A New Hampshire internet marketing service agency

First - consider your business goals.

Before even beginning to think about what internet marketing channel you want to leverage, you should be basing the foundation of your decisions in the goals of your business.

If you can't instantly pinpoint the primary goals of your business, then that's where you should start - examining your business, where it is and where you'd like it to go.

Are you building a new business with a goal of growing awareness? Maybe your systems are in order and you're ready to focus on revenue? Or perhaps you're launching a new service or product line.

You might not even be looking to grow your revenue, but instead trying to optimize your business processes so that you can operate your business more seamlessly.

There are some introspective questions that you can ask yourself (and your team members) that may help you to better establish your business and internet marketing goals:

• Why are we doing this business?
• Why are we the people to do it?
• Why is now the time to start?
• Who is it for?
• What makes us different?
• What do we need to do today, to make sure that we can keep doing the things we want to do tomorrow?

You may be thinking - what's with the deep questions? We just want to get started with digital marketing.

We understand, and because we don't want to waste your time it's important to come into the process having answers to the above questions.

Like most things in life, online marketing tactics take time. They take time to get started. They take time to perfect and optimize to the point of generating new customers consistently.

They require a level of commitment, consistency and faithfulness. Before you start with digital marketing, you'll want to make sure you're committed to the investment you're making. Ultimately, we believe that you'll be happier in the long run having taken the time to prepare and come into the process with a consideration of your business goals.

Second - define your audience.

Now that you have a clear understanding of your business goals - where your company is and where it's going - you need to evaluate your audience as well prior to implementing a successful internet marketing program.

This is important because learning more about who your customer is will give you a better idea of how to reach them. Where they spend their time, what they search for, where they are before being your customer.

If you started digital marketing without having a strong understanding of who your target audience is, your marketing messaging may end up being wasted on an audience that is irrelevant to your product or service.

A few basic questions that you can ask yourself as you seek to study your audience includes:

• What demographics are you targeting? What is your ideal customer's age, gender, marital status, education, income, etc.
• Where does your target audience live? Do they mostly reside in a certain town or zip code?
• What industry does your target audience work in? If selling a product or service to another business, what industries could use it?
• What challenges does your target audience experience? Your product ideally benefits its customer, but in what way? Does it solve a challenge or obstacle?
• Who makes the purchasing decision? A next-level approach isn't just determine who your target audience is, but who is it that actually makes the purchasing decision? They are actually your real target audience.

You can see now that if you targeted an adult male in his 50s living in zip code 12345, but you sold a product or service that wasn't even available where he lived, then your marketing efforts and money would be completely wasted.

Third - identify an online marketing strategy.

Now that you've determined where your business is and where it wants to go (goals), and who it is that you need to sell your product or service to, you can finally, and with wisdom, determine your digital marketing plan.

This is where you can review what marketing tactics are available to you, and how well they fit to your situation and needs.

What you're looking for is an ideal fit of a marketing tactic, a business goal and your target audience.

For example, let's say that you run a food manufacturing business and your company just created a new product that revolutionizes how chicken gets cooked in fast food restaurants.

You've determined that your business goals are to get exposure for your new product ASAP and you have a decent-sized budget set aside for whatever it will take to get this done.

Your target audience is fast food restaurants or, better yet, operations managers and owners of fast food restaurants. So who are these individuals and how we can reach them?

After some research, we've determined that in their work days they spend a lot of time researching the restaurant industry and learning about best practices and efficient operations, and buying supplies for their restaurants.

In this day and age, we know that a lot of research is done online via Google search and even YouTube, but we want to get results right away in terms of interested traffic and sales of our new product. We determine that paying for Google ads in Google search and its display network which includes YouTube is a good place to start. We don't have to wait for search engine optimization to propagate, we can just pay a certain amount of money per day and get our ads serving to quality prospects immediately.

We go even a step further and research keywords and keyphrases to find and put our budget toward the highest-converting search queries.

Now, in review, would it make sense for this company to make social media a part of its internet marketing strategy? Probably not. Social media wouldn't provide the ideal platform to advertise to the target audience participants, and taking the time to build a gathering of followers on social media wouldn't fit the current business goals.

Let's consider a different scenario - let's say that you're the marketing manager for a hotel in a nice area of the country where tourists like to come and vacation.

Your current business situation is that your hotel is well-settled and has been around for a while. You've made some improvements but really you're just trying to consistently maximize your occupancy.

Your target audience is immediately different from the above scenario in that you're targeting consumers and not businesses. So, who are your consumers? People that like to travel and explore. Maybe families that are taking a week long summer vacation. People that are trying to get away from their day-to-day lives for a bit and relax.

What digital marketing tactic or mix of tactics make sense in this scenario?

Google advertising - sure. It's safe to assume that consumers are going to Google to search for hotels to stay at in the area. Maybe social media? Maybe if you can fill other people's social media feeds with thoughts of relaxation and vacation, and that your hotel is the best one in the area to stay at, that would probably be worth the time investment.

Perhaps content marketing? You could create quality content about the best things to do while vacationing in your time. Then, when users stumble across these articles they'll learn more about where they want to vacation and see that they're already on the website of a hotel that can offer them great rates.

So, maybe there are more options in this scenario. If that's the case, you should take the time to review the costs of paid Google ad search terms to see what sort of results you could expect from a digital ad plan. You should also review the competition for social media accounts and content for some of these search queries you'd ideally want your content to rank well for.

You should also make sure that you can identify a marketing strategy that you can follow consistently.

Fourth - execute your marketing plan.

It's one thing to identify your internet marketing plan, but it's an entirely different task to run and execute it successfully.

You've hopefully determined the best marketing tactics to pursue based on your business goals and target audience. But even the best paths, when not operated well and faithfully, will end in disappointment.

You'd likely agree that having a website as part of a business's digital marketing strategy makes perfect sense in most situations, but have you ever seen one that wasn't well utilized? Maybe your website has been a disappointment. If it's not consistently generating new revenue for your business then it likely is a disappointment.

Most businesses have social media accounts. Some even post at least semi-regularly. But how many actually succeed at using social media to grow their revenue?

We're not going to go into how to execute a plan for every internet marketing channel that exists on this page, but there are a few elements that must be part of every success digital marketing plan.

1. Clearly defined goals: Are you trying to get more website traffic? Or improve your search engine ranking? If you don't know what your goals are how do you know if it's working?
2. Plan of execution: Who is doing the work? And when? Can you automate any of the tasks, or at least put them on a calendar so they won't be forgotten?
3. Consistency: If you're just starting out, identify what level of tasks you can commit to performing consistently. Start small at first so that it's easy enough to form new, productive habits.
4. Review and analysis: Do you know if you're reaching your goals, or how to even measure that? More of this below!

Despite your marketing channel or tactic of choice, without the above elements also being part of your plan, you run the risk of wasting valuable time and money for your business.

Fifth - analyze and adjust.

Great! By now you should be running an effective internet marketing plan. You've identified key business goals, learned about your primary target audience, selected a marketing channel and are executing your plan.

If you just stop there, you should be able to perform well enough to beat the majority of your competitors.

But the goal isn't to just be better than your competitors, right? Many of whom aren't really executing effective online marketing plans at all. Your goal is to turn the time and money you put into digital marketing into real revenue for your business.

To ensure that we're making that happen, we need to do one last thing - and that's analyzing our marketing plan and modifying it based on the results.

Of course, to do this requires having clearly defined goals for our execution, which we identified above. So, are we trying to increase the number of visitors on our website? How would we go about tracking that? Do you know?

First, we'd need to be set up with some sort of website analytics program such as Google Analytics. Then, we can review metrics such as website sessions, users and pageviews - all of which might help us to know if we're increasing our website visitors.

What about sales and increasing revenue? How would you go about measuring that if you're running digital ad campaigns or social media accounts?

Well, you'd probably need a website and some sort of signup or checkout form. Then you'd need to add a tracking script from the platform that you're using (such as Google Ads) which would need to be called each time a form is submitted. Then you'd have to set up a goal in your ads account.

It might sound like a lot (it does require a few steps), but it's nothing compared to the potential rewards that you'll receive by having the information of whether or not your digital marketing tactics are working for you.

Consider this scenario:

• You're running a Google Ads campaign and have successfully set up the appropriate tracking so you know when a click on one of your ads leads to a sale on your website.
• You spent $1,000 on ads last month and had 20 sales on your website attributed to the ads, which means that a conversion (sale) had an average ad cost of $50.
• You charge $100 for the product on your website. So, the 20 sales produced revenue of $2,000.
• That means you spent $1,000 on ads and received $2,000 in revenue from those ads. Simply, for every $1 you spent on ad spend last month, you made $2.

In a situation like this, you might want to try to increase your ad spend - at least as long as the money you're spending on ads is returned and then some on revenue!

Could you imagine not having this information? You might assume that the increased online sales are coming from something else and decide to give up on the digital ads - losing this valuable, money-making system that you've setup!

Alternatively, if you're not increasing your revenue, wouldn't you want to know so that you could stop spending your hard-earned money and time?

There can easily exist a perception that being successful in your digital marketing while basing your company in less-populated area like New Hampshire is more challenging.

The distance between you and the majority of larger business in cities like Boston may be greater, making those companies feel almost out of reach.

Maybe you also have felt that the quality of online marketers and marketing agencies in New Hampshire are sub-par compared to the more elite agencies in cities like Boston, Hartford or New York.

Being from New Hampshire ourselves, we know first-hand what it's like to feel overlooked and be concerned that maybe our efforts don't result in the same business success as similar companies in larger cities.

Having distance could certainly make a business impact if you're unwilling or unable to meet clients face-to-face as they may prefer to do at times, however, you must believe that your internet marketing efforts are not at a disadvantage.

The internet is generally a level playing field. The success of your marketing tactics can really be impacted by the choices you make and those alone. The quality of your marketing can even be great enough to convince clients who typically only work with Boston-area businesses - to work with you instead.

The steps listed above:

1. Considering your business goals
2. Defining your audience
3. Identifying a strategy
4. Executing your plan
5. Analyzing and adjusting

... are what you need for success, wherever you are.

Businesses in New Hampshire are not at a disadvantage.

• You can target your marketing towards businesses in NH and beyond
• Your budget can go just as far
• Your web pages can rank just as highly in search engines
• Your social media accounts can still grow into successful communities

Your hard work will return the same results. You can certainly work harder than larger, Boston-based businesses do, but that's not a requirement. Just have and follow a plan. Doing so will actually put you ahead of most businesses - and not just other businesses in rural areas like New Hampshire.

After years in the business and helping to launch dozens of websites and online marketing campaigns, we feel like we have a good understanding for what it takes to have a successfully operating program.

We've outlined most of that above, but to recap:

There are a lot of internet marketing options.

But they might not all be effective options for your business.

How can you know what channels are best for your business?

You need to evaluate what resources your company has (time, money) and who your target audience is.

And then you can develop a plan by:

1. Considering your business goals: what do you want to accomplish?
2. Defining your audience: who are you selling to? Who are you not selling to?
3. Identifying a strategy: based on those, what channels are best for you?
4. Executing your plan: how are you going to do the work and stay consistent?
5. Analyzing and adjusting: how can you make your efforts even more effective based on real data?

And no, you're not at a disadvantage just because your company is located in New Hampshire.

What does an internet marketing project look like with ZeroToDigital?

It's really a collaboration between us, the developers and strategists and you, the representative from your business. It's important to have a solid understand of your business and its goals in order to set you up with a program that you can use to grow your business. But, before we start, we'll sign a document so that you know anything you say to us will be kept confidential.

There will be emails and maybe meetings to make sure we're on the same page before getting started, to provide feedback on the proposal that we'll send to you (which will include details such as timing and costs), and to allow you to make any number of changes you'd like to the strategy.

You should also know that the program will be 100% yours. If you ever decide to take the efforts in-house, we'll provide you with any assets we have on file.

Pricing and timeline estimates will come from our discussions with you - based on the digital channels being used and strategies to be executed, and the level of support you're able to provide on your end.

Everything is 100% customized to you, your needs, your situation, your business. So if you're interested in learning more about starting a digital marketing project with us, please send us an email and we'll get back to you!