Online / digital marketing - a basic guide?

[Mark T Jones]

OK - it's woolly, I know, but I'd like to get a broad understanding of online marketing for my business. (Because for the first time ever, all of my deals in 2024 came from online sources)

Not looking to become an expert, but would like to understand the wheres and whys before appointing one.

Any recommended reading or sources of information please? I see there is a Dummies book, would you recommend it?

(If it makes any difference, my business itself isn't online, post enquiry it's 100% relationship based).

 

[Paul Kelly ICHYB]

my business itself isn't online, post enquiry it's 100% relationship based

Imagine the potential increase in business if it was. BTW, your competitors probably are and getting business you cannot access. Even if it is just a web business card, get one!

 

[Mark T Jones]

Imagine the potential increase in business if it was. BTW, your competitors probably are and getting business you cannot access. Even if it is just a web business card, get one!

It's what some competitors do - Funding Circle have spent tens of millions on it

I'm in a different market

 

[Paul Kelly ICHYB]

I'm in a different market

Yes, but that isn't a reason not to have a web page.

Do you have a Google Business listing?

 

[fisicx]

Online marketing means being visible in multiple places: website, GBP, social media, advertising, emails, forums and so on.

Research will tell you which work best for your target client. But start out with everything then refine and filter until you are left with the ones that work.

The dummies book will help but getting someone like @Paul Carmen @Annoying Donkey or @AllUpHere on board will be a better investment.

A question for you: do you get many repeat clients or is it usually a one off activity?

 

[Paul Carmen]

@fisicx Thanks for the recommendation.

@Mark T Jones Can you share a broad digital marketing plan, as the resources we'd point you too, or people you should work with if you outsource your digital marketing should be based on this?

If you don't have a marketing plan, then a detailed outline of who your ideal customer is, plus what sort of service/product you ideally want to sell is a good way to start. This forms the basis of any research to create a marketing plan, based on what your ideal customers look for, and where/what they will look for in detail.

The reason we'd strongly recommend the plan first is that SEO, web design and paid digital marketing have become more and more complicated and specialised.

Ten years ago we used to do a bit of everything, ecommerce, lead gen, SEO, PPC, web design etc. While we still have those core skills in our team, and do that type of work, we now specialise in web design and marketing for medium and high ticket lead gen. Specifically; finance, mortgages, B2B loans, insurance and high ticket home services like locksmiths, tree surgeons etc.

 

[jfrm]

OK - it's woolly, I know, but I'd like to get a broad understanding of online marketing for my business. (Because for the first time ever, all of my deals in 2024 came from online sources)

Not looking to become an expert, but would like to understand the wheres and whys before appointing one.

Any recommended reading or sources of information please? I see there is a Dummies book, would you recommend it?

I have been running an online shop for 25 years and for a good half of that time, I did all the marketing which was not much more than SEO and that got me 80% of our business. These days there are a lot more options. But you can start with SEO - there is a lot of basic stuff that you can do yourself before you get complicated. As for recommended reading sources, there are hundreds of websites with this stuff just desperate to have you visit them to read their advice and guidelines. Books are often out of date. And useful forums like reddit, google groups etc. If you are a local business, you then need to optimise the site for local users, too (Google Business etc), again, can do basics yourself; it's not difficult although amazing how many people don't do it. You need to get into the top 3 for that, if possible which can involve trying to get defunct businesses removed from the listings, sometimes. Then fisicx is right, make a list of all the other things you could do and places you could advertise and social media sites where you could lurk/post. Accept that you can't do all of them and prioritise the ones that seem most likely to fit you and your target market the best. Finally, we get numerous spams every day and calls and other rubbish from "marketing agencies" constantly. I'm sure that there are good ones out there but I have yet to find one. A bit more than a year ago, I decided to have have a proper go with one that claimed they would get our SEO ranking up, work our social media blah blah. They seemed good but £9K, 6 months and several missed deadlines later, they were sacked with no tangible benefit to my business that I could determine. Probably my most expensive mistake in business. This is not uncommon it seems. I reckon at least half of them are mostly useless and a significant portion of those are cowboys. Of the rest, many charge eye-watering prices for doing not much. And although what you might want is a one-off job, most will do their utmost to rope you in to some kind of ongoing contract and then set things up so that you feel you rely on their services and can't drop them. So if you go that route, I can only advise that you adopt *extreme* caution and immense due diligence. I hope some of this is useful.

 

[Paul FilmMaker]

OK - it's woolly, I know, but I'd like to get a broad understanding of online marketing for my business. (Because for the first time ever, all of my deals in 2024 came from online sources)

Not looking to become an expert, but would like to understand the wheres and whys before appointing one.

Any recommended reading or sources of information please? I see there is a Dummies book, would you recommend it?

(If it makes any difference, my business itself isn't online, post enquiry it's 100% relationship based).

Online marketing is a massive topic. For B2B marketing, take Linkedin, as an example. It's just one online channel to generate B2B sales. It's guaranteed to make us a couple of sales per year.

We post 'useful' posts on there aimed at our target audience. E.g. We want to sell to marketing directors so post something that's useful to a marketing director: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/paul...3P?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

That post generated a sale. A CMO called up and said 'that's interesting, let's talk.' So that's one way of using Linkedin to generate sales.

 

[Mark T Jones]

Thanks all for your replies - I'm not ignoring them, but you are a step ahead of where I'm aiming.

I've bought a copy of 'Dummies' for fun Christmas reading and will return in the new year with more thoughts and ideas.

Meanwhile, here is an insight to where I'm starting from

Finding people who want to borrow is ridiculously easy. Finding the right people, with the right information, at the right time is the challenge

The biggest online player (we're talking tens of millions in development and marketing budgets) once gave me some stats - in rounded terms, they went something like this

80% of applications are auto-rejected at stage 1 - the stage that says 'who are you & what do you want?' (Oddly, nearly all auto-rejections come in on a Sunday afternoon/evening)

Of the 20%, 60% don't follow up by sending information - accounts / bank /statements / projections

Ultimately, less than 5% of proposals are accepted - most of which are taken up.

Whilst I don't have anywhere near enough prop flow to analyse, I had noticed about 3% conversion (against 85% from my existing introducer base) which is quite consistent with their stats.

 

[fisicx]

How many of those 3% come back for a second round of funding? Or do you only ever fund them once and then they disappear into the moonlight never to be seen again (except to make payments).

 

[Mark T Jones]

How many of those 3% come back for a second round of funding? Or do you only ever fund them once and then they disappear into the moonlight never to be seen again (except to make payments).

Historically most come back - some for many, many years

Historically I've worked to an average transaction value £1,700 & customer lifetime value £6,500 (with huge individual variance)

As long as the 80% filter is efficient it's worthwhile (my filter is simply to request information)

 

[Paul Kelly ICHYB]

@fisicx would one of your calculators help, on a web/landing page?

 

[fisicx]

@fisicx would one of your calculators help, on a web/landing page?

Probably. They are great for prefiltering then getting the follow up email. @Mark T Jones would have to do anything until the client has sent over all the details.