How do you establish a digital presence within 1 year?

Sam is a friend. She's trying to get a job as a Director of Digital Marketing in the Consumer Product Goods (CPG) industry. We're trying to help her establish a digital presence that will better position her for interviews and career progression. Sam has a budget of $5,000 to spend on our recommendations over the next year.

Announce your company to the digital marketplace.

How do we help establish a digital presence with a small budget of time and money?

We get creative! Sam doesn't have a lot of time or money to spend, but the good news is that online marketing doesn't have to take all of your time or be expensive.  We have narrowed the focus of her time and financial budgets down to 10 areas over the next year to help guide her in building her CPG online marketing presence.

Top 10 areas to aid digital presence:

1. Website design for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
2. Blogs
3. Mobile optimization and mobile marketing
4. Paid search vs. organic search
5. Interacting with potential consumers - posting to online networks like Facebook
6. Analytics and Key Performance indicators (KPI's)
7. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
8. Consumer generated content
9. Security - avoiding spam, digital attacks, and other unwanted side effects of human and machine interaction
10. Original content origins and management

Social media research is never ending.

How do we research the top 10 areas to come up with the best tools?

Our fingers hit the keyboard running.  Building a digital presence is wide topic with options that are always changing and expanding.  Instead of looking solely in academic journals that might be quickly outdated, to find the best tools and methods of establishing a digital presence we execute the following steps:

Step 1: We type keywords related to one of our top 10 subjects in a search engine. We read some articles of interest in the search results.

Step 2: We visit the site of an article’s suggested tool. We view a demo.

Step 3: We read about the pros and cons of that tool and evaluations of the tool's vendor from another website to get a different, less bias perspective. We might even go back to the original site and ask questions to the tool's vendor directly.

Step 4: We think about which tool will best fit Sam’s business’ goals and budget (time and money).

Step 5: We decide on a tool for Sam to use and if the tool isn't free, we add it as a line item within her budget.