The word "analytics" can make some people shudder but analytics are actually a wealth of information for digital marketers.

Why should you be collecting analytical data in the first place?

Regardless of whether you are spending time or money--or both. These are important commodities that need to be utilized in a smart manner.

You wouldn't waste time or money on something that does not provide any return and analytical data can help gauge those answers.

Whether you are addressing website analytics, email analytics, or social media analytics, all data should be evaluated.

Typical scenarios that can help digital marketers when it comes to analytical data can be: -Seeing the bounce rate of users on each web page to see how web pages or landing pages are performing.
-Discovering what type of social media posts create the most engagement with your target audiences.
-Deciding what email campaign you created performed better based on open rates.
-Creating and updating buyer personas based on demographic data collected from engaged users.

You will have to sift through numbers, create tests, and analyze consistently as you continue to build a successful marketing strategy but using analytical data provided by key analytics platforms can create a full picture of focus points where your time, energy, and money are being well-spent and provide a positive return-on-investment.

How do you utilize data analytics in your business?

Analytics can seem intimidating when you look at it all at once but analytics also play an important role with understanding how your efforts in marketing and other publicity are working out.

If you take some main components of your analytics and separate them, you will be able to understand on the individual level and then be able to read your analytics in a more holistic approach.

An example of how you can learn is by looking at some analytics like demographic data, website data, and keyword data separately and then put them together.

Say, you see that women between the ages of 45-60 visit your website after searching for the target keyword "floral arrangements" and most go to the page for anniversary floral arrangements. These are three separate pieces of anaytical data but can paint a story of who your main audience is, what they are looking for, and how to continue to keep them as a customer or convert to a customer.

Analytics in mass can be intimidating but take each piece and write a story with it to create a more easily understood analytical story on your website.

I talk about holistic marketing as my sole approach when I work with my clients.

Typically, they are coming in overwhelmed and need guidance, support, and honestly a business friend to look at their marketing and figure out how to move forward.

What I typically see is different marketing approaches being taken but while they connect under the concept of the small business, there isn't much overlap others.

Many times, the response my clients will give is "I saw I should do this in an article about SEO or I was told I should post this type of content on Facebook from a Youtube video."

Totally fine, I get it, but were these videos made for YOU? Probably not.

Holistic marketing takes all your marketing, connects with the backend of your business, and also reflects YOUR businesses goals, not the one-size-fits-all approach that articles, vlogs, and other business information puts out there.

Framework is key, learning is important, but you need your marketing to reflect YOU or else you will overwhelm yourself in your scaling small business growth.

Let's dive into everything you need to know about holistic marketing and how it helps defeat overwhelm by creating a well-oiled marketing machine.

What is a holistic marketing example?

To get started, let's create a scenario. You are a roof business located in Memphis, TN. You are creating a marketing campaign that covers your service area and gets the word out about your business.

A holistic marketing approach would start with figuring out where your customers consume information about roofing in the Memphis area. Okay, most likely for social media, they may find you on Facebook to learn about your business and reviews. Online search engines they might also look for your ads on Google Search and a Google My Business Listing to house your phone, reviews, and address for local SEO considerations.

Want to offer some helpful tips for upkeep in roofing and signs you need to hire a professional? You might want to consider a Youtube channel as well to present yourself as a thought-leader in the roofing industry in your area.

Collectively, these would be your channels and they all should work together to lead your audience to your website. You do not need to reinvent the wheel because your holistic marketing should work together. Your Facebook page should showcase your work, any sales happening, and how to reach your website. You can share your Youtube videos on your Facebook as well. 

Your Google Ads should include phrasing from both your website for evergreen copy as well as include any sales and other information already created elsewhere. 

The point being is that each of this individual pieces of your marketing work together with the goal to bring in the sale. Whether you are learning and in the awareness stage of the buyers journey or ready to make a final decision and call in the decision stage, or maybe the reviews and sales information creates a scarcity mindset in the consideration stage. They are all working together.

Why is holistic marketing important?

So, we went over the implementation of holistic marketing but WHY is more important.

When I work with clients, they are creating a lot of copy, marketing strategies, and sometimes spinning their wheels on ideas and concepts that lead to overwhelm.

Plus, having so many ideas and no one to share these concepts with can lead to a lot of needless spending (in money and time).

Holistic marketing truly allows small businesses to scale with a goal in mind. When you work with me, we talk about your goals, values, and missions which set the tone for your copy. These concepts already allow me to truly dive into your niche, where your competitors are, where they aren't, and how you can bring your authentic voice into the mix.

The authenticity is key because you bring a uniqueness and personal expertise to the mix.

Knowing this will allow us to know what marketing strategy needs to be in place, how to create authentic copy, and how to connect each piece of copy together. This allows your marketing to become more seamless because the copy is coming from YOU, YOUR VOICE, and YOUR GOALS.

Knowing your social media connects with your enewsletter which then connects to your website can ensure you are not having to change your voice, do things completely different and reinvent the wheel with each marketing piece, and know that collectively no matter where people find you, they will be accessing the same information to lead them to becoming a CLIENT and grow your brand with holistic marketing!

Should your small business use holistic marketing

Are you overwhelmed? Yes.
Do you feel like your marketing does not have a focus? Maybe.
Do you need holistic marketing? Yes.

Holistic marketing simply ensures your voice, mission, and values do not stray from each other. Having a holistic marketing strategy keeps focus on how to create your content, build your marketing plan, and honestly, understand your audience better.

What you are speaking from your WHY, you are attracting others who are also focused on your "why" and who like what you have to say, and what you offer.

Not only will knowing your core audience help with creating an avatar and understand digital analytics but on a more human point, it helps you continue to craft your products, services, or ideas to continue to align with the clients you WANT to attract.

A lot of holistic marketing comes down to attraction, through words, content, marketing, and authenticity.

Let's focus on creating a marketing strategy that works for you, not against you. Let me be the person who cheers you on with marketing, let's you know how amazing you are in your work, and create a digital strategy alongside you that avoids overwhelm and increases customer engagement.

Get on a FREE 30-Minute Strategy Success Call with me to get your goals out there and see how we can build out your own holistic marketing approach.

The first question you may consider is why is mindfulness important in business?

Mindfulness may seem like a word connected to the spiritual realm of self-care but mindfulness can play an important role in your own business.

When I begin to work with clients on their small business marketing goals and strategy, I want to learn about THEM.

By learning about their schedules, fears, goals, and aspirations, I get to know a bit more about their own attachment to their business. What is their zone of genius in their business, how I can create a digital marketing strategy that focuses on increased conversions and decreased overwhelm, and how to authentically get all of this across to the intended audience.

Small business owners tend to get overwhelmed in their marketing (and is the number one reason they typically outsource it) because they are taking into account one-size-fits-all approaches and not being mindful of who THEY are, what their business offers, and who is their TARGET audience.

When you speak to everyone, you speak to no one in marketing so taking that time to key into the "now" in how you are feeling about your marketing can help move you to where you want to go in marketing.

Now, let's consider parts of mindfulness in marketing and how to approach and apply mindfulness in marketing.

When a conversation begins between myself and a client, I ask them to name their goals in the short-term and mid-term sense (6 months to a year). While this isn't the present moment, this gives me a clear idea of where they want to be.

Then, I ask "So what about your marketing is working right now?" and this is where they typically get stumped. They aren't sure about what is or isn't working because they have come to a point in their scaling business where they are doing marketing for the sake of knowing they need to be out there because it drives business.

What they are no longer doing is checking analytics, seeing how their marketing is resonating, and actually keying into the moment and seeing "does this marketing work for me or does it feel inauthentic?"

The world of social media and digital marketing gives so much advice about the best tips for social media success or how to gain your first 10K followers in a week but while these are articles to take note of, they do not reflect the scaling small business YOU are creating. The nuances of your life are not taken into account which is where many small business owners fall into overwhelm.

My goal is to understand your goals, your aspirations, you current digital marketing strategy, and meet you where your scaling business will continue to grow but in a way that reflects your business authentically and will not overwhelm.

How to Be a Better Marketer Through Mindfulness

Overcome Marketing Overwhelm

The first step in mindful marketing is to take what is happening in your business's growth in the present and attach that to how you are feeling about your marketing. Are you overwhelmed? Are there parts of your marketing you need to offload? Do you no longer have time to learn and optimize your marketing for continued growth?

Key into these feelings, attach them to their current analytics and data, and this will help paint a better picture of how to move forward in marketing. Remember, break marketing goals into smaller, more measurable goals to avoid analysis paralysis.

Find Clarity in Marketing Goals

Along the same lines as overcoming the marketing overwhelm, you want to find clarity in your goals. What digital marketing goals will help your business move forward? How many products or service offerings do you need to sell to make ends meet? How much do you want to make at the end of Q3 this year? How many hours a week do you want to spend on marketing?

Knowing these goals both on the increase in sales and services and decrease in time spent on marketing and overwhelm are all a part of your marketing goals. Finding clarity is what is important to your business growth and sustainability and knowing when to outsource to focus on your zone of genius is key to mindful marketing.

Define and Measure Marketing Objectives

Defining marketing objectives becomes easier once you understand your goals and where the overwhelm in your marketing is coming from.

It is easier to state "I want to create about $15,000 in marketing revenue by the end of the year," when you know what marketing feels authentic and is working for your business and also in unison with your own personal business goals for your scaling business.

Taking the time to get these objectives down in your marketing and create a strategy behind them in key and taking the time to make sure you are creating short and mid-term goals on how to approach these objectives through goal setting and outsourcing to decrease overwhelm will open up the time and space to truly focus on how you serve your customers best.

Understand Your Target Audience Better

When you are clear on who you are and how you are feeling, you understand your mission and values of your scaling business better and as a (helpful) side effect, can understand your target audience more.

When you throw spaghetti at the wall with your marketing and see what sticks, you are simply trying a whole bunch of different ideas but you might not be able to determine which audience is YOUR audience without taking that step into mindfulness.

What sounds right? What feels authentic? What social platforms make sense to YOU? How do you write? What is your company voice?

So many questions but all can lead to better understanding and less guessing.

Create Better Price-Points For Your Business

Pricing may be the hardest part of any business, especially when it comes to both creating those prices and marketing them accordingly.

You might begin to see others in your niche marketing their prices and you might fall into the scarcity mindset of lowering your prices to stay competitive or downplaying the investment of your products of services. This isn't marketing and it isn't mindful of your time and value.

Knowing your price points and being able to market them accordingly because you know your value, voice, and audience, all come into play in mindful marketing. You are no longer in competition from a scarcity mindset because your digital marketing strategy conveys WHY your pricing is a certain price-point and how you help meet the needs of your audience.

The above will allow you to become clear on your digital marketing goals so that it becomes clear on how you want to best spend your time in your business and how to work with a digital marketing specialist to understand your scaling business needs and how to reflect your values and voice to your intended audience.

Seem a little bit scary? No need to feel alone on this journey. You have me to help you work through your strategy and implementation to create a mindful marketing approach to increase customer engagement and decrease the digital marketing overwhelm.

Let's connect, visit sardegeorge.com/contact-sarah.html to schedule your call with me and let's get your digital marketing strategy optimized so you can get back to your zone of genius in YOUR business.

Have you heard yourself say "I need to scale my marketing efforts" because you are overwhelmed?

You woke up one day and all of a sudden the customers were coming in and your business was expanding! That’s great but it can also be a scary time when you begin to feel those growing pains and overwhelm because you simply can’t keep track of everything and need to ask for help.

Sooner or later, many small business owners find themselves in this position. They’ve grown quickly (yay, you!), and now they have so many things on their plate that it’s hard to know what to focus on.

Because, let’s be honest …Growth in business is great! But, when the money is coming in and customers need to be taken care of, marketing tends to go on the backburner.

That’s why you need a digital marketing specialist and that’s why hiring someone to oversee and implement your marketing is hands down the best decision you can make for your business so that you can scale with ease.

Here are four reasons why you need to hire a digital marketer for your scaling small business.

The cost and revenue benefits of hiring a digital marketing specialist

Cost may be the reason why you haven't outsourced your digital marketing yet but it should be the reason you decide to hire a digital marketing specialist. When you are focused on your digital marketing on top of your daily business expectations, you are leaving money on the table.

You may have your own zone of genius when it comes to customer-facing sales or even might find that you enjoy tasks that involve in-person marketing such as tabling and trade shows (depending on your work) or even enjoy the creation of marketing content but not necessarily the marketing aspect of it.

When you are spread too thin, you can't possibly do what works best for you and if marketing feels like an extra task, you are doing a disservice by not letting an expert take on this portion while you are out creating business in your own way.

If you typically make $1,000 in profit due to your own efforts in marketing, that's great and sometimes, scarcity mindset creeps in when you consider hiring on a digital marketing specialist on retainer for more than you pull in.

Now consider, if you pay your digital marketing specialist a retainer of $2,000 per month and they create $5,000 in profits due to focused marketing optimizations, you just made a $3,000 profit versus scraping by and doing it yourself and only bringing in $1,000 in profit.

The knowledge a digital marketing specialist brings to your digital strategy

You might be able to understand social media basics or create graphics in Canva but can you put all of this together in a unified and holistic marketing approach?

When you hire a digital marketing consultant who knows how to connect your social media to your website and understands the buyers journey, you have someone looking into all aspects of the business.

You also will have someone looking closely at the analytics, not just posting, but seeing how those posts attract (or don't attract) customers and will adjust accordingly.

The focused approach of hiring digital marketing talent when it comes to marketing optimization

When a digital marketing specialist works with you, they are focused on your work. They may work with other clients but when it is time to look at your data, analytics, and digital marketing strategy, you are their focus.

They are not worried about your accounting, your inventory, or your products or services, they want to make sure your succeed through optimized digital marketing strategy.

Similar to the above discussion about a $3,000 profit vs. $1,000, when you are focused on too many different parts of your business, you can't be successful in all aspects but having someone coming in laser-focused on your digital landscape and how to attract customers through digital marketing, you can step back and work on the parts of your business that need your attention the most, all while avoiding the overwhelmed feeling of a small business owner stretched too thin.

The tech skills a digital marketing specialist brings to the discussion

Knowing analytics and how to navigate social media are only two aspects of a digital marketing specialist but they come with so much more data.

Some typical skills a digital marketing specialist comes in with are:
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• Data Analytics
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Paid Marketing (Google Ads & Bing)
• Social Media Marketing 
• Email Marketing
• Content Marketing

If you are having trouble in your website when it comes to digital marketing efforts, a digital marketing consultant may be able to offer insight into your websites site speed, alt-text needs, and also if you have title tags and meta descriptions in your website.

This information can help your target audience find you and stay on your website which is the goal, even with social media marketing and other digital marketing aspects at play.

Beyond the website, digital marketing specialists can help look into not only who is interacting with your digital efforts but how and why they make certain decisions based on where the leads are coming from, what they are saying about you online, and can take this data and turn it into a story about your scaling small business.

Data is key and sometimes overlooked by a scaling small business owner who only has time to make a post or write a blog but does not have the capacity or time to learn how to analyze this data.

Need more convincing? Here is another great article from business.com on why to hire a digital marketing consultant.

Don't go at this alone, let me be the person who takes the overwhelm out of your marketing strategy and helps create a plan structured to allow you to continue to scale your business in a way that feels right to you. Less overwhelm, more customer engagement.

Let's connect, visit sardegeorge.com/contact-sarah.html to schedule your call with me and let's get your digital marketing strategy optimized so you can get back to your zone of genius in YOUR business.

Let's face it, digital marketing can become a large undertaking with all the information out there.

You are told constantly about the advantages of digital marketing or the battle between traditional marketing vs. digital marketing with no shortage or suggestions and personal opinions.

While knowing what time is the best time to post on Instagram or the top reasons you should have a blog on your website are important factors, one piece that typically is missing is why authenticity is important in digital marketing.
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When you come down to it advertising through digital marketing should ALWAYS come from an authentic standpoint. Why? Because the most important part of any digital marketing strategy is how you can connect with YOUR audience.

Does this sound a bit overwhelming? It probably does which is why so many clients come to me with this problem in their digital marketing management.

"How do I bring authenticity into my marketing?" 

This is a question I get a lot or they wonder the importance.

When you are authentic, especially online with your advertising and digital marketing for your business, you are coming from a place of truth. You are not copying someone else in hopes of creating the same success as them. Most likely, the reason someone else is successful in their digital marketing is because THEY are coming from an authentic position in their marketing.

How can I be authentic in my digital marketing?

• Share at the comfort level you feel is best for your business including behind-the-scenes looks at your daily business life and the people behind your work--including yourself if you are a solopreneur.
• Showcase your "why" in your digital strategy because if you are driven by a reason to sell a product or offer a service, there are others out there who feeling similarly and would want to work with YOU as opposed to someone else.
• Write with personality. It is easy to write blogs, social media posts, and other digital marketing material but that little bit of "you" in how you write will attract people who enjoy what you have to say and how you want to say it.
• Pick the platforms in which come naturally to you. Are you a wordsmith? Then email marketing or content marketing in written form may be your natural spot to shine. Are you more of a video person? Then creating a TikTok or Instagram Reel platform may be where you stand out with your personality, content, and message to your target audience and customers.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to digital marketing which is why reading best practices of social media marketing or understanding SEO basics are just the tip of the iceberg in your marketing strategy and should also include the most important part which is YOU, your businesses personality, and how you are unique.

You might think your industry is saturated but sitting down, looking at your marketing goals, and coming up with where, how, and why you are unique can truly create an authentic digital marketing strategy to implement.

Don't go at this alone, let me be the person who takes the overwhelm out of your marketing strategy and helps create a plan structured to allow you to continue to scale your business in a way that feels right to you. Less overwhelm, more customer engagement, and most of all, authenticity.

Let's connect, visit sardegeorge.com/contact-sarah.html to schedule your call with me and let's get your digital marketing strategy optimized so you can get back to your zone of genius in YOUR business.

Search engine optimization or (SEO) has been a phrase that has been a while for a while.

What used to be a way to easily up your rankings on search engines by keyword stuffing (adding many keywords to a website to rank) and black-hat link building (creating a lot of low quality linking websites or spammy links) has now become a bit more organized.

Unfortunately, that means you can no longer trick search engines with the above and need a solid SEO strategy to begin to organically rank on the SERP's to the coveted first page search results.

Having a good content strategy is key with SEO and content means everything from your website copy, meta descriptions, blogs, and alt text, along with all other organic efforts. SEO calls for a lot of unison between all copy you have out there.

Website Copy

This can be your hero section paragraph, services page, or about me. You want your website copy to be thorough, easily scanned by readers, and offer keywords you wish to rank for in a conversational way. This copy can also help with meta data pulled from your web pages into search engine results.

Blogs

Your blogs are a great way to practice SEO by creating informative copy to your audience to present yourself as a thought-leader and drive action to your website. Ensure blogs are optimized to be easily read on different devices, involve key phrases in spots such as the title, headers, and within the paragraphs (used conversationally). Updating your blog with new content or updating older blogs is also good for SEO boosts.

Alt-text

An often missed website SEO opportunity is alt-text for images. Search engines can read alt-text provided for images for when they cannot load. Providing key words and location based phrasing can help search engines know your picture is a "couple standing outside of City Hall in Philadelphia after sunset."

​The list of ways to optimize your website and search results for SEO is endless but this is a starting point to help understand what SEO is and why it is important for slower but sustainable growth for your website's ranking on search engines.

There is a more more one can learn about search engine optimization best practices and considerations for both on-page SEO and off-page SEO.

Still overwhelmed and need a digital marketing specialist to help you with your business digital marketing? Get in contact with me at https://www.sardegeorge.com/contact-sarah.html and let's chat about your business marketing goals.