How Big is Your Digital Footprint?

By Dr. Bryan Hawley

In today’s competitive online market, it’s easier and more budget friendly than ever to get in front of your ideal clients.

I remember when I first watched the movie Jurassic Park and the T-Rex’s footprint filled with water shook due to the impending force of the impact tremors. It made me think about digital marketing and the importance of sending ripples out through the online world.

This leads me to the question: How big of a digital impact tremor does your business have on your surrounding area? As we approach the 2020, do you risk becoming extinct? Just having a simple templated website, landing page or Facebook page that has posts two times a month is no longer what I would call making a digital footprint—let alone creating an impact tremor that will make the competition shutter.

If you haven’t looked at it lately, getting in front of your ideal client and being seen virtually everywhere is now easier and more budget friendly than ever! Using digital “strategery” (no that’s not a real word, but I like it) you can accomplish two unique phases of marketing.

One: Getting yourself and your services in front of everyone who is actively searching for you.

Yes, it is a great feeling to have people contact your business who are actively looking for what you offer instead of you hounding them with offers and specials. Using the power of Google Analytics and other SEO formulas, you can position yourself perfectly for when someone in your area talks into the phone and says, “SIRI find me xyz in my area”—for literally pennies! Never before have we had this type of opportunity.

Two: Putting your ads in front of the ideal client.

We literally have the power of what I call “sniper marketing” in the palm of our hands. For example, we can now target within 25 miles of our business a 35-year-old female who is married, has three open lines of credit, uses an American Express credit card, has a two-year degree, purchased vitamins, and works out. You can also use job title targeting, which is an impressive tool if you’re wanting to reach a decision maker.

Carousel advertising on social media has opened up a new genre of ads. Why show one selling point when you can show more in one swoop. Customizing these ads to your audience is an impressive way of getting creative with your customers and delivering various messages that sell a scenario.

Say, for example, you want to explode exposure to a training course; you could use the carousel feature to dictate a series of scenarios, each with a different image and wording.

  • Are you stuck in life?
  • Feeling the inner pull of something you should be doing?
  • Here is a way to uncover and discover your path?

Each of the ads would speak to different scenarios and capture the interest of those viewing.

You can even use local Google keyword search stats to find the most common demographic searching for your topic and then target your ads toward them. Let each ad run for a few days for a couple dollars per day and monitor which ones are getting the most hits. Once you’ve dialed down the winning ad, scale it up and reap the rewards. Keep it running as long as your ad is producing.

Pixels is another way that you can capture relevant audiences. By placing a tracking pixel on your landing page or ad, whenever someone lands on it you will get a digital profile of that person. You can later track all the people who landed on your page and create a custom lookalike audience in Facebook. Say you have a person who purchased a product or became a client; with a tracking pixel you can get a digital profile of that individual. Facebook will then search for other people (lookalike audience) who have the same digital profiles in your area and send your ads directly to them.

Re-targeting is another method you can use for people who landed on your page but did not call or fill out the form or purchase something. You can capture the digital footprint and send them retargeting ads with different calls to actions or offers. Re-targeting campaigns have shown to increase conversions by up to 33 percent or more in some cases and cost half as less as blanket advertising campaigns. Why is this? Because re-targeting is marketing to a warm audience vs. a cold one.

Similar to re-targeting is Geofencing, a popular way to target customers in a certain zip code or radius around a building or structure. Say, for instance, you want to target people who are visiting a certain mall, or higher-end shopping district. Geofencing allows you to target customers in any given radius.  You’ll notice when this is happening, especially on mobile apps. Any mobile app that you use for free likely has advertisements, and those advertisements are usually being geofenced.

This can be a boost for getting local client engagement with your office digitally. You can also use this method to advertising things like speaking events or other live engagements.

One of the biggest trends now is the use of video in marketing. You can place a video on your business Facebook page and re-target everyone who watched three seconds of your video with a call to action ad. This is a very powerful and engaging technique.

Another thing to consider is having a Facebook ad that has a built-in lead form attached to it. Basically, a person sees the ad and wants more information, wants a free e-book or something you are offering and fills out a very short contact form without ever having to leave the Facebook platform. You get notified of the lead, get the information and contact him or her. If you don’t want to be bothered with that now they even have BOTs (Messenger Bots) that will automatically do that for you!

All these things can be set up and managed by individuals without having to hire big expensive ad agencies. How do I know this? Because I own a big expensive ad agency, and I have been teaching others how to do this on their own for years now.

Never in the history of marketing have we had this capability, literally in the palm of our hands.

So if you are not using the power or digital marketing or are not making a big digital footprint (think T-Rex) I urge you to give this some attention because I guarantee your competition is, and the world needs to hear your message.

Dr. Bryan is a published author, national speaker, and personal growth consultant. He also owns an online digital marketing agency and has created a simple online course on digital marketing to help other coaches, and authors break out into the world and reach audiences. You can find out more on his website http://www.drbryanhawley.com or email directly at info@drbryanhawley.com.

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