[TEXT: DEMOCRACY, PROSPERITY, HUMAN RIGHTS, EDUCATION, SECURITY A PRODUCTION OF U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE]
There are many reasons why entrepreneurs are starting and running businesses online.
The startup costs are relatively low.
The potential to reach customers outside of your local area.
The flexibility of both time and space.
And the ability to design and implement marketing campaigns
that help you build a profitable relationship with your customers,
who are primarily living in a digital world.
[TEXT: Digital Marketing for Entrepreneurs]
In this course we will cover Digital Marketing for Entrepreneurs.
We will discuss practical ways entrepreneurs can develop
and maximize marketing for their online businesses.
It will cover such topics as personal branding,
best practices for website design,
keys to developing a digital marketing strategy,
and ways to maximize your online marketing
using available tools like social media and search engines.
[TEXT: Written by Christopher Gray, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Scholly] This course was written by Christopher Gray.
[TEXT: Creating Your Online Brand] This lesson is Creating Your Online Brand.
[TEXT: Learning Objectives] In this lesson, you will learn to understand the key differences
between traditional marketing and online marketing.
We will talk about the key components of personal branding
and why creating a personal brand is important for you and your business.
Christopher grew up in deep poverty during a national recession
in a single-parent household in Birmingham, Alabama.
With limited access to computers and no access to internet at home,
but the desire to go to college,
he searched for scholarships,
ultimately winning $1.3 million to study finance and entrepreneurship at Drexel University.
The challenges and rewards of his experience gave him the idea for a mobile app
that helps students easily find scholarships for college
and helps graduates pay off their student debt when attending U.S.-based institutions.
In 2013, he founded Scholly
The company was named in Inc. Magazine’s Top College Start-Ups,
won Under Armour’s Cupid’s Cup competition
and won former AOL executive Steve Case’s Rise of the Rest Competition.
Christopher was named Ernst & Young’s “Entrepreneur of the Year for 2015” for Philadelphia
and is one of Forbes’ “30 under 30 for 2016.”
As Christopher writes, creating your personal and company’s online brand
is a critical component to any successful digital marketing strategy.
That’s because your online brand has the power
to leave a lasting impression on potential buyers,
whether they’re ready to buy from you now or in the future.
But before we get into how you develop your online brand
and infuse it into every part of your business’s digital marketing strategy,
it’s important that we first understand
[TEXT: Marketing Traditional vs Online] the key differences between traditional marketing and online marketing.
According to the American Marketing Association,
marketing is the activity,
set of institutions, and processes for creating,
communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings
that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.
[TEXT: Traditional Marketing] Traditional forms of marketing communicate and advertise
a company’s offerings through newspapers, magazines,
telephone books, radio, and TV.
[TEXT: Digital Marketing] But, as you’re probably well aware,
these days most people aren’t spending as much time
looking at any of those forms of media
as they do looking at their phones, computers, and tablets.
So, digital marketing is all about adapting
those traditional marketing techniques to fit digital channels
such as search engines, websites, social media, email, and mobile apps.
Where, Christopher asks, does personal branding fit in?
A strong personal brand
guides how you market your company
on those digital channels.
But this doesn’t happen by accident.
Creating a personal brand requires you to really think about
where your personal mission and the mission of your company intersect.
Generally, when creating your personal brand,
Christopher says you want to make sure that it is:
Focused
What is the key message that you want to deliver to your audience?
If you had to choose one thing,
what do you want people to know about you and your company?
Consistent
You want to make sure that you’re presenting the same message on all channels,
online and offline,
so that people aren’t confused if they interact with your company
in more than one place.
Trustworthy
Consumers want to buy from brands that they trust.
But if they feel that you’re trying to force a connection to build that trust,
you could damage the relationship between customers and your business.
Relatable
Consumers also want to be able to see themselves as part of your brand.
So, studying your target customer
is necessary to align your mission with their values.
And as he mentioned before,
all of this can directly influence and enhance
how you market and sell your business.
For example, when it comes to sales,
having a strong and memorable brand helps you to stand out from your competitors,
build trust among consumers,
entice customers to buy from you again in the future,
and makes it easy for people to refer your business to their friends.
Christopher says that one of the best places to really build and establish your personal brand
is on your business’s website.
When building your website,
you’ll want to make sure your brand is reflected in things like:
Domain name, which should be easy for customers to remember
and associate with your business.
Design, including the colors, logos, fonts, and any other visual elements.
Content on every page including your “about us” page,
contact page, testimonials, reviews, and descriptions for your products or services.
Calls-to-action that tell people how you want them to buy from
or engage with your business.
When creating your website, it’s also important
that you’re optimizing it to be used and found
by your target users with minimal effort.
For example, your website needs to be fully functional
on desktops AND all mobile devices.
If it’s not optimized for mobile devices,
you could lose a lot of potential visitors to your website.
In the first quarter of 2021,
mobile web traffic accounted for 54.8% of all global web traffic.
You’ll also want to make sure your website’s navigation bar
is intuitive and easy for customers to understand.
Creativity and using plays on words
might regularly be part of your brand identity.
But it shouldn’t be part of your website’s navigation
because it might confuse visitors.
So, aim for clarity when it comes to navigation.
Lastly, Christopher says that if you want potential customers
to find your website organically on search engines or without paid ads,
then you’ll need to also focus on search engine optimization.
Search engine optimization, or SEO,
is the practice of optimizing your website
to be exactly what people are searching for
whenever they type a query related to your business
into a search engine like Google or Bing.
Search engines rank your website
for how well they think your website
matches the intent and content of the search term,
also known as a keyword.
To increase your visibility, you need to first figure out
what your target audience uses
to search for topics related to your business.
This is called keyword research.
Then you’ll want to use those keywords
to guide you in creating content
that regularly appears on the first page
of search engine results like:
Blog posts, images, videos, infographics, or e-books.
Product descriptions for the items you sell.
You can also optimize your website for search engines
by using keywords in your website’s:
Web addresses, also known as URLs.
Title tags or page titles.
Alt-tags, or descriptions of images.
Meta-descriptions, a short description of your page
that appears under the link on search engines.
With your established online brand and functioning website,
your next step is to make sure consumers know about it
with a solid digital marketing strategy.
For more on this course and to access related resources,
visit our website.
[TEXT: DEMOCRACY, PROSPERITY, HUMAN RIGHTS, EDUCATION, SECURITY A PRODUCTION OF U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE]