How effective is your marketing strategy? How has this affected your ROI? And could it be better? Your marketing plan is the blueprint for your business’s sales strategy. This blueprint should be constantly audited, reviewed, reevaluated, and changed according to market trends – buyer expectation and your company’s goals.
Not interested in creating an online marketing campaign because you think it will take too long or is expensive? Coordinating an organized online marketing campaign with rotation through various targeted websites isn’t difficult; it doesn’t cost a lot and can generate traffic and sales faster than search engine optimization (SEO).
It takes a little research and solid knowledge about your target customer, but you can design and execute a simple online marketing plan over a given day.
To review your marketing strategy, you need to conduct a marketing audit. The following tips will help you evaluate each dynamic component of your business and how those components will affect your marketing campaign.
1. Define And Track Relevant Metrics
You NEED to make sure you track the most relevant metrics when measuring ROI on your marketing strategy. For example, how much do you earn from your blog? Find the average time spent on your site, the average number of social media shares, the number of repeat visitors, and more. Choosing the wrong metrics hurts your marketing campaign.
2. Adjust Your Goals
A good marketing strategy should allow for frequent adjustments in its components to maximize your return on investment. Such a plan will allow you to spend more on components that produce the best results and cut the cost of those components that yield less.
3. Use Tactics That Improve Your Online Presence
If your business has a lot to gain from online consumers, you’ll want to track the effectiveness of your marketing plan on social media and other discussion forums. Build your website around the interests of your visitors, using search engine optimization to optimize for Google and other search engines. Your website should be easy to navigate and rich with new content. Think about adding links to business directories and engaging your visitors through blogs, RSS feeds, and podcasts.
4. Use Direct Response Marketing Techniques
A good marketing strategy should elicit direct feedback from your customers. If it isn’t, then what you are doing is wrong. Your marketing strategy may not be tailored to your customers’ exact needs. First, you need to track buyer responses and any other transactional data. You can then build a complete customer profile guided by their expectations and buying behavior.
5. Decide Your Campaign Budget
While people think this should be the first step, in reality, you can better budget for your online marketing campaign when you have a good idea of the costs involved. This can be done only after you have calculated your goals.
You may already have a figure in mind for how much you can spend, so go back to your marketing campaign and find the total cost of all the ad spots you want to make. That total is likely to exceed your total spending limit.
Now go through that list and prioritize ads where you think you’ll get the most exposure and results within your budget. Next, move others to the hold list. Remember, as ads start getting results, you can always go back and expand your campaign from that list.
If you’re involved in pay-per-click advertising, check in daily for the first week and monitor your results to ensure you’re paying for the results.
Never forget to consider ad swaps and bartering as part of your payment and marketing budget. Many websites will swap newsletter ads or banner ads for similar placement on your site if you have one.
6. Create Your Ad Content
Online marketing works best when you focus on just one or two things. You can have various products but choose one or two items that are good sellers and have a solid appeal to the target market for your marketing campaign.
Next, ask yourself, “What am I selling”? You’re selling a benefit, something that registers on an emotional level. For example, if you sell fishing rods, you sell the excitement of successfully landing that monster in the lake. If you sell cosmetics, you sell beauty.
The most successful ads use words related to the customer. Use the words “yours” and “you” and never focus on “I,” “mine,” “our,” “my,” or “me.” Instead, create several inspirational words associated with the product – fun, relaxing, relaxing, addictive – and use at least one in the ad.
Coupons are also one of the practical marketing tools. They can be easily tracked manually or by automated shopping cart systems. Use different codes for different ad locations, and you’ll immediately see which ones get the best coverage.
It would be best to create a text ad for each item in your online marketing campaign, making sure you hit at least one to three keywords in the text. Text ads are typically three, five, seven, or ten lines up to 60 characters wide.
Once you’ve got your text ads, check your banner inventory. Do you need to update them using a holiday-specific message? Does each image have the appropriate ALT tag? Is the graphic optimized for size (less than 20-50kb) and resolution (72dpi)?
If you’re creating ads for media platforms, choose or create suitable photos and make sure they all match the social media platform requirements where it’s going to be placed.
7. Tracking And Monitoring Your Ads
Tracking and responding to your campaign successes is vital to running an effective marketing campaign. From your website to PPC statistics, there are many ways to determine what works and what doesn’t. By paying attention, you’ll learn about your ads in detail and how to accelerate them for the best results.
Tracking tricks include:
- Using specific coupons or sales codes for each ad placement.
- Setting up separate listing pages on your website for each ad.
- Utilizing a service that helps track activity.
There are ad management services that help you track ad performance. One of them is Google’s DFP Small Business, a free service that is relatively easy to operate and provides robust ad tracking and management support. In addition, some venues, such as Facebook Ads, provide their reports.
Review the results of your various ads daily for the first two weeks. Write them on your tracking sheet and look for any trends or patterns. Change them or try another one from your catch list if some don’t work.
Once you settle into the pattern of reviewing and managing ads, you’ll know better how often you need to monitor your marketing efforts.
The basis of almost every successful media marketing campaign depends on a well-crafted plan. Therefore, it’s essential to know the difference between strategy and tactics when creating your plan – otherwise, you may go around in circles.
It also helps find what’s already working well in the industry, so you can learn from people who’ve come before you. So get started on your plan now and use what you learned in this post to grow your small business using online marketing. Then, you can call us to learn more. Call now!