One of the things I love about working at Armada Digital is our company culture. Nick puts a great amount of emphasis on understanding not only what makes an employee more successful but also what our passions are outside of the work environment.
One of mine is gardening. I love growing vegetables and flowers. Particularly, I’m passionate about growing peppers. From jalapeños to cayenne, to Aji Limon- I start every day by taking care of my garden. It’s something Nick frequently teases me over.
But it got me thinking. A good digital marketing strategy is very similar to gardening. And here’s how:
Step One: Build your platform
The first step I had to do when building my garden was to actually build the beds to plant my seeds. Why? My yield will be twice as large if I correctly build out the space to let my seeds flourish. It’s something people often forget. The platforms in which your digital marketing strategy lives must also be built before you begin to lay the seeds. To bring this all back to content marketing — properly building out your social media pages, and optimizing your website for conversions needs to be the first step. The idea is that ultimately you will harvest fruit (customers) by growing them through your process organically and then having a site at the end that allows you to convert more paid customers.
Step Two: Lay the Seeds and Wait
In my opinion, this is the most exciting part about gardening. You’ve built the platform for your digital marketing strategy, but now it’s time to actually lay the seeds. What I mean by this is that it’s now time to actually implement the strategies. A digital marketing strategy is very similar to growing Pimento Peppers (one of my favorites). You begin to implement your strategy but it’s all about making sure you take root with your target audience so you can use other tactics to further grow in the future. If the roots are not solid, ultimately the plant will fall on top of itself.
Step Three: Water Everyday and Fertilize Regularly
You can’t go from seed to pepper in a day, just like you can’t go instantly create customers with content marketing. Content Marketing is a long-term strategy. It takes consistent effort and you won’t see the results every day. Social Media is frequently defined by likes, however, that metric misses the most important part of social media. Social Media is about engagement. We want to make sure your target audience engages with your brand as regularly as possible — just as you would need to water that Pimento Plant every day. People buy from brands they recognize and trust. Staying front of mind to your customers should always be one of your primary digital marketing objectives.
Even still, sometimes a little fertilizer can go a long way. Frequently, business owners approach digital marketing as simply ROI linear. What I mean by that is that there is only a linear progression in digital marketing strategies. To most effectively grow your plant, paid advertisements should supplement your efforts rather than be an effort within themselves. Facebook ads are an excellent way to boost blog articles for example, which helps grow your organic traffic to your site. Google PPC Ads can be extremely effective to bring traffic to a lead generation quiz or assessment on your website. If you don’t fertilize your plant properly you may just be wasting money, or even worse, may ultimately kill your plant.
Step Four: The Harvest
If you properly build out your platforms, root yourself correctly in your target market, and consistently focus on solid organic growth, your business will reap the harvest. Just like my pimentos, you may only see only one ripen at first. But digital marketing is about long-term growth. Your presence online will only become more and more important and a strategy that continually produces will become paramount. The next key will be picking the ripe fruits and turning them into customers. The idea behind content marketing is that over time the right clientele will engage with your brand and come to your site ready to be harvested as customers.
Or you can just always go and buy the plants with peppers already on them ready to plant from your nearest nursery. They’ll be cheap and you know you’ll get at least some results. But they won’t’ taste near as good… Need help building your platform or laying your seeds? Reach out to us, we’d be happy to discuss content marketing — or gardening.