Focused Approach to Digital Marketing: Why Do You Need It?

I couldn’t help but read all about Oliver’s journey – all the way from letting go of clients, to focus on a single-minded (or monomaniacal?) pursuit to let go all distractions, and focus on a few effective ways to do digital marketing to help promote his membership site (among others).

He calls the rest of us, the “Fortune 5 Million”.

As a result of his decisions, he shifted to the RainMaker Platform which comes with superfast hosting, bloat-free WordPress themes on The Genesis Network, LMS, RainMail, Podcasting, Membership features, and a whole lot more.

I couldn’t help but think: we need to do just that.

He decided to one thing that I wish we could all do (including you, the mighty you who is reading this): focus.

When you launch a business with you at the helm and with just a friend, wife, or mom as your partner, your resources are stretched too thin. You can’t possibly do everything that digital marketing demands, and then some more. Plus, you still have your business to run which is a monstrosity in itself.

But then, it’s hard to “focus” when it comes to digital marketing.

By design, it calls for content marketing, which needs “content” in all its glorious forms. Then, you have multiple social channels that you’d need to amplify content. Also, you’d need email marketing to ensure that you have your righteous claim to your subscriber’s inbox (and you’d have to earn this).

So, how do you focus?

I can’t recommend the “single channel” approach that Oliver suggests. Instead, I’d suggest a basket approach while still being able to focus on exactly what you’d need to do to make digital marketing work for you.

What is the Focused Basket Approach to Digital Marketing?

1. You’d pick the best possible channels for digital marketing and decide to commit to those channels for a specific time period.
2. Use a combination of Google Analytics, Mouseflow, or whatever else you’d use for analytics and stay on top of your numbers.
3. See what’s working and what’s not. Then, try another set of channels and digital marketing approaches that are still available to you.

Just don’t go overboard with the digital marketing channels you pick. If you are just starting out, you’d need results fast.

Maybe your first experiment could be like this:

1. Start with your website, all set up and designed the way it should with regards to marketing (and not just design).
2. Pick Google AdWords, and set it all up the right way. Build landing pages to match every offer you make with your ads.
3. Run the campaigns, optimize your campaigns, and A/B test your campaigns until you have enough data to help you make smart decisions.
4. As long as you run AdWords campaigns for testing, keep your budgets low.

If you don’t want to take the PPC route and spend money on campaigns, spend time and put in the effort instead. So, now your route would be:

1. Start blogging regularly, on schedule.
2. Amplify your content (along with sharing content from non-competing sources) on social media.
3. Build a list with smart email marketing (throw in marketing automation for good measure).
4. Do A/B Tests for your website itself, along with any landing pages you’d use. Also test email subject lines, blog headlines, copy, images, Call to action buttons, and pretty much everything else that you can test.

a. Building your WordPress website with the Divi Builder gives you the ability to test every page on your website with the built in Divi A/B testing feature.
b. If you use Unbounce, you have landing pages A/B testing built in.
c. All popular email service providers such as Drip, MailChimp, ConvertKit, and Campaign Monitor allow you to test email subject lines and copy.

Instead of going overboard with “I got to do this and I got to be on that network too”, start with either of the routes above, do it for months or years at a time, and then decide what works best for you.

You can’t be stretching yourself thin. That doesn’t mean you’d sit on your ass and do nothing.

What do you do for digital marketing? Are you all over the place or do you take a focused approach digital marketing (for long enough) to make it matter to your business?