Ewans Top Digital Marketing Tips

Here are useful links to the free digital marketing resources referred to by Ewan Colville of Sunstone Digital Instagram LIVE chats with Adrian Richards on Instagram.

Starting with links to apply for Google’s and Facebook’s small business grant schemes:

Google’s COVID-19 Small Business (SMB) grant scheme: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9803410?hl=en-GB
Facebook’s COVID-19 Small Business grants (click locations, enter UK and sign-up): https://www.facebook.com/business/boost/grants

There’s also a ton of links to more free resources in Ewan’s article at this link https://www.sunstoneagency.com/tourism-marketing-tactics-for-coronavirus-interruption/. While the article is intended for tourism businesses, points 4-10 are relevant for any small business.

LOCAL WEBSITE RANKINGS

Ewan mentioned Hotjar (here’s the link) which is an excellent website performance tool. Its’ basic model, likely all you’ll need, is free. Just create an account, install the hubspot code on your site and it’ll start creating heatmaps of your key webpages. You can also use Hubspot to playback recordings of sessions on your site (showing in real-time where people move their cursor and click) and create mini-surveys that pop-up on your site.

When it comes to local SEO, Google My Business is vital to have properly set-up and optimised. Here’s a great local SEO ‘how-to’ from Joshua Hardwick of AHREFS (at this link), which is packed with actionable tips and includes a step-by-step Google My Business set-up.

Ewan mentioned a tip to create a one-click link for inviting five-star reviews on your Google My Business. It uses your Google map ID, which is something you get when your Google My Business is verified. All you need do is generate the url link (see below) and email it to your customers asking them to be kind enough and leave a review on Google for your business. OK, two links to accomplish this task:

Instruction from Google
And, assuming you already have a Google My Business page and Google map ID, here’s a review link generator from risingstarreviews.

FACEBOOK MARKETING:

Boosted Posts; A starting point for facebook advertising is to loop back and analyse the effectiveness of your post reach, i.e. organic (regular) posts on your business facebook
- Using facebook insights, you’ll understand better what % of your facebook followers your posts reach on average (industry averages are between 20-35%)
- Use the Instagram insights tool via the Instagram app to see how effective your IG posts are
- With this knowledge you can make better decisions about boosting posts, which is a jumping-off point for facebook advertising
- If you’ve created a post with an offer (or one that’s just a great piece of content) and its likely to reach 25% of your FB or IG followers, then it’s a no-brainer to boost to ALL your FB and IG followers. This might only require a boosted post budget of £35
- And you can boost a post easily from your facebook page without getting too immersed in the Ad Manager tool
Using the Facebook Ad Manager tool you can advance to more sophisticated campaign tactics:
- Create prospecting audiences local to your clinic and who match the profile of your regular or desired customer type. Get as granular as you want to with audiences, but watch the estimated reach facebook shows for the campaign. You don’t want audiences too small (<2,000) and nor do you want them massive. For a local clinic, a rough gauge would be circa 10K in a local audience
- Use the ad managers geo-targeting to precision target postcodes or outlying commuter towns – or to simply target a close radius around your clinic. Common sense and local knowledge will get you through this
- Create a retargeting audience of people visiting your site (this requires you dropping your facebook ad account pixel onto your website – best get your developer to help)
- Create a Look-a-like audience of local people who match the same characteristics as people visiting your site
- Video content (in a video ad) will drive engagement fivefold, but follow the golden rules for social video:
  - Keep it short (30-60s)
  - Shoot vertical (or square)
  - Clinics should avoid showing needles or blood
  - Use captions (you need a video edit tool for that)
For the current COVID-19 business interruption, you might consider a brand awareness campaign (this is a campaign objective you can select in ad manager) with the call-to-action to follow your clinic on facebook and/or Instagram (or visit your site). Here you would target new prospects in your clinic’s vicinity
Facebook’s BluePrint Academy is free and has multiple online modules to get your facebook ad skills up to scratch. There are 75+ modules, but don’t be intimidated. There are a few beginners modules that walk you through the basics. Each module is maybe 60mins to complete and you get a certificate for each one you pass. Here’s a link https://www.facebook.com/business/learn