketing managers, but they have teams of people they want to upskill. And then thirdly, we've got these kind of learning managers who don't know anything about marketing or digital marketing either. They really care about it, but they're the people that are spending the most money on our thing. And we need very different content for those three people. So by identifying that audience, understanding what their objectives are, I can look at their user journey and say, what bits of content can I put in the website that are going to help them along the journey?
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I feel a spontaneous fishing analogy about to erupt.
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How good?
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I love fishing, everybody, but I'm not very good at it. But the fishing analogy is that if you're going to go fishing, you need to know what fish you're going to catch. If I just go out and go, I'm going to go catch fish, and I don't know what type of fish I'm going to catch, then I'm not going to be very successful. I'm not going to be in the right place, I'm not going to have the right bait. It's just going to be a disaster. But if I know the type of fish that I'm after, then I can work out where they hang out and what they like to eat and, and how they do stuff and make sure I'm in the right place at the right time. And that's really what marketing Personas is all about, really. It's about targeting.
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Yeah, great.
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Yeah, you heard it here first, people.
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If you've ever seen Cloudy of a Chart to Meatballs, if you've got kids and you've seen the film, the dad in that film tries to speak to his son in fishing metaphors the whole way through and he can't understand anything about it. So I feel a bit like that at the moment. This whole thing of understanding your audience is essential. What I'd also say with this as well, this whole budget thing, we've been pondering this a bit at the moment and that's that we spend loads of money on pay per click and Facebook campaigns and so on as well. And I did a bit of analysis and that's all the money we were spending. Looked where our traffic was coming from, the quality of the traffic. And what I actually realized is that we're publishing loads of content. What we're not really doing is spending enough time on two key areas. One is the kind of link building, but I don't mean this in terms of emailing people and saying, can we have a link from your website please? It's really the influencer outreach side of things. And what I mean is that if you engage with people one to one and you actually build real world relationships, there is a greater likelihood, especially if you target it specifically, of them pointing back to your website or blogging about some of your content or something else. So actually after all this effort of doing all these different things, what we've realized is one of the most positive things we can do, which is absolutely obvious if you're, you know, if you take a step back is, is that build one to one relationships, which is work out who are the existing bloggers, who are the influencers in my particular market that I might be able to engage with and get them to talk about my stuff or link back to me or something else like that as well. So for example, you can use a great tool like Clear, so K L E A R dot com. And it'll be in the show Notes as normal on targetinternet.com that will allow you to put a particular topic in and it will tell you who the influencers are. Now, my general advice of this as well is don't go for the people that are world famous for this particular topic. So if I go off and go, right, who are the influencers about digital marketing? And I might come up with Avinash Koushik, who talks about this stuff, or Ran Fishkin from Moz or something like that.
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Matt Cutts.
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Right, okay. These kind of people, now, they are massively influential, really smart, really nice people, actually really friendly and responsive. But they're so busy and they're saying, bob, by the request. It's kind of unlikely. I mean, you might be able to build it up, but it's kind of unlikely that they're going to directly start linking through to your website and so on. But there's probably people of slightly less influence that still are really important and have good audiences that might better help you out as well. So our experiences, reaching out to people, asking them questions, debating things with them, interviewing them for the podcast, all those kind of things can really help. And those are the kind of people that are more likely to actually link through to your content from that point of view as well. The other thing that we do, which might sound slightly cynical, but I think it isn't, is that we have a csr, corporate social responsibility approach, and this can work for a tiny business as well. Are there any charities, are there any good causes you can help out? Whatever service you're offering, do it for free, one of those good causes. And in exchange to say, can you link back from your website to ours and just point us. Actually, it's a good value exchange for both people. They're getting some services, not costing you any direct cash, but actually that's going to help build up the link through to your website and just get some social mentions as well. Increasingly, we're seeing in Google, the amount of people talking about your stuff is increasingly important. So you do want to drive that and you need some key content. But rather than trying to push every five minutes, I would really focus on some hero content. What's the one or two pieces of stuff you could create that would be really useful for your target audience? The other thing that tends to happen in these situations is you're starting from kind of zero. So if I open a Twitter account, I haven't got any followers, so therefore, when I do post stuff, I'm not going to get that much traffic from it. So you might think, well, every time I'm creating a piece of content I'm tweeting about and getting two visits to the website. Is it really all the effort of writing the blog? What you can do is do content curation. So if you identify your audience, you see they have particular problems and you then are curating the content around those issues. So that might be small business owners, what challenges do they face? And what I mean, creating the content is finding relevant news sources and then tweeting about it and saying this was useful, this is interesting, what do you think about this? And by doing that, you're not driving traffic back to your own website, but what you are doing is building an audience because you're providing value, because you're filtering the news for them. That means over a period of time you'll actually find that you've built that audience. When you do tweet something, you're actually going to get more people coming through. The tool I use is Feedly. So Feedly allows me to find useful news sources on a particular topic. And because I also use hootsuite, so I use hootsuite for managing my social media, I in Feedly can then post it through to hootsuite, but I can schedule it so I can sit down for 20 minutes in the morning, find five interesting news stories and I can auto schedule them to go out through the day. So I can kind of put this on semi autopilot. I'm not just throwing out news though, I am filtering it. I'm adding value in some way that builds me an audience and therefore I can then drive up the number of people that I'm speaking to over a period of time.
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It's amazing how quickly you can get into conversations with people, look for opportunities on that. It's very often people will maybe retweet or ask you a question back or comment on something that you've written, engage, have a two way conversation. And actually I've made really good friends that way. It's quite crazy how quickly that level of trust and camaraderie builds up when you work on something like that. Because it's kind of a mutual, generous, giving.
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Yeah, well, let me give you an example now. So we always ask people what they'd like us to talk about and so on as well. And I noticed there are certain people that always retweet our stuff and share it and come back and give us comments. So Sean Greentree, who is someone that's Followed us on Twitter for a while and has always been a big fan of the podcast. Very kindly retweets and shares our stuff, which means I'm a lot more inclined to retweet his stuff as well. So there's a bit of a mutual benefit. So if you're listening, Sean, thank you very much for all the kind of help.
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I've never met Sean Greetry, but, you know, he regularly comes up in my Twitter feed and when he does, I feel a little warm glow.
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Right, there you go.
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You do that for us, Shaun.
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It's great.
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It's great.
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That's quite slightly disturbing. But the reality is that it is a one to one relationship and I think that's the key thing. And we kind of forget this when we're doing social. So what's important is that actually you do build those relationships with both influencers. Those people have access to an audience, but also advocates, people that say nice stuff about you, because those people that are advocates are more likely to share your content and engage with you as well. So think about hygiene content, the stuff you have to have, but do it well. Hub content, what you can get out regularly, but what you probably want to focus on more is a bit of hero content. Just one or two pieces of content that are really going to get people coming back to you again and again. Build your audience through content curation and so that influence outreach. And then you can start. When you've built up the leads that are coming in, make sure you've got analytics running in the background. So that's set up because even if you're not using it that much initially, you've got the data building up in the background. The one thing you should have set up in analytics is goals. And that, generally Speaking, in a B2B situation is somebody filling in a form which is going to be a destination goal. So you go in and you set your thank you page as a destination goal, which basically says, thank you for filling in our form. We'll be in contact with you shortly. You then can see where people have come from, how they've traveled through your website and how they end up doing the things you want them to do. And that will just arm you for the future so you can start to analyze and iterate. But before you get to that stage, you obviously need to build some traffic. And that's where the hero content is going to come in.
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And it's one of my pet peeves. A lot of designers out there, when they set you up with a website, they'll set up forms that just have a JavaScript text pops up on the screen and it's really hard to track that if you're setting up your own analytics. So always insist that they take you through to a dedicated thank you thank you page so you can track those goals.
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So we hope it's given you a good starting point. Rick, any more questions? We're happy to kind of answer those as well and we'll speak to you all again on the Digital Marketing Podcast.
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Thanks for listening to another episode of the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by Target Internet. If you'd like to get more information on the show, get hold of back issues of this podcast, or get details on any of the links we mentioned, please visit our website at www.targetinternet.com. if you've enjoyed the show, we would love to read your feedback. Please rate us in itunes or even better write us a review. Or if you have any questions, please get in touch. We'd love to help.