We're going to be going over everything that is important for your business, the internet and all of the things that you should know as a business owner when it comes to digital and your business. We're going to be going over things like your domain, website information and social media and the very basic things that you need to know about all of these things in relation to your business.
The first thing we're gonna be going over is your domain and website information. The first question we would want to answer is what is a domain? The domain is your .com .org or dot.
Dot media is what my business uses. It is the web URL that is tied to your business's website. A big thing that I stumble upon a lot with business owners is that they don't know where their domain is hosted or who has access to that? They may have hired someone like myself in the past as a web designer and the web designer purchased the domain for them or maybe they didn't pass off the password.
That's as much as the business owner knows and remembers. That is one thing that is a huge asset to your business is the actual domain itself. If you could imagine, if you had 10 years of web traffic and then someone just deletes your .com or takes access to it and ties it to maybe their competing website or something to that effect, it could be somewhat detrimental to successive businesses and it's also gonna hurt all the hard work that you've built up on the internet getting all the traffic to your old domain. Domains themselves are tied to the Google listing. So, that's another reason that has value there. If you lose the domain, then you also lose the traction that you created with Google and all of the traffic you were sending there to the site.
Knowing where your domain is hosted is a popular thing. There's GoDaddy, Google Domains and Name Cheap for example. There's hundreds to thousands of resellers for domains, knowing where that is, the password to it, and who has access to it is very important. If you haven't reset it in a while, I'd update the password. How does it connect to your website is another thing I wanted to go over. Now that you know where your domain is and what the password is to it, where does it actually go? The web URL, if you wanna think of it, is like a name floating in space, and until you tie it to something, which is the website people can't go anywhere. They can type in the name all day long to that .com, but they, and the domain could be hosted somewhere, right? Like Goad for instance, you could buy a domain there, but until you actually tie it to a website, then the domain itself is useless. So typically you'll find yourself paying for a website host and a domain host.
Sometimes that's the same person. Just like the domain, you want to know where your website's being hosted. The password to it, who all has access to it as well. If you can't already kind of discern why it matters, if it's gone, it's gone and your website is there and your social media, which means they are extremely crucial assets to your business.
Those are some of the most valuable things in your asset category, that your business will end up owning. After you refuse into business, a lot of people's websites generate. The majority of their leads or their sales, which is the same with social media. We want to keep track of these things and make sure that they are actually yours and going to stay yours.
The next thing I wanna go over is your website and social media acting as the front door to your business. This is a train of thought. I've been trying to train clients for a while on this, but first impressions matter to you as a business owner. I'll explain why. If you've decorated your website or your storefront, or maybe you do, eBay-selling. If you've edited the description of your store on eBay, wherever it is you sell, you typically have manicured what that looks like, so that's when the customer comes to buy. They're actually enticed to do something. What I've been trying to train people to do is to start thinking of their social media and their website, the presence, and look of those to be just as important as the front door of their business, because it's the same concept, right?
This could even be the first impression that the person has in your business. So that is something that I've been really trying to hammer down on people. I literally had someone ask me, “I do power washing. Why would I need a website?” All your leads can come through your site. So, apart from just why would I have a website, why does it need to look good? Why should I pay a team like yours to come and develop something that actually is functional and pretty because just like I said, the first impression has a huge impact on the sale itself. So the bigger impression or the better of an impression that we can leave the higher that you'll be able to charge over the lifetime of your business' existence for your products and services. The next thing I want to go over with social media is that a lot of people don't know that social media actually has two halves to it.
So there's the first half, which is the organic half. That's what most business owners or managers have dealt with and still do deal with on their own. Then there's the half that never gets really the, the light of day for most people, which is the paid half. Which is where we actually run the ad campaigns in the back end.
This is not boosting a post. This is actually a whole separate platform on the back end of Facebook, where you can actually go in and create whole campaigns. This is what we're paid to professionally do. There's the paid half and the organic half.
The reason I say it's half, not 70-30, is because they really are almost equally important. You kind of have to attack the desire for success on social media on two different fronts. One of them is the organic one. So it's like, how well are we doing on posting, getting engagement and all the things that are free to us.
I like to use air quotes because they're not free. You have to pay someone to do that and spend time to take photos and do that where you're spending your own time, your own time, and it costs money. Then there's the paid half, which is kinda like I said, running the ads Truthfully, I think both are crucial to getting the page to actually do what most people want it to do, which is generate more revenue for the business.
Not only just knowing that there's two halves, but understanding that both are equally weighted and important. The next thing I wanted to go over is the doubts behind some people, social media actually can make your business money. It can be a positive in the asset category for everything. Social media works really, really well for sales, promotions and events. One of the biggest things that does a good job at is brand awareness. What I'm talking about with the social media information is manage your expectations as a manager or an owner when it comes to social media. It really does take not only a team and not only a plan, but it takes time to actually implement these things.
We have some clients, three days out of the gate trying to change what we're doing and what I normally will come back to them and say is like, let me fail before you try to correct. After that, we never have to have that conversation again because things actually end up due the way that we wanted them to. When you have an actual plan together with the team to implement the plan and you're willing to wait enough time for this plan to have success, it's going to work. At that point, who's the team and what is the plan? Right?
Time is always gonna be doing its thing, but the expectations we set with ourselves through paid and organic need to be realistic. When we start to do all of the stuff, you need to put your best foot forward the first time and have an actual good plan set up and ready to go.
I have some clients that are very, very smart before they even start their social media and their online branding. They'll come to us and already have us right there from the beginning.
Platforms are different. Not all platforms are born equally. Facebook is typically an older demographic, whereas Instagram and TikTok are a combination of the two. Twitter and LinkedIn are where you are more likely to find professionals lingering around on the internet. Snapchat is better for low cost items to be sold on ads, sponsored ads, affiliate marketing and Yelp. As you could imagine, it doesn't need to be done by a small mom and pop shop owner, but it would need to be something that's managed by a restaurant owner. So understanding that just because you have a business, that doesn't mean that you need to be on every single social media platform.
Again, having the time and the plan behind what you're doing is going to actually benefit you better in the long run. I say this all the time to my team, but slow is fast. Meaning if we have a plan out of the gate the first time, and we're working slowly through that, we just continue to implement it. Typically that's gonna give us more success down the road than just gunning it.
Trying to figure out what happened after the fact is wasting time on multiple platforms, whereas we could have spent double on selected outbound marketing and old methods with Radio, TV and magazines. I'm definitely not knocking them by any means. Radio ads and TV ads, you see them all day long. I will say they are trying time. Everyone knows that it's the age of the internet right now.
COVID didn't help out at all with that. I would advocate if you are someone who's been spending tens of thousands of dollars a year on radio and TV to just give it a try through Facebook and Instagram marketing, even if the money spent is with your own internal team, maybe you have an employee who displays some sort of desire to be in charge of the social media and all those things.
This would be an awesome time to offer them extra hours or overtime, just to see if you can get some traction or running here. Give it a shot, get out of the old outbound marketing methods. It doesn't have to be crazy expensive.
A better question I would just ask is, do you actually have a plan set up for your spending on marketing for this year or for next year, for each quarter? Do you have a budget that's allowed for this kind of stuff? If not, why? I was trying to even, you know, ask myself that why don't we have a marketing plan or a budget better yet?
Why don't we have that set up together? We have some clients that get away with less than 3% of their sales going into all marketing efforts and it's still effective. So you do, let's say a million dollars in sales. 30,000 for the year in ad spend. In this hypothetical, to pull in a million in sales doesn't seem that bad.
You kind of have to frame it that way. If you are a manager or someone going to your boss, and you're really trying to talk about Facebook ads, Social Media ads, or maybe you're just an owner trying to convince yourself another easy way to do it is to break it down each day. So it's like, “Hey, this is gonna be 30,000 for the year” or you could say, “Hey, it's gonna be a hundred dollars a day”. So think about it that way. Then, think about how many people this might pull into our storefront, or how many sales this could generate on our website. You have to really break it down and try to hash it out on a day by day basis sometimes to really make sense of what you're looking at and to make it seem a bit more feasible when you're trying to move forward with all of this. Here's another question I would ask you all, which is for planning and organizing. Have you actually ever developed a plan for your promotions throughout the year for your posting on social media throughout the year?
This is something we do for our clients. We need to make sure that we actually have a method to the madness for the posting times. So we're not only choosing the days that we're gonna be posting promotions, but when they end and how long they are and the stipulations behind them. Have you done that for your business?
So, getting a checklist put in play is super useful, and it's gonna help you follow through with higher intention. That's something huge that any business could use from its owner management staff, any of that kind of stuff.
Lastly, the very last thing is going to be your actual measurement. How are you gonna be able to measure the data that you're going to be pushing toward? If you're gonna be spending money on this stuff, you're gonna want to know where the money's going, if it's working or how to measure if it is working or if it's not, and then be able to identify what success looks like to your team or maybe it's your ad team.
We want to know what feels like success to you. So if it's more sales, then that's it. If it's more people coming into the door every day, then that's it. So trying to work toward that using analytical data is really cool. We have a dashboard that we've built for our clients which is not something that you can just get anywhere, but there's also built in analytical tools to most of these.
Platform wise, if you did make a post, you can see how many people it reached, how many people it impressed on and how many people clicked on the links on it. Then you can try to do the things that work. A little bit better and more often, and then continue to refine that process.
The reason that that is important is because there's no point in doing any of this, if you're not going to be making progress on it. It's not just making general progress, but achieving goals, resetting and continuing that process.
What is Roas? What success with Roas is and how that you, how you're gonna be able to measure this. So Roas is an acronym that stands for return on ad spend. This is going to mean for every dollar that is spent, how many are being returned to your business.
Why does that matter? Your goal, one of the goals apart from elevating the organic side of things, half of social media is if you do get into the paid side, being able to increase your roas, and increase exponential rate or a multiple multiplication rate. So four X, 10 X, 20 X, whatever it is, that's typically how we will denote what the Roas is. So you'd be looking at, say a three Roas is kind of like average three to five Roas would be average for just like a decent success on a campaign. The goal would obviously be to get that very high.
We have some clients that will get up to 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 on certain campaigns and certain things that they're doing. It's going to be different based on the thing you're pushing the price of the product, the brand and the market and industry in the location that you're physically in.
Ultimately, comparing yourself to either a very similar business or to your past self. Track what progress is and what it looks like is going to be very helpful for you. So to recap on everything, we went over what a domain is, how to figure out where you're hosted, how it links to your website, how websites are hosted and what you need to do in order to figure out how to take control of both of those assets.
We talked about training yourself on thinking about the importance of the website and social media, being another front door to your business. Another place where people are impressed. We talked about the two halves of social media, the paid side, and the organic side. They're both equally weighted and important.
If you're attacking one front, you need to start attacking the other and vice versa. We also talked about how it takes a plan, team and time, which are big things. So manage your expectations for growth, and hopefully you won't get burnt out too quickly because this should give you that dexterity that you'll need to make it through the first three to six months while starting. We also talked about how platforms are different.
That doesn't mean you need to be on all 26 social media platforms, that means choosing the top three to five for your business. How to measure everything after it's all implemented.
This was inspired because I've noticed a lot of our clients are not doing very well on this front. They're not super tied into the information that I believe that they should be tied into, which again is your website.
