Online Digital Asset Planning for Your Business

March 7, 2018

“Online Digital Asset Planning for Your Business” written by Mike Marko.

What are the elements of your internet marketing plan?

Many who are promoting their business online often don’t put a lot of thought into the platforms they use to promote their business. They may have a website, and maybe Facebook, Twitter, and a couple other social media platforms.

But little thought is put into their overall plan.

When I have go through this exercise with my clients, it is often an eye opening experience… social media starts to make sense in how it’s used.

That’s why today I want to take the time to talk to you about your online digital assets and how they all work together. I’m going to expand on the previous blog posts, How to Promote your Business with Pervasive Presence™ and The Key To Making Pervasive Presence(TM) Work for You and Your Business.

Your Online Digital Asset Plan

Previously we talked about your target customer, customer avatar, and customer pain points… all important parts of creating your digital asset plan.

Before we dive into your digital asset plan, let’s first answer the question….

What Is an Online Digital Asset

A digital asset is really any platform you have online: but something that is hosted (like Facebook) or self-hosted (like a WordPress website that you pay for the hosting separate).

I like to refer to digital assets as your pieces of real estate online.

Digital assets can include:

Self-hosted websites (like WordPress)
Hosted website (like Squarespace)
Blog network website (like Medium)
Subscription to a personal Facebook account
Facebook business page
Facebook group
Instagram account
Twitter account
YouTube channel
LinkedIn personal account
LinkedIn business page
Adwords account
Bing account
Google business page
Local directory account (eg. Yelp)
Reddit account

And the list goes on.

Each of these may be used as a digital asset for your business.

Selecting the Digital Assets for Your Business

Let’s face it… you can’t do it all.

There are literally dozens if not hundreds of digital assets you can use and manage. But it would be a huge cost of time (and money) to manage everything you could.

So you have to make choices.

Selecting the right digital assets to use for your business should be based on the work you did on your target audience and customer avatar. Those exercises can be used now to help you pick where you want to focus your attention.

Your Primary Website

Your primary website is the center of your digital business universe. It is one of the very few digital assets you have complete control over.

That’s why I recommend that your primary website be self-hosted.

I would not recommend using a platform such as SquareSpace to be your primary website platform. You don’t have full control. Tomorrow something *could* happen to a platform like SquareSpace and you may no longer have a website.

Sure it is a remote chance… but I learned from personal experience that the risk is often higher than you think. Prior to having a self-hosted site, I’ve had my website on what I thought was a solid platform only to much later have problems with the platform being down frequently, and eventually shutting down (in this case the main cause was hackers).

I’ve also known people trying to use free platforms for their primary website shut down a year later, and they lost all their work with no recourse.

With my own self-hosted website I’m in control of my website. I can control the security, the access, and really have control over how the website looks.

The few challenges and some extra costs I have with having a self-hosted website don’t come close to outweighing the advantages.

Your Primary Social Media Channel

The next step is picking your primary social media channel. Your primary social media selection can be based on several criteria:

Where your target customers are most likely to be
Easy to customize to reflect your brand and messaging
Has a direct messaging feature that facilitates you communicating with your customers.
Can help showcase the content you create

For example, if you are a consultant that is looking to help businesses then you make choose a platform like LinkedIn or Facebook as your primary social media channel.

You should use a significant amount of your time and social media marketing budget building up this platform. It should be congruent with your website brand and messaging. And it should be optimized for SEO (you can rank social media channels in Google).

Your Secondary Social Media Channels

As part of your omnipresence, and ultimately Pervasive Presence™ engine, strategy you need to take advantage of other social media channels.

Now the goal here is be selective in what social media channels you use.

With most of my clients, we can often limit their social media channels to the following:

Facebook: typically used for business-to-business (B2B) marketing, and to a slightly order demographic.
LinkedIn: used for B2B marketing.
Instagram: used to market to a slightly younger demographic (like millennials).
Twitter: used for B2B marketing, and to faster paced demographic.
YouTube: used to market to the more visual audiences, and to people doing “How To” searches.

You have already selected your primary social media channel in the previous section, so now use this list to remove one or two social media platforms that are NOT relevant to your target audience (if any).

For example, for clients relatively new to internet marketing (and who only want to have a couple secondary social media channels) I’ve agreed that they can drop Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn because they worked off referrals and the goal of the marketing campaign was more about building social proof and retargeting ads.

However, chances are that you can probably make use of all five social media channels in your business marketing. That includes YouTube if you can create at least one video to promote your business.

Start Creating Your Social Media Map

This is the most important step… putting it all together.

When you start planning the omnipresence part of the Pervasive Presence™ framework, you have to structure things to create your “Web on the Internet”. Think of it as structuring your fishing net.

Start with a piece of paper and draw a small box in the center of the page. Write in the box, “Website”.

Then just offset to the website box, draw another box and write in it the name of your primary social media channel. I put “Facebook” as mine, but yours may be different.

Draw an arrow going from the website to the primary social media channel, and then an arrow from the primary social media channel to the website. This represents the flow of traffic between your website and your primary social media channel.

The goal is to keep traffic in this nucleus within itself.

When I first started, I didn’t know how to direct my traffic and sent them everywhere… and it became a lot of work maintaining. By following this strategy you will help keep your traffic where you want to nurture them.

Now draw a circle that encompasses most of the page. The website box should be the center of that circle.

Draw a square boxes on this circle, and label them, to represent your secondary social media channels.

Then draw arrows from each secondary social media channel to the website. You always want to try and drive traffic to your website where possible.

Then draw arrows from the secondary social media channels to your primary social media channel. People on social media often want to stay on social media, and this allows you to help facilitate this desire.

Social media also allows you to foster a long term relationship with your customers, and our primary social media channel is the best place to do this.

When you add in other digital assets, you get an overall “net” or “web” that is setup to help find and attract your customers and future customers to learn more about your business, allowing you to nurture trust.

With all these elements, you now have a digital asset plan that can help you implement the omnipresence part of the Pervasive Presence™ engine.

And by having your traffic move to the center of your “digital world” you have better control of the messaging and better leverage your precious time.

Final Words About The Online Digital Asset Planning for Your Business

In this blog post, we talked about how you can start your online digital asset planning to help you make the Pervasive Presence™ framework work for your business. Your digital assets help you create your “net” or “web” to help find and attract customers to your business. Keep in mind that it’s only part of the Pervasive Presence™ system. You also need to be relevant to your audience AND have a level of intimacy with them, then you will grow your business more effectively than anyone else.

If you need help with designing and implementing your online digital assets, and implementing the Pervasive Presence™ to help you scale up your business, then you should take a look at our “Results in Advance” program.

We start with a 30-60 minute free consultation where we together create a strategy that will grow your business effectively. Its actually a strategy session where you’ll walk away with actionable steps you can take to increase your business revenue. By the end, you can either take what we discussed and run with it yourself or we can agree to work together to crush your results!

If you want to learn about how to qualify for our “Results in Advance” program, please feel free to reach out to us by clicking the button below.

P.S. – If you like this post, feel free comment down below and/or share on Facebook.

Have questions and want to connect?

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http://www.Facebook.com/mike.marko.37

Author: Mike Marko
Click here to contact Mike

If you want a system to help you rank in Google just like I do, then check out IM Consultant Services.

Article: Online Digital Asset Planning for Your Business

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