Tweaking Your Marketing Strategy: A Systematic Approach
By Cameron Davis
Designing a marketing strategy is about more than just establishing a policy, and then following it. It takes endless tweaking to fine tune an approach. If you haven’t been doing this, you should get started. Here are some ideas:
Keep Tweaking Your Marketing Budget
The average small business spends little on marketing. While one in two spends under $500 a month, one in four invests nothing in it at all. If you’ve started investing in your marketing, but aren’t keen on hiring a team of number crunchers to determine how much you need to scale up your efforts, a trial-and-error method can be just as good. You need to work on finding the best marketing methods possible for your business, and then raise investment while keeping an eye on return on investment. You do need to make sure that you measure on every metric necessary, not just sales. It’s sensible to look at word-of-mouth and brand familiarity too. It’s always good to make progress in these areas, whether there is a pay off in actual sales in the short term, or not.
Keep Optimizing Your Website
Web sites, both mobile and desktop, offer customers an experience, which is a complex thing to create and improve. It isn’t something that possible to correctly conceptualize and deploy at one go. To constantly study your website and allowing the tweaks and improvements to build up over time is the only way to provide the best user experience.
Not only do you need to study Google analytics over time to learn about the customer demographic that visits your website, you need to audit your website each week to find out where people actually go when they arrive. This kind of knowledge takes time to build. Once you know enough, you can make regular improvements that makes sense for your customers. While it’s a good idea to learn to do this on your own, for many businesses, it makes sense to simply partner with a trustworthy SEO company.
Tweak Your Social Media Strategy
If your business has sat out on social media so far, you aren’t alone. Far too many businesses do the same thing. It’s better to sit it out than to make a halfhearted attempt that earns consumer indifference, however. Once you’re ready to make a real effort, you should go ahead. Studies report that two out of three millennials see advertising as disruptive, and take active steps to tune it out. What they look for is advertising that is actually enjoyable and useful to engage with. While you can make headway with highly innovative, traditional advertising spots, they’re likely to be expensive.
Instead, you should go with a quality, low cost social media strategy. Engaging experts to put great content on social media is an excellent way to bring attention to your business. It takes time to find the sweet spot, however. You need to learn how much of a social media presence is likely to give you results. With an eye on a meaningful editorial calendar for your specific audience and original content that is directly aimed at their needs, you’ll have a better social media strategy than any one of your competitors.
Get On Every Listing Possible
Business listing services such as YellowBook and SuperPages tend to be a low priority for many businesses, but they can make a difference. Small businesses often neglect to either get on these listings or to keep their entries updated. It can make sense to turn to services such as SinglePlatform, Universal Business Listing, Localeze or Axiom to keep your listings updated.
Manage Your Online Reviews
A recent study of nearly 30,000 subjects has found that consumers just trust online reviews. They go by them when making a decision on whether to trust a business or not. A study by the Harvard Business Review found that each added star on Yelp is able to deliver a noticeable increase in profitability to businesses. If your business has negative reviews, it’s important to throw yourself into the problem and solve it, doing whatever it takes.
If you aren’t familiar with working on a marketing strategy and making tweaks to deliver improvements, the process may be scary at first. It’s vital that you learn, however. After all, no one cares about your business like you do.
Cameron Davis shares top tips when it comes to marketing your business.
