Marketing & Advertising – Knowing What Works Best for Your Business

20 May Marketing & Advertising – Knowing What Works Best for Your Business

Prior to dumping an entire marketing budget and time on a particular marketing channel, it’s worth knowing what works best for your business from the get go. Knowing what forms of marketing work effectively for your business is key to helping you maximize your advertising spending.

In today’s world it’s now easier than ever before to test a platform out before extinguishing your entire marketing budget. For instance, with a minimal ad spend and test you could discover social media is driving the most traffic and conversions to your products and services. Once you’ve established a little historical data from running a simple test, it’s important to reevaluate your spending and put more focus on the platforms that are producing the best results.

The same can’t be said for offline advertising methods like billboards and TV. Although still effective forms of marketing these types of “offline” advertising are typically more expensive because you simply can’t test the channel prior to investing a significant amount of money upfront…You simply have to go for it and jump straight into the deep end without the ability to test a portion of your budget and just hope for the best. That also produces no long-term value for your business if you’re ultimately not 100% sure it worked in the first place.

Here’s a few simple strategies to help narrow down your marketing channels while safeguarding your marketing budget at the same time.

Google’s reporting tools

Google is all about ROI and being able to track the visitor journey from beginning touch points to final conversions. That said…Google Analytics provides very detailed tools that allow you to track all your marketing efforts. For instance, if you are spending money on social media platforms, it’s worth checking the number of sessions you are getting from each one of them and how well they convert on your website.

By placing the tracking code on your website provided by Google Analytics you can see a plethora of information such as:

• traffic sources
• devices used to locate your brand online
• amount of visitors
• what areas of the world (regions) visitors are coming from
• keywords that drove the clicks
• was an action taking ie: sign-up, download, sale
• bounce rates
• points of entry to final exit
• landing pages etc.

Clearly there’s a lot of information to be discovered however suffice it to say all of it pertinent to making the right choices whatever and wherever you may be marketing your business online.

Understand data that is critical to your business

Not all data that you get from your Google Analytics will be relevant to your business. It’s important for you to narrow down what actually works for you. For instance, if you have an e-commerce store/site and you want to track the number of orders you get from social media leads, you can use different features like the Facebook pixel that connects your Facebook page to Analytics in order to see how many people converted from your page.

For (pardon the phrase) newbies that are just starting to dip their toes into the online options available, you can still find out a lot about the customer journey be simply asking your customer.

Get feedback from customers

It’s also important to have a way of collecting feedback from consumers because it helps to know what forms of marketing are working best for your brand. You can implement different strategies such as using a promo code for certain campaigns in order to keep track of customers you reach using a specific method. Another way to keep track of offline conversions would be to keep a record of customers who contact your business and always ask them how they heard about your brand.

Be ready to make changes

As the evolution of technology is inevitable you’ll soon discover that different marketing and advertising channels may or may not work for your business. Its important to do regular evaluations to determine what works for your brand. For instance, if you have spent 80% of your advertising budget on offline marketing strategies like billboards, TV ads and brochures, and you can’t trace any significant conversions, it’s worth reducing that spend and focusing on digital marketing ads that you can actually track. When you boost a post on Facebook, you can quickly see if it has performed based on the sign ups you get, website sessions, sales and/or referrals.

Don’t spend too much on advertising and marketing channels that do not work for you or where there’s too much guess work involved. That’s a slippery slope and can consume a marketing budget quick with no returns. Think of unique ways to split your advertising budget and test without putting in too much risk. What may work for you may not be effective for a different brand…after all there is no one size fits all cookie cutter solution for any business on the planet. Most importantly, have clearly laid out goals. When you understand what you want to achieve it’s easy to narrow down your marketing efforts to only those “specific” areas that work best for you.

And last but not least…track, track and track some more! Guarding your budget and generating as much ROI as possible is doable if/when you deploy a few simple safeguards upfront.

Marketing brands on almost every channel available online makes Seomavericks the right choice for your brand.

Seomavericks has qualified marketing and analytics professionals with the experience and know how to get your company’s marketing and tracking completely dialed in. With personal growth strategist assigned to your business, we take the guesswork out of what’s working or not before deploying expensive non-producing campaigns. Seomavericks growth strategists possess all the experience you could ever need for your businesses online advancement., Our team of professionals will help create and maintain a marketing and advertising strategy for your business that will put your brand in front of your prospective client at the precise moment they’re most interested in hearing about your products and services.

Call Seomavericks today and talk to me or one of our team members….With nothing to lose and everything to gain for your businesses online objectives it makes perfect sense to have a team of professionals guarding your back online.