Marketing Overwhelm – How Do You Map Your Online Presence?

Marketing your business is not something that is guaranteed to work overnight. Nowadays, social media outlets are awash with pressure to be everywhere and marketing overwhelm often leads to procrastination. With so many creating a ton of content every day, from podcasts, free downloads, mastermind groups, webinars, etc how do you stand out and be seen?

It is this pressure that has so many feeling overwhelmed with marketing their business. As a business owner it is important to keep in mind this quote by David Meerman Scott a renowned Marketing strategist – “Instead of one-way interruption, digital marketing is about delivering useful content at just the right moment that a buyer needs it.”

Marketing isn’t about online or offline, it’s not about digital or social. It IS about knowing where your audience is & creating value for them.

How Do You Overcome Marketing Overwhelm?

We all know how important it is to create a plan based on your business goals. Without this, you are walking blindly in the digital space, and it will waste your time and your effort. You can’t hope your marketing will improve or that your message will suddenly become viral. You need to prepare a plan that you can confidently execute. Take action and work hard for 30 days, and you’ll see a lot happen.

Here are a few guides you can follow to avoid getting overwhelmed:

Take a step back and breathe

Sometimes when the marketing overwhelm hits, you have stop what you are doing and take a step back. It allows you to take some perspective and understand your marketing goals more.

Identify your objectives

After you reevaluate your marketing goals, it’s time for you to work on your S.M.A.R.T goals. With this, it will help you monitor your progress better.

Prepare a strategy

Your marketing strategies need to match your business goals – not what your competitors are doing or whatever technique the ‘gurus’ are saying is the latest and greatest.

Map Your Online Presence

After taking a step back and reevaluating your goals, it’s time for you to map your online presence. How do you do that? Here’s a guide that you can follow to help you out:

Know where your ideal client is online & learn that platform

There are a lot of different social media platforms nowadays … 103 at the writing of this blog, and if you don’t know who is your target audience is, then there is a high chance you will waste your time on the wrong platform. You need to know who your ideal client is, so you can take the next step to figure out where and how they spend time online.

Taking this step will ensure that:

• Your brand has a presence on the various sites and/or platforms where your ideal clients are active.
• It’s important to place your content – and calls-to-action – exactly where your ideal clients will see them (and can respond to them).

As the first and most important step in creating your ideal client persona, you should know details about your ideal client base, such as, but not limited to:

• Details about a person, such as gender, age, location, and marital status
• Interests, likes and dislikes
• Their pain points, their needs, what keeps them up at night and how you solve this for them

Identify the broader trends that emerge when analysing individuals who stand out as potential clients if you haven’t started this process.

Now that you have created a buyer persona to match your target audience, learning where they spend their time online is your next step. It saves you time and effort when creating your marketing strategy, as you know where you will be spending the most time consistently building relationships and your brand. It also helps in knowing the TYPE of content you will be creating such as video, audio podcasts, blogs, or short form video and reels. To assist with the process of selecting the the best social media platforms here’s a quick overview of the different social media platform demographics (I have also done a more indepth video here) :

1. Facebook: With 2.5 billion active users per month, it’s still the world’s most popular social media platform. Facebook does an excellent job of identifying and responding to what its users want, and it’s here to stay.

• The average age of users is 25-44.
• Nearly 94% of businesses market via Facebook.
• It is used for viewing and sharing photos, watching videos, interacting with groups, attending events, and discovering products.

2. Instagram: There are 1.2 billion active Instagram users a month, and those who have an account are among the most active online.

• 70% of users globally are under 35.
• Over 70% of people say Instagram influences their purchasing decisions.

3. Twitter: Interacting with brands, interacting with customers, conducting research, and driving conversations are all possible with Twitter.

• There are 145 million users daily.
• In 2007, Twitter introduced the hashtag as we know it today.
• It is great for engaging in conversation and jumping on trending topics, as academics, global celebrities, and world leaders widely used it.

4. LinkedIn: At first, it was viewed as an online CV store. It is now the top site for B2B marketing because of its high-value client base that is actively seeking out business connections.

• Business decision-makers regularly use LinkedIn to network.
• Within 2020, there was an increase of 60% in LinkedIn content creation.

5. YouTube: Video consumption on YouTube was higher than ever in 2020. Over 2 billion people log on to the original video sharing site every month.

• The second most popular website in the world after Google.
• The average person over age 18 watches YouTube for 41.9 minutes a day.

Optimise your profile

We cannot build an effective digital strategy without an optimised profile – and that is true across all touchpoints. A well-optimised profile has several elements. A typical profile picture for most platforms is round and quite small, so the less detail you can include, the better.

A second step in optimising your digital profile involves creating a short and snappy company bio that communicates your message to the market (think about what your company stands for). Be sure to include your website link and blog if you have one. Most importantly, be consistent! Be creative!

Although your digital bio should clearly explain who you are and what you do, it is also a chance for you to showcase your unique personality or characteristics!

Develop a signature look

We can compare social media to an online magazine, where people are presented with a collection of your posts as soon as they land on your profile page. If they like what they see, they’ll follow and engage. Regardless of how good your photos are, if they are not aesthetically pleasing, entertaining, educational, or amusing, then you will not attract followers.

The visual nature of social media makes it important to have your own unique style on your feed. Consistency is key across your digital feeds. Additionally, stick to your brand’s colours to make your feed look more cohesive. The key is to make it look appealing and resonate with your brand messaging and voice.

This is where Canva is fantastic for AUD$17 or $18 a month, you can set your complete brand up, so, every time you create posts and content, the consistency is there. You don’t have to keep checking whether you’ve got the correct font, shade or colours for your brand.

Build a content plan

As a digital brand, you must stand out and post content that fits your brand identity and emphasises your uniqueness. Developing a content plan for your digital marketing efforts is essential if you want to stay on top of your posting schedule on Social Media.

Here at Marketing Leap, we wanted to stay ahead of time in creating our content. We ensure to have at least 2-3 weeks’ worth of content ready. A content calendar will help you keep everything organised and consistent. It shows a day-by-day breakdown of the creative process that goes into producing every content asset in the content plan.

The next step is to ensure your content aligns with your value offers. Setting up Value Offers is a process I follow with my mentoring clients, mapping out a sequential ladder of offers that might start with a free lead magnet. Then, move up to a low value offer of $45 or $97 gradually working up to their core offering, each time giving value and building that relationship.

The value offer allow the business owner to map out exactly how much they want to earn every month, and then calculate back what they need to sell to hit their target. This also concisely aligns their Call To Action with their value offer and the content that is posted on social media. As always, consistency is key. Consistently posting content that, not only talks about the value offers you have, but fits your brand identity and highlights what makes you unique and different to everybody else.

Integrate everything into your marketing strategy

After doing all of these, the last thing you want to do is incorporate all of them into your marketing strategy. You can develop a strategy that plays to your strengths and matches them to the emerging opportunities by knowing the internal strengths and weaknesses of your business and the external opportunities and threats. It is also a good idea to reduce the weaknesses you have.

To put that strategy into practice, you will need to create a detailed marketing plan. You may start with the first 4 above:

• Identify your target audience and know where they hang out.
• Optimise your profile on social media.
• Stay consistent with your brand visuals – logo, colours, font.
• Build a content plan and write it in batches.

You have a lot to accomplish if you are a brave, bold, social impact entrepreneur. Your mission is important, but so too is the message you are sending. These guides helped me and my team to overcome marketing overwhelm and hopefully it will help you too.

Whether you have any questions or simply want to chat, drop a comment below! We offer a full range of done for you realistic, practical marketing solutions for your business that deliver results and hit the spot with your customers. You can check out what we do here.

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If you want to learn how to implement different marketing elements in your own business, I have a series of Online Digital Success courses focusing on different marketing elements. These are self-paced courses, so you don’t miss out on the learning! You can learn all about those here.

Prefer structured mentoring? I also offer a 12 week 1to1 mentoring program designed to Give You Clarity, Generate leads & STOP DROWNING IN THE OVERWHELM! There are also 2 hours Strategy Sessions available. If it’s time to get a Clear Action Plan, Digital Strategy Map & Checklists, you can check out the details here!

Regardless of what you need when it comes to online marketing, take the Leap … we are your springboard to success!