How to Prioritize your Digital Marketing Efforts
Should I focus on my blog or social media channels? Do I need to prioritize my SEO efforts or my email marketing content? What's most important? What should I tackle first?
Does any of this sound familiar?
It's ok, we've all been there!
There are SO many digital marketing tactics to choose from and SO many things you feel like you "should" be doing. (Side note: I have a personal goal to stop using that word but I feel like it's warranted to hammer home my point here.) It can feel overwhelming and intimidating when you don't know exactly where to spend your time - especially since we never seem to have enough of it as solopreneurs and small business owners, right?
So, how do you figure out which thing to focus on first? What takes priority and what can wait?
My advice is to think of your efforts in terms of a marketing funnel. Once you know what part of the marketing funnel your tactic is addressing, then you can set a goal for it and THEN you can prioritize each initiative depending on the current needs of your business.
Here's my basic description of the marketing funnel:
The wide part, at the top, is where you are bringing in people to learn about you. They don't know about your business or offerings until they enter the first part of your funnel. How do they learn about you to get into this funnel? Well, it can be in a number of ways - word of mouth, Google search, social media post or advertisement, article published by a third party, webinar, and the list goes on. Goals at this stage of the funnel are often related to impressions, clicks, and website visits. This shows that the person saw your information and maybe took a step (like clicking a link to your website) to learn a little bit more.
The middle part of the funnel is where people already know about you but you want to lead them down a path to convert them to become a customer. This middle section can contain many different initiatives but for simplicity's sake, let's just say that it's converting on a landing page (by completing a form with their contact information in exchange for a free downloadable offer) and then receiving steady email content from you over time. The goal is to stay in front of them (in a non-annoying and value-added way) so that when they are in the market for what you offer, your name comes to mind and they take yet another step to learn more and, ultimately, become a customer. (End funnel.)
So let's say you really want to tackle SEO (search engine optimization) and also work on your email nurture sequence. How do you decide where to start? Well, where do you currently stand with those efforts and what would you want to accomplish with each? For SEO, the goal would be to get more people finding your website for relevant search terms. You'd measure this based on Google Analytics data points like visitors and new users. Now ask yourself - do you need more visitors to your website? Are you getting enough traffic already? Do you feel like people are easily finding you? This will help you determine how much of a priority SEO needs to be.
When it comes to your email marketing, what does your current list size look like? Do you have 100-200 people who are highly engaged? Do you have thousands of people with mediocre engagement? If your list size is minimal (or non-existent), then prioritizing email marketing might not make the most sense for you right now. What you need to focus on first is building your list. This can be done by creating more downloadable offers on your site, boosting your SEO and other similar tactics that will bring people to enter your funnel so that THEN you can build out your email marketing efforts to nurture them down the funnel.
By thinking in terms of which marketing tactic falls within each stage of the marketing funnel, you can better determine what thing to tackle first. Then you'll be working more strategically and better position yourself to be building a highly functioning marketing system that enables you to work smarter and not harder on your digital marketing efforts.
Hear more on this topic in the video below!