Marketing Tools – Margaret D. Minuth

Marketing Basics for Beginners: Where Do I Being with Online Marketing?

Whether you join a company that’s been in operation for years, you create your own business, or you join a start-up, every business needs some basic company assets. If the company is already established and has an online presence, you’ll want to audit the tools they use to make sure they are working properly and that they are the most efficient as well as cost-effective for your particular needs.

I’ve selected these Priority Assets as a starting point:

Company Website – if your business is a Your Money Your Life (YMYL) category such as finance, health, legal, and more, you need to know Google’s guidelines for these industries while creating the content for your website.

Social Media Profile(s) – you don’t need them all! Pick up to 3 where your customers play and build your skills with these. Regardless of the three you select, you need to also have LinkedIn and a Yelp! Business profiles.

Google Analytics Account – without the ability to measure who comes to your website, from where they came, where they go on your page, and where they leave, you lose the basics to understand your customer. There’s so much you can learn about your company’s online presence with this essential tool.

Google Search Console Account – this service helps you check how your website functions online by identifying any key issues such as if your website is mobile friendly (“optimized for mobile”) and is indexing properly by the Googlebots.

Google Ads Account – if you plan on doing any paid advertising, you need Ads linked to your Analytics. Also, when you become proficient, Google Tag Manager can help you with a variety of tasks that you can manage on your own without asking a developer to add additional code to your website with each campaign or task. While I’m not a fan of Bing and have never seen any valuable results when using it, if this search engine works for you, you will need to create a Bing Ads Account as well. Yahoo as well, maybe (does that still work?), LOL.

Google My Business Profile for each location – claim your locations on Google maps to respond to your reviews. You can also build a stronger profile so Google has more information on your company to give to users as Google moves further away from serving up company websites during search results. While Bing is not a heavy player in any market, you’ll want to claim your company’s Bing Places profile.

A citation data management tool such as Yext will submit your company’s critical NAP(name, address, phone) information to dozens upon dozens of local directories online that you may not even know exist. While many directories are useless, Google still sees their signals as valuable enough to make a difference if old, inaccurate data about your company remains online. There are some directories such as Yellow Pages (the Real Yellow Pages – beware of fake ones!), Foursquare, Chamber of Commerce.com, Hot Frog, Superpages, and the Better Business Bureau pages are some you may want to claim your own profiles, if you can.

Google Alerts – set up an alert using key business phrases along with your company name so you know when and if your company is being discussed online in articles or blogs by a third party.

While this is not nearly an exhaustive list, it’s a good start for getting your business online accurately.

My favorite online tool for work, play, and everything in between

I love to create gardens. Not just any gardens, but spaces that flow and have areas of interest with plants you don’t find at Home Depot or Lowes. Sure, I’ve gotten some great deals there, but I’ve primarily shopped online with specialty tree suppliers through eBay or on their own websites.

Back in 2014, my father and I rebuilt the entrance to my house with rocks, stone, concrete, and a myriad of Japanese maples and conifers. I thought it was time to actually catalog my investment and keep a diary of “how does your garden grow” because we’re not talking a dozen plants and trees – we’re talking over 70 plants.

I needed a way to visually track their growth, record what I paid for each and where I purchased them, what warranty they had, when they’d bloom or fruit, when to fertilize, make notes about their health, and map their location in my garden. The most important feature of my catalog though was pictures! Pictures of what the mature specimens looked like, what the plant looked like when it arrived, and images throughout the years to show how it had grown. You can’t do that with Excel.

Enter AIRTABLE.

This tool is simply incredible. I created a complete database with full photos where I can view my trees and plants in “cards” with full pictures or a database. I can filter and sort results which gives me the chance to see what other species I want to add to my garden.

And this was the beginning of my love affair with Airtable. Since then, I’ve told dozens of creative friends and peers about the tool, and because I provided them a referral link, I’ve received credits in my account, although I’ve never used them. I still have a free account because it’s enough for what I need. Soon after discovering it, I began using Airtable at work for creative projects (production calendar for a magazine), budgets, directories of VIPs, and simple short-term projects.

One Thanksgiving weekend on Black Friday ( I do not leave home that day, no-sir-ee!) when my mom came to visit, we were looking for something to binge-watch since Downton Abbey had ended earlier that year. Being a fan of Korean dramas (K-dramas) since 2010, I thought she’d enjoy a fun romantic fantasy called “Legend of the Blue Sea.” She loved it and started watching K-dramas on her own. During Christmas when I went to visit, we watched “Descendants of the Sun” (“DOTS” in fan-speak), and that was the start of her obsession (like daughter, like mother).

While I’ve taken several Korean language classes at Wake Tech and have watched a decade of K-dramas, I have a better understanding of the language than my octogenarian mother. We had a bit of a language barrier when she would call me to tell me about a new actor she found and would totally butcher his name. She had been keeping a box of index cards with the actors names and shows, but she had no pictures, bless her heart. She didn’t have Airtable. So I created us a shared database of K-Actors with pictures and movie posters so we can have Hangul-centric conversations. Right now, we have over 140 actors so we can giggle over.

As a marketing pro by trade, I keep my eyes out for cloud-based tools that let me do things easier, smarter, and more efficiently. This tool is absolutely incredible. Trust me. It’s addictive. Just give it a try and see how much easier you can organize ANYTHING.