This plan is a basic guide, and assumes that you have a well-designed website with a blog. This is geared towards brochure-type websites, rather than e-commerce or niche-purpose sites. Contact us for more information, or a specific marketing strategy for your business.

First month

• Set your website up with Google Analytics allowing you to review your metrics such as traffic, top content pages & user behaviour.
• Begin to plan and write posts for your blog and have an idea of when you want to post them. Stick to a schedule to begin with so you can monitor whether the way you’re doing it increases traffic or if you can improve it by changing your method.
• Set up as many social media accounts as you can, protecting your brand and allowing you to reach users in many different ways. It’s important to ensure you’ll have time to work on these social media accounts though, so ensure you have a budget, or time, for this.
• Set yourself up an e-mail list, sending automated e-mails about your company letting people know who you are. Have a newsletter signup, and focus on creating engaging content.
• Use local search on Google and other search engines to look at what your competition is and to see if you can rank above them.
• Create and distribute a press release describing why your company is unique and what gives you the edge; sell yourself to your potential customers as best you can.
• Once all this is done you need to monitor your reputation thus far and see what works and what doesn’t, capitalize on what works and work out a way to fix what doesn’t work.

Second month

• Review your metrics from the first month to see where your traffic has spiked the most, you can then see why and focus on the best methods to improve your traffic to your website.
• Once you’ve spent the first month writing blog posts, start to post them on the website and stick to your post plan.
• You have to stay active in the blog community, regular updates so your audience know what you’re up to and what’s happening with your company.
• Stay active on the right social networks suited to your company; it’s important to be where your customers are. Observe and listen to begin with. Get a feel for what they are interested in and plan how you will supply their interests.
• Join local chamber of commerce, businesses rely on word of mouth to survive, this is a great method as its companies discussing companies, utilising this can improve your online reputation.

Third month

• Investigate your local offline options, anywhere you can place your brand for the cheapest price possible, if you sponsor something such as a child’s football team, you’ll also receive good will from the community.
• Begin your activity on social media, now that you’ve scouted out what your audiences interests are, you can utilise the knowledge you have by posting links and tweeting the occasional person, let them know you’re there and your interest will spike.
• Sign up for HARO, it’s a journalist site that shows journalists who need stories to write about, if you offer yourself as a story for them to write you are promoting yourself to a wider audience as you’re creating links between websites thus ranking better, also it’s free to use.

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