If you are reading this blog, it’s probably because you want to get more from the internet. You may want a higher ROI for the time you spend optimizing your digital presence.

Now, let’s take a look at what you can do right now to begin your journey

How To Shine Online

There are many different reasons an individual or brand may want to improve their digital presence. Being online helps build your brand, drive traffic to your website, and generate leads. Below, we’ve outlined the basics of digital marketing to help you find success online.

1. Know Your “Why”

What I mean by that is, know your mission, vision, and values. This may not sound like part of digital marketing, but as a B Corp, we believe in ethical marketing. That means no black hat SEO or false advertising. To avoid that, it is important to state your mission, vision, and values.
The first step is to write your mission statement, define your values, and understand your vision. Once that is done, you can strategize and understand how you will make your vision a reality while working by your values.

2. Know Your Audience

To market and shine online, you must know your audience. Posting content without knowing who you are speaking to will make success a lot harder. It’s like a game of catch. Your goal is for the ball to be caught. If you throw it without knowing who you are throwing to or looking at, your ball will end up on the ground. But if you know who you are throwing the ball to, there is a higher chance it will be caught.

In marketing, you want your content to be received and interacted with. So you need to know who you are “throwing” your content to and target them. To do that, you need to make buyer personas.

Buyer personas are fictional characters that represent different audiences. They should include:

• Name, and background. Something to make them come to life.

• Demographics, such as age, marital status, race, and gender.

• Technographics. Because you are reaching them digitally, you need to know how they interact with the internet.

• Identifiers and personality. Are they decision-makers? Active or passive?

• Goals: what are their desired outcomes from their interaction with you?

• Challenges: why do they need you?

• And solutions: what you will provide them to meet their needs.

Make sure you know your personas well. Every piece of content you post should be aimed at them.

3. Solidify Your Branding

Your brand is what will help you build your audience. It’s what will make you stand out from your competitors so it needs to be memorable. When you build your brand keep in mind your:

• Logo

• Brand messaging which includes your tone and voice

• Colors

• Fonts

Branding is fun, but can be challenging and requires some big decisions. Make sure you consult with people outside of your business on your brand to get a sense of how it is perceived.

4. Your Digital Home

People get acquainted with your brand on your website. That’s where they gather all the information they may need and where they will convert. There are many different components of a website. You need visuals, content, a web hosting service, and more! You can do steps 1, 2, and 3 without hiring someone, but will definitely need to collaborate with some friends. Building your website will probably require an expert to help you set it up.

That doesn’t mean you don’t get to choose how it will look or if you can edit going forward. It means someone will make sure it’s safe, secure, and user friendly. Plus, it’s always good to get feedback from an outsider.

5. SEO

SEO stands for search engine optimization, something digital marketers are well acquainted with but may be foreign to others. It is the practice of optimizing your website to make it appear on the first page of Google search results.

Keywords are the most important thing to know for SEO. If you are an organic produce delivery company, you want your site to appear when someone searches “organic produce delivery” on Google. “Organic produce delivery” is the keyword. To appear, your site needs to be optimized for that keyword. That means your keyword needs to appear in a few places on the page you are optimizing for that word:

• URL

• Title

• Metadata and title tag

• Organically throughout your body content

For more on keywords and SEO, check out this blog.

6. Blogging

Blogs are a great way to improve your SEO and increase your reach. The more content you have, the more opportunities you have to be found
The first step to blogging is creating an editorial calendar. To make your own, check out our blog all about creating editorial calendars.

7. Email Marketing

Email marketing will help keep you top of mind. Over email, you can send deals and information directly to someone’s inbox. Plus, if someone takes the time to sign up for your newsletter, they are interested in you
When starting a newsletter, you need to know the purpose. Usually, it’s to get sales. Work backward from your newsletter goal to how the content will support it.

8. Social Media

Social media is where you can get really creative and engage with your audience. There are also millions of people on social media who check it daily, so there are lots of potential clients.

In order to shine on social media, you need to have a strong strategy that will keep people engaged. That means you need to:

• Post consistently

• Post a variety of content

• Give your audience a reason to engage with you

Takeaways

These 8 tips are starting points. There is so much more to learn such as analytics, creating sustainable strategies, and more technical stuff, like UTM links. But before you can get there, you need to understand the basics of digital marketing.

To take the next step, sign up for our Shine Online course. It will give you the resources you need to up your digital game. For example, when you start building your editorial calendar, there is a template for you to work with.

Sign up here and let us know what you think!