Hey 👋

Welcome to Neighbourhood Post issue #4 - easy to implement digital marketing ideas straight through your metaphorical letterbox.

This email is about making things easy. 

So in that spirit, let’s skip the fluff and get to it.

A framework for making marketing easy 😌

I heard a quote attributed to Einstein this week:

"Make everything as simple as possible but no simpler"

Who knows if he actually said it, but let’s go with it. It got me thinking: Do we overcomplicate digital marketing?

I think we probably do, but we can follow good old Albert’s advice.

Making digital marketing simple for us means making it simple for our audience to get what they want.

I thought I’d translate that into a framework you can use to make things easy. The framework focuses on three areas:

1. Make it easy for people to find you

2. Make it easy for people to choose

3. Make it easy for people to take action

If you focus on those three areas, you will see big improvements.

Let’s go through one-by-one:

1. Make It Easy For People To Find You

Q: You’re a brand in the 90s, how do you get people to notice you?

A: You pay for billboards, TV ads, radio placements, print ads and more.

In some ways it was easier to get people to find you back then, but it was more expensive.

Digital has made it cheaper to get people to find you.

Here are a few ideas you could try:

Run collaborator campaigns on Instagram - Identify people with larger followings who align with your vision. Plan a creative campaign that includes them.

Run paid social campaigns - It’s the most costly option, but running ads on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok is the easiest way to reach new audiences.

Optimise social media for reach - Stop using social media as a way to get people to your website, instead use it for what it’s good at; expanding your audience.

Run Google Ads - Find people at the point they’re searching for you. (Note: if you’re a charity, you can easily get $10,000 of free monthly ad spend.)

Sponsor podcasts in your niche - Explore options in the podcast space - even smaller podcasts can get good results if you find the right ones.

Are you getting in front of enough people?

2. Make It Easy to Choose

I went to buy some mouthwash this week (rock & roll) and this is what I was greeted with:

Sure, there are bigger problems in 2023, but I had no clue which one was best for me. I just wanted mouthwash. 🦷

When you present people with too many options you put them in a position of cognitive overload. When people arrive on your website, do you make it easy for them to make a choice?

Here are some questions to think through:

• Do you talk about too many different things on social media?

• Can people understand what you offer within 15 seconds of being on your website?

• If you had to distill the choice you want your audience to make into one sentence, what would it be?

The more choice we offer, the higher the cognitive load and the more likely someone is to walk away.

3. Make It Easy To Take Action

When someone has made their choice, how easy is it for them to get what they want?

The best thing to track here is the conversion rate of your website.

Whether you’re selling something or asking for donations, tracking your conversion rate will tell you how easy it was for someone to take action.

The higher the percentage, the easier it was for them to give you their money.

There are a few things that impact your conversion rate percentage, but the biggest is how easy your website is to navigate, and how good a job it does of selling the benefits of what you offer.

If you want to optimise your website’s conversion rate, take a look at Roast My Landing Page. 🔥🍗

Ollie ‘roasts’ landing pages, giving you an insight into best practice, and how to remove the barriers that stand in the way of people taking action.

And for an advanced tip: study how the conversion rate changes between different channels. Are people more likely to convert from email, social, organic search, content, referral websites etc.? That might help you prioritise channels effectively.

🏁

How easy is your marketing at the moment? Maybe I’m oversimplifying it. Would love to know your thoughts - just hit reply.

See you next week ✌️

What we’re looking at 👀 and listening to 👂

📚 Emma’s returning to a favourite of hers: The Examined Life. It’s a collection of stories from a psychoanalyst, across 25 years of seeing patients. Worth a read if you’re up for a period of introspective reflection.

📺 WE ALL LOVE BECKHAM ⚽️ 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 ❤️

Before you go - we’ll never use these newsletters to directly sell you our services, but we’re always here if you need any expertise or support 👍