Your Marketing Strategy Checklist: Top 3 To-Dos
When you put marketing last, you leave money on the table.
Marketing isn’t easy, but the basics are straightforward. There are a few essentials you need to have your marketing in order. We’re boiling it down to the critical basics in our marketing strategy checklist, with a breakdown of why you need each.
1: Design Your Logo.
Your logo is your first impression to your clients. It tells them something about you and helps you set the tone for your branding. Your logo should combine professionalism with recognizability. Paying for a quality logo ensures that your logo and its use cases can grow with your business. Hiring a graphic design expert to develop your logo and branding for consistency can pay big dividends.
Ideally you should have multiple formats of your logo for different use cases, such as:
Landscape
Portrait
Icon
Black & white
Color
Designing your logo can be a great chance to figure out what you want to say about your business and how you want to brand yourself. More often than not, when working with our clients to develop a logo suite, we find that the conversations we have around designing their logo helps our clients figure out even bigger realizations and decisions about their businesses. It's a great process and one we love to watch play out.
Final reason to design a logo: Show off what you built! And why wouldn’t you? A logo you love is an asset you’ll be proud of and excited to share! If it's well-done and good looking, it will represent to clients that you're good at what you do and communicate quality, professionalism, and attention to detail. Plus it will be memorable!
2: Build your website.
You need a digital home online to give people pertinent information about your business. When your potential customers search for you, you want a solid and professional presence that puts your best foot forward and offers the most important information about you and the business you’ve built.
In 2020, 68% of all website visits came from mobile devices. That means almost 7 out of 10 visitors to your website will be looking at the mobile version of your site. How does your website look on a phone? It’s important that your site is built according to mobile-first standards.
Your site also needs to be easy to navigate, informative, and clear. A few guiding questions to ask yourself when building your site include:
Is my site easy to navigate with clear Home, About, Services, and Contact pages?
Are all my visitors' obvious questions answered?
Do I clearly state my geographical areas of service?
Does my site's mobile version look good; i.e. large enough font and correct width?
Does my site offer a chance to capture email addresses if my visitors wish to subscribe to my email list?
Is my site well-designed and visually appealing?
Does my site have proper security; i.e. an SSL certificate?
Is my domain name set up and pointed correctly?
Does my site take too long to load or is it optimized properly?
3: Launch your search engine optimization (SEO).
Your website should serve as your best salesman, working for you 24/7 and keeping your phone ringing. That means it needs to be search optimized so it shows up in search engines. A good search engine campaign is built around quality content such as blogging and regular new page builds.
The right search engine optimization (SEO) team will use constructive and ethical strategies and techniques to get your site ranking without earning any Google penalties. Unethical SEO techniques are known as “black hat SEO” and will damage your site’s credibility and search rankings, but white hat SEO should build over time for valuable Google placement you don’t have to buy.
Our team at Go West can help you get your marketing plan in order; contact us for a free consultation.