Do the marketing parts and pieces align with your company’s strategy vision? (If you aren’t sure what your company’s strategic vision is, let’s talk.) Are you set up – either internally or externally – to bring together your marketing systems and have their outcomes effect the same goals? Are those channels where your ideal audience easily receives it?

At Visual Thrive, we begin overall digital marketing strategy with a Discovery Session that educates us about what we call The Golden Triangle. Our focus is Main Street growth, serving those small to mid-market companies with annual revenue around $10 million or more.

You may have heard this term, Golden Triangle, if you’ve played Halo Wars or traveled to Thailand. But in the game of marketing, the Golden Triangle is all about turning up or turning down the dials that create a solid, successful strategy when it comes to delivering positive results and business growth.

Our Golden Triangle includes a responsive website, search engine optimization (SEO), and social media. They play very, very well together even when only one of them is winning at a given time.

Basically, this concept acts like a rock, paper, scissors system within the marketing game. One wins against the others, then the second one steps forward, and so on. This three-pronged approach allows for dial adjustment every quarter when we review the data. The data is our scorekeeper, the tools execute our decisions, and our experience is the compass.

The winning strategy combo is use data, tools and experience (or research) to consistently deliver SEO, a responsive tailored website, and social media conversions. That’s more like the game of Bowling. In the big broad world of digital everything, SEO finds your people. It shepherds them to you when they are lost and searching. Their queries are answered by being delivered to your website.

Your website is where your customers learn more about the bones of your work and how you will solve their problems.

When we are approached to design and develop websites, we’ll take a hard look at the SEO implementation, because it’s not always easily apparent. We had one potential client tell us he paid a firm over $11,000 for SEO, and there was nothing apparent to be found for that spend.

Needless to say, SEO is super important because it brings your audience to you, but more-importantly you’ve got to trust your marketing firm who’s implementing it.

Ask them to see what’s really going on under the hood.

Onward… Your customers will go to your website and see how you can work together to solve their problems.

Visual Thrive focuses on becoming the marketing arm for businesses that have little or no marketing employees, and want to focus on their own business instead learning how to execute successful marketing. We slide in work together.

Your website is your digital front door. How are you welcoming your audience? The key to a great website is ease. Plain and simple. Ease on the eyes. Ease of understanding the personality of your company. (Visuals lead the pack, so easy on the stock photos!) Ease finding information. Ease reading and informing. Ease contacting you.

If you haven’t reviewed what the world sees when they find you, go take a look right now.

And now for the third point…

Social media. It also moves your audience to your website. Social media tells your company’s story all the time. It changes all the time. Is your social media creating an authentic voice, a peek behind the scenes, or a company style that resonates with your customers? Social media is often how your audience evaluates if they ‘get’ you, and want to be “friends.”

A great social media feed will inform your audience.

• Do your company’s values resonate with theirs?

• Do your employees enjoy their work at your company?

• Do the owners of your company jump into the fray or not?

• Is fun happening at your place of business?

• How successful at you at your work?

• Are your Followers real? Or are they Memorex? (You have to be a certain age to get that one ;-).

Next time, let’s review the best practices around the media that works best; and the best ways to display and promote your company.

By starting with your evaluation of your Golden Triangle, you are creating a great foundation for success. If you’d like to chat about what you have, or what you need, contact us. One of us LOVES to talk!

Take a three-pronged approach to a great marketing foundation.

As a social media management & marketing firm in Rhode Island, Visual Thrive considers the ongoing development of your original content and visuals key to what we do, and in today’s world it’s no different, Like every business owner, we also consider the need to shift in times like this.

Visual Thrive is a boutique social media agency delivering high-end business-centric social media. Our approach is, and will always be, to speak openly and authentically with businesses that want to work with us. We believe a rising tide raises all ships, and we approach all of our work with this in mind.

Before we jump into how we raise our clients, let me say that more often than not, clients tell us about their less-than-stellar experiences working with marketing agencies. The agency that did their graphic design or their website tells them they can handle their social media. They can’t, and they don’t do it well.

The client ends up spending a boatload of money, and they decide to…

Most entrepreneurs know in their bones that what they’re doing is meaningful. Every client we have knows the “how” and “why” they began their business.

Pablo Picasso said the work of our life is to find our purpose – the thing we know in our hearts we do better than most – and share it. Many people take their purpose and become an entrepreneur, developing a small business.

Small business defined by the US SBA, depending on your industry, is a business with a maximum of 250 employees, or even 1,500 employees. It could also be defined by a maximum of $750,000 to $38.5 million in average annual receipts. Doesn’t seem so “small,” right?

It almost immediately makes one think about how BIG their small business can grow!

Besides having the stomach for rollercoasters, entrepreneurs have an onslaught of options when it comes to marketing, communicating, and selling their company’s goods or services. When Visual Thrive sits down with a potential client, here are the things we like to review when it comes to social media marketing: