Entrepreneurs Boot Camp Recap: Session 3 - Marketing Your Business

We hosted our first ever webinar series: Entrepreneur Boot Camp. These online events took place June 23-25, with sessions that included speaking with real entrepreneurs, learning how to create a website, and learning how to market your business. In case you missed a session, you can watch all three webinars on our YouTube channel, but here’s the rundown of Session 3: Marketing Your Business.

Read about Session 1: Stories From The Entrepreneurs

Read about Session 2: Creating Your Website

Morgan Hennessey, Manager, Search Marketing, concluded our webinar with a discussion on how to get your business found using Facebook Ads and Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and how to measure digital marketing success with Google Analytics.

Facebook Advertising Tips

This session begins with the do’s and don'ts of Facebook advertising. Morgan shares a few tips to keep in mind before setting up your ads and pushing actual marketing budget to them. You want first install Facebook Pixel and link your Facebook and Instagram social accounts with your ad account. When advertising, use videos when you can, use the appropriate call to action depending on your ad, and test different messages.

When it comes to setting up your Facebook ad account you want to use Facebook Business Manager, Facebook’s tool that manages your business Facebook, Instagram, and Ads accounts all in one place. You can run ads through a third party, but this is the safest and most effective way to manage your account.

Once you set up your account, you’ll need to choose an objective for your campaign and set up your Ad Set with the goal and your audience. Advertising is only effective if you target the correct people – those who are going to convert. Of course, you’re not always going to reach them on the first shot. That’s why you need to set up multiple audiences to test your ads. There are different options when creating an audience for your ad: Detailed Target sorts by demographics and psychographics, Custom Target is built out of people who have already interacted with your business, and Lookalike Audience reaches out to new people who are similar to your current audiences. After, you create your advertisement and submit it. Your first ad might take a day or longer to get approved, and with strict advertising guidelines, it might be rejected! If that happens, request a manual review to get your ad live.

SEO Tips

SEO is a never ending process and is important to help your website stand out from the competitors. SEO helps your website get found through search engines. In order to have an optimized search strategy, you want to follow Google’s best practices. This includes having clean backlinks (and as many as possible), honest information across your website, and unique content to support the claims you make on your website.

To begin your SEO strategy, start with an audit of your current positions and the competitors’. Do A simple Google search of the keywords that you want to rank for to see where you and your competitors are showing up. If they rank higher than you, you’re going to want to figure out why and strategize around that.

Next, you will complete your keyword research. There are free tools to do this like Google Ads Keyword Planner, or paid programs like Ahrefs and SEMrush. Once you’ve got your keywords down, implement SEO elements into your website. One important place to optimize are the H1’s across your site. Make sure they are written with keywords and that they appropriately represent the content on that page. Writing meta titles and descriptions with SEO best practices is another important SEO element. This is where you will highlight your top keywords to inform users and search engines about your page. While adding in your keywords, it’s important to remember that natural language is essential – not only for user experience, but also to be optimized for voice search and in order to follow Google’s best practices. Keyword stuffing is highly frowned upon, which is the repetitive use of keywords without accounting for natural language or quality of content.

Once you have your SEO elements down, you want to see how effective your SEO efforts are. Measure your SEO strategy using Google Analytics to measure your organic traffic and evaluate website goals.

Google Analytics Tips

Google Analytics will be your go-to reporting tool. This free program will help you keep track of campaign performance using metrics such as users, pageviews, bounce rate, and conversion rate. You can also narrow down your reporting using “secondary dimensions” and “segments” which allow you to view traffic from specific channels, devices, or even break down your metrics based on new users and returning users.

When you use a campaign URL builder, you can track the performance of any campaign whether it’s paid, email, social media, or affiliate posts. You’ll want to do this for every link you put out there in order to track the effectiveness of the campaign.

One of the most important metrics to watch in your Google Analytics account is your bounce rate. If that number is high, over 50%, then you’re either attracting the wrong users to your website through your ad and SEO strategies or the content on your website is not up to par with what the users are looking for. Keep a close eye on the bounce rate for your landing pages (your homepage is probably the top landing page) and make any necessary adjustments to your ad targeting to see if that number goes down.

Use Google Analytics with Google Tag Manager to enhance your conversion tracking. Google Tag Manager allows you to simply create events that matter the most to your business, such as newsletter sign ups or clicks on the product page.

All in all, there’s a lot that goes into marketing your business and this is just the beginning. For more information on SEO and digital marketing, you can check out all of the resources we have on our blog.

Download the resources to help market your business.