Let’s start with a confession: I work for a marketing agency, and honestly, we’d love to help you! But with that out of the way, there are a number of things you can do by yourself to give your business at least a BEGINNING in the quest for an online presence. I’m going to give you 3 DIY Marketing Tips so that you can get started on your own. When your brand and business begins to take off, THEN you’ll want to get our help in order to keep building your brand, growing your social community, and bringing your message out to the people that most need to hear it. But for now, here’s what you can do on your own:
#1 Create Your Social Profiles.
This is an important step, which you can and SHOULD do yourself. Create your profile on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, G+ and Pinterest. Sure, there are many more, but for the DIY starter, you just want to make sure you’ve built good profiles on these giants. Use a good picture of yourself, fill in as much information as you possibly can, show your human side (your personality), and give links to your main website.
#2 Craft Your Brand Message.
You ought to take care of this before you involve an agency, so it’s definitely a MUST for the DIY Marketing beginner. Read my post about “The First Question of Branding” to find out the key to defining your core message. Even as you create your social profiles, you will want to reflect your core message across those different channels. So take the time to think it through and to tighten up your message. If you can get it down to a few key statements that reveal the unique value that your company brings, you’ll be in great shape to move on to my 3rd tip for DIY marketing…
#3 Construct a Content Marketing Strategy.
For a truly effective Content Marketing strategy that integrates your Social Media and your SEO efforts, you’ll eventually need some help from an experienced agency (I know one I can recommend, called Shift Digital Media). But in the DIY stage of your brand building, you need to cover the basics of a Content Marketing strategy by crafting your core message, identifying a small set of keywords that you can compete for, and then making sure that your content is relevant to that message and those keywords. Try to add 2 pieces of content each week to the blog page of your main website, and make sure you’ve optimized those pieces (whether content, images or video) around your keyword strategy and your core brand message. I know this part sounds a bit intimidating, but I believe most small start-ups will be able to give a decent start, on their own, to their online marketing project by just beginning their business blog.
Get Started on Your Own (then call us later)
There are some other things you can do on your own, but if you want a solid start, just focus on what I’ve laid out here. I hope your business really takes off quickly, and that soon you’ll come back and let us help you when you’ve moved beyond the DIY stage of building your company!
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