Digital Marketing For Small Businesses – Infrastructure and Management

Building Your Digital Marketing Infrastructure

For the most part you’ll already have the constituent parts of a modern-day marketing campaign.  Things like your website, a Facebook or Linkedin Page, perhaps some email marketing or a small amount of paid media in select placements. You’ll have all the tools needed in digital marketing for small businesses. But are all of these channels speaking to your website correctly? Can you tell if your conversions are coming from new clients or return clients? Or maybe it’s about making sure that your objectives are actually made into goals via your website’s Google Analytics account. Creating this infrastructure is super important. 

Just like in part one, unless you have clearly defined goals and understand how those goals relate to online marketing, all of the data in the world will be of no benefit to you. Knowing what your goals are allows your digital marketing agency to align them in all of your social and digital channels to your website. Your website analytics will then be able to guide you on where things are working, where they could be better and where you should stop wasting your time and money. 

It’s hard to appreciate the work that goes into creating a good digital marketing for small businesses infrastructure. It can involve several people, using several platforms; all with unique taks, permissions and functionality. Workflows need to be established so that everyone is working smart instead of hard. Content calendars and ad accounts need to reflect a new coordinated way of marketing your business. A couple of tools to consider are below: 

• Google Analytics
  • Account (company)
    • Properties (website)
      • Users (employees; agency)
• Hootsuite 
  • Account (company)
    • Properties (social networks)
      • Users (employees; agency)
• Google Drive
  • Account (company)
    • Properties (folders)
      • Users (employees; agency)
• Content Calendar
  • Account (company)
    • Campaigns (content)
      • Users (employees; agency)

There are other tools out there that complete these tasks well. This is just for guidance. 

Producing Your Content and Paid Media Calendar

As briefly discussed above, your new content calendar will include all of the stuff that you’re going to produce for the next few weeks of the month. Blog posts, email blasts, video campaigns, normal organic content etc. It’s all gotta be planned out so that your reach and engagement is the best it can be. The further along you can plan, the better. You don’t have to have all of the content produced on day one, just a clear understanding of when it should be due and published. Like, just knowing you need to write a blog post about the festival in 3 months, does not mean that it needs to be written this week. Just know that it’s part of the campaign and that it will be used in several different ways. This is part of the planning process and will help you to road map your marketing efforts and keep you focused. 

The content calendar is going to take a fair amount of effort. It could be a company culture change at the start. Or it might just be a small pivot and reorganisation of sorts. It will be a big collaborative effort between you, your employees and your agency. Everyone will have input and rely on others to ‘put it all together”. The content calendar should also be a living and breathing document. Something that can be changed immediately to reflect changes in the business or new opportunities. 

The big scary part is when you decide what content / media you are going to use in your paid media campaigns. This also goes into the content calendar for planning purposes. Ad copy, videos; anything that you want to pay for people to engage with should be planned and put into your content calendar. Through metrics and analytics you’ll see organic content that does well and be able to incorporate that into your paid media budgets as well. 

Digital Marketing Monitoring and Measuring 

You’ve now got an amazing digital marketing for small businesses infrastructure in place!  Your team members are super excited about all of the new business that should be generated by your efforts. If your agency is doing their jobs well enough, they will be reporting back to you at various intervals. Don’t let them firehose you with data! In part one you outlined your objective and your goals. Your marketing agency should provide you with data that correctly measure your overall objectives and goals. Did you want to increase your site page views per session? Great, make sure you’re tracking this correctly and your agency is providing the reasons this is or isn’t driving the results you want.  

Your team and your agency should be looking at analytics daily; from the previous day, the previous week, month, quarter and year. Below is an outline of what your agency should look for and what you should expect in data terms to understand your success. 

• Daily – Looking back on the previous day. Compare day-to-day to understand trends.
  • Comments, likes, shares
• Weekly – Looking back on the previous week. Compare week-to-week to understand trends. 
  • Reach, engagement, resonance
• Monthly – Looking back at the previous month. Compare to understand trends.
  • Campaign performances, ad spends and other paid media metrics
• Quarterly – Looking back at the previous quarter. Did you achieve your goals? 
  • Sales, revenue, ROAS, CPA, 

Ask for Meaningful Data

If your digital marketing agency is talking to you about how many page likes you got at a quarterly meeting, you’re working with the wrong agency. 

Make sure that the more granular the data, the smaller the data sets you compare. If you want a bigger picture, make your metrics more general. Get it? The longer the data period, the more top line the reports should be i.e. Sales, ROI, CPA, etc. 

Example: 

Weekly data reports: comments, likes, shares 

Monthly data reports: reach and engagement

Quarterly data reports: revenue and measurable ROIs

We can make sure that the next time you need digital marketing for small businesses you talk to the right people.