Are you wondering about how to use the internet and social media to start or grow your business?
Do you have a healthy degree of skepticism about what works and doesn’t work?
Have you come across individuals who claim to be experts and gurus in the area but you have your doubts?
I have built my solicitor’s practice almost entirely through digital or online marketing. So what I have to tell you is based on what works, not some theoretical nonsense with no valid evidence or data to support it.
There is plenty of spoofers out there, quite frankly, giving advice about digital marketing, online marketing, social media marketing who really only talk the talk.
Not only will I tell you what works, and what the important metrics for my business are, but I will prove it.
Yes, I will give you evidence of critically important areas I monitor and measure on a weekly basis to ensure my marketing machine is ticking over nicely with a nice, smooth sound.
Ready?
Let’s go.
Website traffic
Firstly, if you were ever involved in a retail business you will know that footfall is critical to your success. Without footfall-that is, passing visitors in the immediate vicinity of your business premises-you will struggle big time.
The online equivalent of footfall is website traffic. How you get visitors to your website can fall into two large categories:
1. Organic methods
2. Paid methods
Organic methods include organic search traffic and social media traffic.
Paid methods include advertising such as Adwords, YouTube advertising, Facebook advertising, and so forth.
Clearly, the best type of traffic is organic search traffic, and there are 2 reasons for this:
1. It is free
2. It is motivated to find a solution to a problem
To clarify, organic search traffic is when you are looking for a product or service and you search online in a search engine like Google. If your website ranks well in the search engines, especially Google, you will get more of this top quality traffic.
So, my number one metric to measure on a regular basis is my website traffic figures. Putting it plainly how many people visit my store each day-that is, how much daily traffic do I achieve?
I have a number of websites dealing with differing aspects of Irish law but the two main sites I look at are:
b) EmploymentRightsIreland.com
I have other sites, too, such as SmallBusinessLawIreland.com, FamilyLawIrelandHq.com, and MakingAWillIreland.com.
But these 2 sites are the ones which drive all my traffic and in the year to date (early May 2018) the average number of daily visitors to my sites are as follows:
March, 2018, average daily visitors: 4389
Average daily traffic: 1,356 per day in April, 2018
So, between these 2 sites alone I receive 5,745 visitors per day.
It is self evident that the more traffic I get the more leads/queries I receive, the more consultations I book, and the more clients I add to my books.
The next time you are being regaled by a ‘guru’ or expert with the latest shiny new object for growing your business online ask him/her how many daily visitors he/she gets to his/her website or blog. It will give you some food for thought and should influence you as to whether to do business or not.
Let’s face it: if the guru cannot get traffic to his/her site how will he/she do it for your business?
Email marketing subscribers
Email marketing is incredibly powerful for it allows you to communicate with potential clients/customers in a way which is expected, consented to, and personal.
Email marketing, however, is not about asking people to sign up for a newsletter (yawn). No, you want to be much more intentional, useful and strategic than that.
Here are a couple of email marketing articles I have written previously, they explain email marketing in greater detail:
- Email Marketing for Small Business-What You Need to Know and the 2 Common Mistakes to Avoid
- 1 Email Marketing Mistake that Makes You Look Stupid and Lazy
From my business perspective, I monitor the number of subscribers to my list on a weekly basis. Today my total number of subscribers is 6,067. The vast majority of these subscribers have signed up for my free employment law report and free weekly employment law tips.
These subscribers are valuable to my business and I am ruthless in ensure good list hygiene by removing anyone whose email address is undeliverable or who have unsubscribed. In fact I encourage people to unsubscribe as I only want people on my list who are interested in what I have to offer.
So every week I will scrub my list to ensure only people who want to hear from me do, in fact, hear from me.
Here’s the proof:
YouTube subscribers
Video is powerful and allows a connection between video maker and viewer that is difficult to achieve with words alone, especially given the attention span deficit of people nowadays.
This is why I put a lot of effort into my YouTube channel.Checking the number of subscribers I have is an extremely regular occurrence.
Today the number of subscribers is at 873 with my first major target being 1,000 subscribers. That should be achieved soon because I am adding an average of 70 new subscribers every 30 days. Here’s the proof:
Facebook metrics
Facebook allows me to reach an enormous audience easily and I check certain FAcebook metrics every day, including:
- Number of fans of my two main pages (here and here)
- Cost per result of any advertising campaign I am running
- Cost per acquisition of leads to sign up to my email list (see above)
Fans of my employment rights Ireland page number over 18,662 today and fans of my Terry Gorry & Co. Solicitors page number 6,864 today. Here’s the proof:
Conclusion
- Understand the digital marketing metrics that are most relevant for your business and monitor them relentlessly
- Don’t fall for ‘shiny new objects’
- Don’t accept assertions or promises from people who promise to help you grow your business online without getting some cold, hard evidence and facts from them about the important metrics in their own business
- In other words, ask them politely, ‘don’t tell me, show me’ when it comes to growing your business online.