As a digital marketing consultant, I was wondering how to come up with an efficient, workable template for practicing professionals (PP) like CAs, Architects, Interior Designers, etc for marketing their skills in the digital world! And that too without any financial commitment including those Digital Ads, Google, and Facebook, etc.
After much tweaking, I almost found the recipe for the same. And here I am sharing how you could actually do it yourself if you are a PP and really want to go ahead of the competition! Who doesn’t want to attract that highest paying client around the corner or even far away from you?
The catch here is how to impress him/her with your skill or rather professional achievements more so because either you don’t have enough time, or you don’t have the necessary technical know-how or maybe you aren’t fully aware of the power of digital media and technology!
The power of digital media and technology
This topic must have been covered millions of time but it is important to highlight here that ever since the existence of the human race it has been never been connected what it is today!
That means the immense possibility of promoting your skills but here lies the problem as well. Along comes so much noise that it is difficult at times to connect with the right audience at the right time.
That doesn’t mean that it is not possible to filter that noise. It is all about, choosing the right technology and platform, creating an efficient template and addressing the target audience’s needs, and you will get the traction!
So now I have given you a glimpse of what needs to be done let me tell you exactly what I have done for a PP.
1. Defining the target audience (or customer) and finding their requirements!
This can also be called as “goal setting”. See unless their digital behavior, issues, the mindset of your core customer is not well defined, no strategy will work.
So I will suggest you please jot down your target audience. Their:
- Demographics
- Likes and dislikes
- Digital behavior
- Language
So how it helps is by categorizing these it will be easier for you to decide which are the digital platforms and technology your target customer is more active upon.
Also, you will be sure that the kind of content you are going to create for the target audience, it is going to serve its purpose!
2. Map and prioritize the digital medium as per your audience categories:
Create an excel sheet where-in you map the target audience with their key pain point areas and start writing blogs in those areas. This would be easier for you as you are an experienced professional. Include case-study as and when required
For eg. if you are a dental consultant and you have your target audience as 40% elderly, 20% kids and 10% ladies (for cosmetic purpose) you can create a template as shown below.
Invest time in quality research, goto Ubersuggest by Niel Patel and look into what people are asking in your country. Go to answer the public website, and look for what people are searching for!
Search for your local competitors using google maps
This is very important as a topic relevant to India might not be the same as fro the US.
Try to fill the cells with quality well researched and impactful blog titles!
3. Start creating content as content is the king!
Please understand unless you create quality content for your potential customer for free you can’t gain traction. So this is very important and if planned well this will be smooth sailing in the long run. Like us who are creating almost 5 articles per week in coordination.
Use free Google tools such as docs, sheets and even forms to streamline and make your process efficient. There are several other tools also but that would be a topic of detailed discussion in some other blog!
For creating a quality blog in an hour, breakdown a topic into subtopic. For sub-topics, use google auto-suggest and also the keywords that appear at the bottom of the page during a search result.
Once you break down a topic in sub-topics, consider writing every sub-topic independently and concisely. That would make your life easier!
But please keep in mind that even after creating a quality blog you need to do on-page SEO which is a detailed topic in itself. However, if you want to learn more please contact us for details!
4. Publish your content over a well designed and mobile-optimized website!
Be regular in creating and publishing the content on your digital asset (website). Also, make sure that the website is optimized and is loaded with the latest features and functionalities like sharing, email subscriptions and google API for google business reviews.
Although to rank your content higher on Google searches so that you get more traffic you need to do off-page SEO using Quora and other platforms!
You should understand that from any search result on google, 70-80% of the traffic is being taken by results appearing between 1-3.
Although off-page Seo is very important I would not like to overemphasize it at this juncture as it can be taken care of later and also gradually.
5. Create (if not created) and integrate all your social media platforms
With today’s digital technology you need not publish your content on each social media platform independently but what you would essentially want to do or rather should do is to automate that process.
So what I would suggest is to make your website as your base platform and from there create a post for every other social media platform.
This would not only say your time, energy but also make your posts standardized.
Although the social media platforms which you will be going to choose will be based upon your target audience, still platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram should never be missed!
Use Google my business which is a free tool to enlist you and integrate it into the website
As it is a google product, we can give it a higher weightage when we are considering it in SEO perspective. Moreso because it provides a free review option, utilizes it over your website as testimonials. There are (mostly) paid plugin which can be considered for this.
6. Keep a track of the traffic, and queries from various social media platforms
It is very important to keep track of all the activities and happenings on social media and website. I would recommend installing all the tools required (like Google Analytics and WordPress etc) to analyze the data. This would come handy as you can be connected and prompt in any action that would be required on your part!
7. Redesign and tweak your strategy as per the feedback from various platforms
It is very important that you should invest your time and energy in those platforms from where you are getting results (i.e. traffic or page visits, or queries)! In digital marketing, if you are getting results (howsoever small) try to build that channel as your primary channel. Try to build your reputation as a goto professional. By this, I don’t mean that you should start to offer everything for free, but you should at least give them a glimpse of what you can offer, once they are your client. So that they will be far more confident and comfortable having a professional relationship with you. You can also redirect them to some of your blogs which you have already created in which you have covered similar topics. That is a good idea!
Conclusion
So, all in all, we have seen that creating a digital presence, a digital brand and a digital identity is of utmost importance. We have seen how we can create all these with the investment of our quality time.
So we need to understand that creating a digital ecosystem is not that difficult but it’s a process that requires time, patience and a strategy!
We at “Digitechnosolutions” have most of these implemented for clients who are utilizing our strategy and templates for their benefit.