You can spend a lot of money on your marketing campaign, but it's really only worth it if you're getting a good return on your investment (ROI). If you're a small business, you especially have to make sure you're not wasting your limited capital on marketing that isn't going to bring in more sales. Here are seven quick tips on boosting the ROI on your marketing expenditures.
1. Use Available Automation Tools
Automation is increasingly available to help you handle the more mundane, time-consuming tasks you might have. They can help you with customer service, managing email newsletters, or with managing content on your website. These tools can save you time and money, which helps you drive down costs while reaching more people. Win-win!
2. Use Free Resources
When you can find free resources for creating or managing marketing materials or content, you should jump on them. Business cards, for instance, are an oft-overlooked but effective form of print marketing, and you don't need to pay an arm and a leg to design a great one. If there's a resource you can use for free, it's a no-brainer!
3. Establish Realistic Goals
In order to measure the ROI on your marketing campaign, you'll have to establish goals so you can know what exactly you're measuring and whether you're meeting these goals. Realistic goals will also help you build a good marketing strategy to meet them. With unrealistic goals, you might not be able to come up with a good strategy to meet them, and you'll just spin your wheels and waste money. It can be helpful to build goals through the SMART framework.
4. Improve Distribution Channels
With social media, all of your team have access to potential revenue streams via their own social media networks. If you're publishing digital marketing content, you can set it up so your employees or team members share it through their social media channels as well. You can use a service like Dynamic Signal to help streamline this process.
5. Know What You're Measuring
There are a variety of ways to measure ROI, but you have to make sure the metrics you choose are actually contributing to your bottom line. Just tracking page views might not actually mean your marketing campaign is leading to more sales. You can measure your conversion rate, the cost per lead, or the customer lifetime value, but tying these effectively to your marketing costs can help you make sure you're spending your money wisely.
6. Experiment
Experiments with marketing don't have to be expensive; you can run small course adjustments frequently, as long as you have a good method to track their success. Changing only one variable at a time, such as time of day when you post content, will help you optimize your marketing expenses and get more bang for your buck.
7. Be Specific
When you identify problem areas in your marketing campaign, it can be tempting to just write down what you need to fix. However, writing a broad to-do task, like "produce more content" can be too vague and may not get done. Instead, try being specific, including the meetings or working groups you'll hold, or the specific types of content you're going to create. This will make it much more likely to get crossed off your to-do list.
Making sure your marketing is a good investment can take time and be tricky, but there's no better way to keep yourself from wasting money on ineffective strategies. By following these seven tips, you can keep yourself and your team on the straight and narrow towards higher revenue through better marketing.
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