Smart Digital Marketing: Attract More Customers With Less Effort

Make your business work like a well-oiled sales machine with effective Local Digital Marketing

Any local Sunshine Coast business has a powerful – and highly cost-effective – tool at their disposal with Digital Marketing.

Smart Digital Marketing covers a wide range of tactics to help your business reach and connect with potential and existing customers. And for so many customers, jumping online when they need something is usually their first port of call.

A good Digital Marketing Agency can reduce your cost of acquisition

Digital Marketing is a broad topic and your business may not need to take advantage of all of the available strategies, depending on your goals and types of products and services. But it can be an incredibly cost-effective way of acquiring new customers and building loyal repeat business. Typical tactics involve search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing (SMM), content marketing, email marketing, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and affiliate marketing.

Go beyond an internet presence with strategic digital marketing

Digital Marketing can be a highly efficient and effective way to promote your brand, products, and services online, and reach more people who are interested in what you offer. It’s more than just having a website!

As a Sunshine Coast business owner, you can benefit from digital marketing in the following ways:

- Increase your visibility and awareness in your local area and beyond
- Build trust and credibility with your ideal customers
- Generate more leads and sales for your business
- Improve your customer satisfaction and loyalty
- Optimize your marketing performance and improve your return on investment (ROI)

But as we said above, not every strategy is required! At the very least, you’ll need a fast and light website, structured the right way to maximise conversions or calls, and then a comprehensive SEO plan.

Both of those are foundational needs – but the good thing is, they make everything else work far more efficiently. So, if you do start spending money of Google Ads, or Facebook advertising, your cost of acquisition will be lowered and your conversion rates maximised.

A well-organised site with effective SEO standing behind is your minimum entry point before you get serious about digital marketing campaigns.

If you’d like to talk to us about how well your current online presence is performing, then call or contact us to book in a free consultation.

Typical SEO and marketing terms a digital marketing company will use

Let’s expand on some of the terms used when it comes to crafting a cost-effective digital marketing plan, so you’re familiar with the language of online marketing.

- Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is the process of optimizing your website and content so that it ranks higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). This can help you attract more organic traffic to your website, which can lead to more leads and sales.
- Content Marketing. Content marketing involves creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined customer and drive profitable visitor actions. This can include blog posts, articles, infographics, videos, and e-books.
- Social Media Marketing. Social media marketing uses platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and even TikTok to engage your target audience and promote your products or services. This can be a great way to win over potential customers and drive traffic to your website or calls to your business.
- Email Marketing. Even in today’s socially organised world, email marketing stands tall as one of the least expensive methods to stay in touch with existing customers or tempt new ones with promotional offerings and helpful information. You’ll want to build a subscriber base of people who have opted in to receive your messages, as well as make a plan to keep everyone on your list warm. Email marketing can be a complex strategy but the payoff is excellent. We have inhouse email marketing experts ready to help you get started today!
- Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising. PPC advertising means you incur a fee each time someone clicks on your ad (whether on Google, Facebook, Instagram etc). This can be one of the fastest ways to reach your customers quickly and efficiently, but it can quickly drain the budget if not set up correctly and fine-tuned to keep your Return on Investment (ROI) in the black. We would recommend using a specialised agency if you are ready to spend a significant amount every month on PPC advertising.

Now let’s look at each of these Digital Marketing strategies in a little more depth…

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Future proof your online presence

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your website’s ranking and visibility on search engines, such as Google or Bing, for relevant keywords and phrases that your customers use to find your products or services. For example, if you are an electrician in the Sunshine Coast, you might want to rank for keywords like “electrician Sunshine Coast”, “best sparky Sunshine Coast”, or “emergency electrician Sunshine Coast”.

SEO helps you to:

- Attract more traffic to your website. We call this organic traffic – or free traffic
- Reach customers who need exactly what you offer
- Increase your authority and reputation locally and in your specific area of expertise
- Boost your conversions and sales. This is the big one and often underestimated. Being consistently easy to find in the major search engines is no longer an option for modern businesses on the Sunshine Coast

How do we help with SEO?

Some of the work is about thinking outside of the box, some of it involves understanding your business and your customers inside-out, and some of it is highly technical backend work.

- After taking time to understand your business and ideal customers, we begin with keyword research. This means assessing and selecting the best keywords for your website and its content
- On-page SEO. This is a technical term for making sure your site is super-easy for Google (in particular) to understand exactly what it is about and how it fits into the marketplace. We do this by optimizing your website’s structure, content, and code for your keywords and customer experience
- Off-page SEO. Google loves popular websites and articles! So they look at sites in particular that have authoritative links pointing back to them. Off-page SEO involves activities such as building links and relationships with other websites and online platforms that help boost your website’s popularity and trustworthiness
- Technical SEO. This is where we work our magic behind the scenes, by making sure your site’s speed and security is top-notch, and that it is compatible with different devices (especially mobile!) and browsers

Effective SEO is an ongoing process that requires constant monitoring and updating. We use specialist tools and reporting to make sure we’re doing the best every day to keep you at the forefront of your customer’s minds.

Great Content Marketing is part of managing every interaction to surprise and delight

We think content marketing is an unusually bland name for such a powerful online tool. When we create and publish valuable, relevant, and engaging content, it attracts and engages your ideal audience, and with the clever use of a Call to Action (CTA), encourages them to take action. This type of content takes various formats, such as blogs, videos, podcasts, ebooks, infographics, case studies, testimonials, etc.

One other key element at play here: Google loves new and fresh content. They’re always looking for the best information to serve up on specific searches. For example, if your article called “Should Sunshine Coast homeowners upgrade their meter box to make room for EVs and other high-electrical power appliances?” comes at the top of the results – or is the ONLY local result… you’ll be the winning electrician!

Content marketing is an excellent strategy to:

- Showcase your expertise and knowledge in your field
- Provide useful information and solutions to your customers’ problems and needs
- Build trust and rapport with your customers and potential customers
- Generate more leads and sales for your business
- Improve your SEO and social media presence, as well as becoming known in your marketplace as a leader

Local content marketing does need a careful plan

We make sure that it will align with your business goals and resonate with your audience. This involves:

- Working with you to define your ideal customer, their pain points, interests, and preferences
- Creating a content calendar that outlines what, when, and where we publish your content
- Producing original and engaging content that matches your customer’s intent and expectations – as well as being properly targeted to already identified keywords and search terms
- Promoting and distributing your content across different channels, such as your website, email, social media, and online communities
- And of course, we assess and analyse the performance and impact of each piece, not only optimizing it, but using user feedback and behind the scenes reports to identify new opportunities

Generating Customer Reviews

With targeted Digital Marketing you can prompt your customers for reviews. This user-generated content is not just a persuasive way to convince prospective clients with great social proof, it’s another way to create incoming links and improve your SEO, Google PageRank and ranking in the SERPs.

Marry that with a top spot in the Google Map Box; a great website those customers can click through to that immediately satisfies their needs – and that’s the power of aligned digital marketing.

Word of Mouth

SEO content isn’t just generated by you or your digital marketing partners.

Help your customers share your wonderful services, products online, or give a shout out to your staff, and you’ll automatically gain great search engine juice from both backlinks and people clicking emails from friends.

This is often one of the best forms of sales copywriting – customer reviews sound natural, yet usually contain exactly the terms everyone is searching for.

When it’s well set up, increasing your word of mouth online can come at almost no cost.

Generating Referrals and Creating Loyalty

Almost a follow on from great word of mouth recommendations, smart digital marketers know that a referral, recommendation, or a repeat customer is the most cost-effective acquisition method.

By automating your referral programs (if your business lends itself to this) and incorporating loyalty programs (for example, in email follow ups), you can out-market the competition and win new and returning customers without spending money on ads.

It’s also much harder for your competitors to see what you’re doing behind the scenes…

When you’re looking for the best local digital marketing consultants, make sure you ask them how they can help with all these highly leveraged tactics!

Social Media Marketing means you have multiple touch points: “I See You Everywhere”

What is Social Media Marketing?

It is what we mean by using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok etc, to engage with your target customers and promote your brand, products, and services. Social media marketing can be a great help to:

- Increase your online visibility and business name recognition
- Build and nurture relationships with your existing and future customers
- Showcase your business’ personality and your staff
- Drive more traffic to your website, landing pages, and special offers
- Generate more leads and sales for your business
- Use as an extra channel for customer service and feedback

Your local social media marketing plans should be strategic

With social media, we know it’s easy to fall down unproductive rabbit holes by randomly posting and hoping for results! A well-structured plan means everyone’s use of time is maximised – and smart scheduling means you don’t need to be hovering over that “post” button, but you can be working on your business while your social media campaigns work tirelessly behind the scenes.

We can help you:

- Choose the best social media platforms that reach your customers most efficiently
- Create and optimize your social media profiles and pages
- Post relevant and engaging content that stimulates engagement and triggers user-sharing
- Connect with and respond to your followers and fans, and encourage user-generated content
- If it fits with your overall goals and strategies, we can run paid social media ads and campaigns to reach more people and boost your results

Targeted Email Marketing converts more customers, creates return business, and helps you grow

Email marketing is a great tool to engage existing and potential customers on a one-on-one basis. We treat anything that arrives in our inbox as very personal, so email marketing requires a deft marketing hand to avoid high unsubscribe or “mark as spam” rates.

But done well, and with appropriate frequency for your ideal customer base, the results can have a very high ROI.

With effective email digital marketing, you can:

- Build and grow an engaged and receptive list of subscribers and customers
- Easily deliver highly personalized and relevant messages to specific customer segments
- Nurture and educate your leads and prospects
- Increase your conversions and sales with targeted campaigns, seasonal offers
- Retain and delight your customers with friendly onboarding processes
- Increase your customer loyalty and referrals
- More easily quarantine your online marketing activities from nosy competitors! (But we’ll sign up for their lists so you can collect competitor intel)

Some of the key tasks we can do for you if you want to undertake email marketing is to develop a secure, permission-based and customer-centric approach that respects your audience’s privacy and preferences. This could include tasks such as:

- Creating a compelling lead magnet or incentive to entice your customers to join your email list
- Segmenting your email list based on your audience’s characteristics, behaviours, and interests (allowing for more precise email campaigns)
- Designing and writing catchy, captivating and persuasive email campaigns that delight customers and prospects
- Testing and optimizing email subject lines, content, and calls to action
- Tracking and measuring email open rates, click-through rates, and conversions, as well as improving your email marketing strategies as you mature

It all starts with an effective local web design and development plan

The last part of the puzzle when it comes to Digital Marketing is actually the first thing we always begin with. The ROI on your Digital Marketing campaigns improves dramatically when the foundation and structure work to support it 100%.

It’s key that your site shows to your visitors that they are in the right place.

We do that by designing and building a website structured to mirror your business, how you work, how you best like to attract customers, and most importantly, the types of customers you most want more of.

We will make sure that as soon as the site loads, they see “above the fold” exactly what they are looking for.

And that Google sees a well-organized site that is clear what it represents.

When you do all of that—we can always call it getting all your ducks in a row—then any Digital marketing will always perform better.

But if your site needs an overhaul (eg. It’s overly complicated, slow to load, isn’t easy to understand, or lacks visual appeal), we would strongly recommend focusing on that first, before spending dollars on local digital marketing.

Our aim is to help your marketing dollar stretch as far as possible!

To find out how we can help you skyrocket your online results, book an appointment today. We’d love to hear about your business goals.