Digital Marketing... Simplified
Do You Want to INCREASE REVENUE?
if you’re the owner or a high-level manager of a small to medium-sized business, it’s a good bet that this is your primary operational goal.
NEWS FLASH: locals have gotten used to doing business online.
If you want to increase revenue in post-pandemic Hawaii (and we’re pretty sure you do) at least some of that revenue is probably going to have to be generated online. There are actually only 3 basic ways to do that:
This is how you get your website to magically pop up in the search listing after a user enters a search.
To achieve this, your site needs to be full of great (free) content, fast, optimally set up for search engines and easy for users to navigate. There are a multitude of ways to achieve this:
- Content (is King) – articles and web pages with consistent, high-quality, original content that answer user’s questions.
- On-page SEO – this is the technical side of the house, including: image compression, url naming, title tags, meta tags, header tags, image alt attributes, link structure, broken link checking, robots.txt file, sitemap and lots of other things.
- Local SEO – this is all about developing a strong presence on sites such as Yelp, TripAdvisor, Bing Places and Google My Business (Google Maps). It’s a good idea to regularly post to and update the information on these sites, especially the business name, address and phone number.
- External link building (getting backlinks from other sites, preferably within your industry or directly related).
- Regular website maintenance is also super-important since this impacts site speed, functionality and other performance items that impact the user experience (UX). This includes caching, updating plugins or removing unnecessary plugins as well as keeping the programming language and wordpress up to-date.
- Time – a strong organic web presence doesn’t happen right away. It can take years…
Organic is the “free” kind of social media.
It’s what you’re doing when you share or create a post on either your personal profile or business page and it’s the bulk of what you see out there on Facebook and other channels.
Because of the intermingling of personal and business content and the interactive way people use these platforms, regular posts (and the subsequent engagement with customers) offers you the ability to interact with your customers and potential customers in a way that was never possible until the advent of social media.
A lacking in this area can be a turnoff for some customers so most companies now accept the necessity for social media, even if they don’t like it.
Note: social media also impacts your SEO, since social sites are one of the primary traffic sources for your website.
This is the fastest way to get your business noticed online. There are 3 main types:
(Paid) Social Media Ads
Algorithm changes over the past few years have reduced the number of people who ever get to see your organic (unpaid) posts on these platforms. Obviously, the reason for this is to incentivize us to pay for more social media ads… and lots and lots of businesses are doing exactly that.
Why? Because social media advertising still works.
Facebook/Instagram ads give us the opportunity to significantly expand your audience beyond organic reach. These ads provide more space to deliver your message and also give you the ability to grow your brand by using pictures and video.
While other social channels (Twitter, LinkedIn, TicToc, YouTube, etc.) might be appropriate for your business, we usually recommend advertising on Facebook and Instagram because most of your customers are likely to be on those platforms.
Display “Banner” Ads
Display is the fastest-growing advertising medium worldwide. These are the ads that pop up on websites while you’re doing other things.
Display ads are versatile. They can be set to reach an extremely wide audience or to target a smaller, more select audience using machine learning. They can also be used to retarget your website visitors who weren’t ready to buy the first time.
Search Ads
This is foundational.
When people enter words or phrases into a search engine that relate (directly or indirectly) to your company, product or service, you want your website to show up among their list of possibilities.
These people are already aware that they have a problem and are actively looking for a solution. If you’ve chosen the right keywords for your ads, your business should be able to offer that solution.
Since these people are already “warmed-up” (aware of you, your product/service or at least that they have a problem that needs fixing), we generally include Google search ads as a recommendation for most businesses. There are other search engines, of course, and one or more might work well for your business, but Google is the big kid on the block with more than 80% of the search traffic market share.
The first 2 are “FREE”!
Hint: ain’t nothing for free.
As with everything in life, there are a few cons:
- A speedy, tuned-up website requires a certain amount of technical know-how.
- After you’ve written the articles for new web pages, it takes some design skill to format and lay out that copy on your site.
- Social media posts are shorter and easier, and the platforms do a lot of the work for you, but putting out a steady cadence of relevant, interesting and ORIGINAL posts to your social media channels is harder and more time-consuming than it may seem.
- There’s a hard cost if you need to hire someone to do these “free” things for you and a soft cost if you take the time and energy to do them yourself.
- Organic social and SEO are the long haul. It can take years to build up website domain authority and a social following. You’re also competing with the big boys who have lots of money to spend on professional SEOs, graphic designers, photographers/videographers and social media marketers.
The 3rd option: paid digital advertising provides a means to bridge the gap between the average, local company—with a slightly aged website and intermittent social media presence—and those powerhouse big boys. It gets you to the top of the search results and in front of a lot more eyeballs than organic. It can also put your message in front of people who aren’t even looking for you or thinking about what you do.
Oh, and BTW, paid advertising also boosts your web SEO and social media following by driving traffic to those platforms, giving you the proverbial tripple-whammy.
The downside, of course, is the “paid” part. Even before you pay the publishers (Google, Facebook, etc.) you’ll likely need to pay an employee, outside contractor or agency to create and manage the ad campaigns.
You could do this yourself, but effective digital advertising requires a number of specialized skill-sets (strategic planning, copywriting, web development, coding and ad account management, just to name a few). There can be a steep learning curve, depending on your existing level of knowledge in these areas. And, let’s face it—even after you or someone on your team takes the time to learn the skills, your ads aren’t likely to perform nearly as well as a professionally created and managed campaign, which means that you’ll be getting a much lower return on the money you’ll be paying to those publishers.
Digital advertising can be daunting even for professional marketers. We work every day with CMOs and marketing managers who know about marketing and advertising but are less than confident when it comes to digital.
So, what’s the best way to go?
Bottom Line: DIGITAL ADVERTISING WORKS—otherwise, Google and Facebook wouldn’t be the monsters that they are.
After years of marketing businesses across Hawaii and across industries, we’ve developed a system of digital advertising that is data-driven, methodical and designed to:
- Make more people aware of your brand.
- Identify the people most likely to be interested in you and your product or service.
- Find the right combination of words, images and offerings that will appeal to those people.
- Disseminate that message to the right people at the right time using the right medium.
- Generate a positive return on your investment.
For most small to medium-sized, local companies, this strategy is a layered approach, with website landing pages to supplement the main site and email marketing to generate customer lists, cultivate leads and develop site/social media content over time. Traffic into the marketing funnel is generated by fully-managed digital ads campaigns focusing on the 3 leading platforms:
92% search market share*
The Google Display Network reaches most of the internet, while Search Network ads get your website to the top of the search engine results page.
60% social market share*
3 million organizations have a businesses page.
15% social market share*
Growing popularity, younger demographic.
*Source: Statista 2021
this is not an automated service
Our team has been marketing companies and managing digital advertising campaigns in Hawaii since 2016. Our system for digital marketing was developed over time through study, testing and data analysis by real people and refined with feedback from our clients. Software AI can’t do this… at least not yet.
If your main goal is revenue (and it probably is) then that means we have to make you more money than we cost! We work with some of the largest brands in Hawaii for 1 reason: we are able to repeatedly and continually do exactly that.
We can have you hitting your revenue goals in as little as 3 weeks or less.
Is Your Business Ready for a Shot in the Arm?
Ready to Increase Revenue?
Supporting small business in Hawaii is one of our core values
We used to get calls all the time from business owners who didn’t have the budget to work with an agency or wanted to advertise but were missing some basic, foundational items that would have drastically reduced the performance of their ads.
At first, we weren’t able to help many of them. But, as we grew and our processes became more efficient, we were able to develop service packages specifically designed for local small business owners who aren’t quite ready for digital advertising.
Ads aren’t the only way to expand your online presence!
Our small business packages were created to put a check in the box on all those must-haves and to get your business ready for a digital advertising growth strategy in the near future.
If you’re not sure, here’s a handy-dandy form to help you out:
