Tracking ROI With Digital Marketing Tools
It’s easy to know whether or not you’re hitting your revenue goals. Equally important, however, is understanding which marketing tactics or strategies are helping you hit those goals, and which ones aren’t. Luckily, there are several ways to measure the ROI of your marketing campaigns.
Using Landing Pages
When you create a website, you don’t know who will find it or by what means. With a landing page, you can dictate both of those variables. Instead of visibly anchoring it to a navigation menu, include the landing page link on marketing pieces connected to a campaign targeting a specific audience, allowing you to determine how well individual campaigns are working. Since you control who has access, it’s also the perfect opportunity to tailor messaging just for that audience. An added benefit of using a landing page is the ability to use Google Analytics to track the behavior flow of that specific audience as they navigate your site.
Of course, web traffic alone isn’t a strong indicator of ROI. Hopefully your landing page has a call to action leading to a contact form, RSVP portal, or a white paper download. In addition to generating a new warm lead, you may be able to track a future sale to that specific marketing campaign. Some marketing campaigns are more hands-on an others, for example, more local businesses may find that using direct marketing materials such as booklets, catalogs, postcards, flyers, pamphlets and other print-based marketing tools provided by printing services similar to Printivity could be helpful to local marketing.
This strategy works for nearly any campaign. When using targeted marketing, you want to direct website visitors to specific content that’s relevant to them. Landing pages are particularly useful for targeted direct mail, radio, and PPC campaigns with a narrow marketing message.
Using Promo Codes
Businesses often use promotions to add urgency to their marketing campaigns. With a little extra planning, promo codes can teach you a lot about your audience! Rather than provide one code across many different tactics, use different codes so that you can measure which tactics or what types of messaging worked.
One thing to remember: make sure that you don’t mix your promo codes. Try to ensure that no single lead ends up with several different promo codes. This requires precise management of your direct mail and email lists, as well as careful consideration if you plan mass marketing tactics like radio or billboards. If you choose to use both mass marketing channels and your existing customer base, ensure that your current customers receive the better deal for being loyal!
You can use this strategy when employing several tactics within a campaign – like some people getting postcards and others getting emails. This would help determine which tactic had the better ROI. You can also divide up your lists and test out different messaging, and use the different promo codes to track which marketing messages connected more with your target market.
Using landing pages and promo codes are just two effective components of an overall marketing strategy geared towards measurable, calculated growth. In pursuing this end goal of calculated growth, businesses make both their marketing and their dreams sustainable. Want to chat more? Visit our Contact Us page and get in touch with one of our experts today!
Grow Smart With Targeted “A” List Marketing
At some point in their growth cycle, most companies learn through trial and error that not every paying customer will generate a positive impact on their business. Growth in the wrong direction can cause any business to stall or even regress. Smart, sustainable business development requires targeted marketing aimed at your most profitable customers in order to attract more of them. This is called finding and marketing to your “A List”, which involves strategically crafting services and messaging around the specific needs of your most ideal clients.
How to Identify Your A List
Start by mining your existing customer list for the types of businesses that make the most profitable purchases or have the potential to make them. For a manufacturer, that could be a repeat customer that puts in the most lucrative product orders with the most reasonable turnaround demands. For a B2B service-oriented business, that would likely be the type of customer that signs up for a continuous program or contract. While we hope your most profitable clients are the ones spending the most with you, that may not always be the case. There are instances where your biggest customer may strain your resources, leaving you with a razor thin profit margin, in which case you don’t actually want more customers with similar orders. Even if you you consider yourself a “one-stop-shop” for a variety of industries and applications, identify customers who purchase the products and services with the highest profit margins.
Those customers are your A List. The rest of your customer list may still provide some business, and there’s nothing wrong with continuing to serve their needs when those less ideal customers find you, but your marketing resources should be primarily devoted to campaigns aimed at the top tier. The idea of targeted marketing isn’t to shrink business, it’s to grow in the most profitable areas with the most cost-effective strategy.
Use Targeted Marketing to Grow Your A List
When we retool messaging, recalibrate your Adwords strategy, or venture into new digital spaces in ways designed to reach your most profitable customers, not only do you keep those existing high-value customers engaged, more of the same tier will start to find you. By contrast, a business that directs resources towards less desirable customers will become swamped by their least-profitable customers and stunted in their ability to provide exceptional services to the customers they want the most of. That strategy not only drains business resources, it can damage your brand in the eyes of your A List.
A successful A List marketing strategy focuses on connecting and reconnecting with those specific businesses. Potential tactics could be as simple as sending your A List a targeted email campaign pertaining to the specific products or services they want, or offering them a referral discount. This is the easiest, least exclusionary way to market to your A List. Other tactics may involve retooling the aesthetics of your website and social media presence to reach your ideal customer. If your A List is a bulk-buying budget conscious customer, a minimalist, no-nonsense website makeover could be more appealing to them. When your A List is comprised of individuals with advanced degrees, taking an elevated tone to your messaging will likely give you more credibility in their eyes. These types of tweaks may not be appealing to D and C List customers, but it’s ok to allow your targeted marketing to filter out those who won’t benefit the long-term growth and viability of your business. As a matter of fact, that’s the point.
For more information on how to reach your A List and letting go of the customers you don’t need, connect with our team of marketing experts via the Contact page.
Lead Generation Starts in Marketing, Not Sales
What percent of leads do your salespeople close? That number varies from company to company, but a lot of it depends on the quality of leads your sales people have. Traditionally, companies have bought list, mingled at networking events, and, of course, pounded the pavement to get prospects further into the purchasing funnel. But if you are still doing that, you may not be using their time the most effectively.
The way people consume information has changed drastically, even in just the past few years. As a result, there’s been a dramatic shift towards inbound marketing to complement your sales strategy. After all, who’s more likely to convert — the company who searched for a product you provide, found your website, read your blog, then called you, or the company whose contact information you purchased and then called out of the blue a few times a year?
And what would you rather your salespeople spend their time doing? Having cold conversations with companies who may not know about you or need your product, or following up with prospects that have already expressed interest? Give your sales team a competitive advantage by allowing your marketing department to first warm up their lead bank.
Save Money By Marketing for Lead Generation
Companies that generate leads through their marketing department spend less per lead than those that leverage their sales team as their sole relationship building mechanism. The cost of social media advertising, creating and sustaining a website, producing email newsletters and digital content is less expensive than the cost of time going door to door, making cold calls, networking membership fees, or attending events because it takes a lot more time and energy to educate leads to the point that they are interested in doing business with you without unobtrusive inbound marketing doing all of that work for you. Couple it with some other strategies, such as personalized promotional pricing and other potential deals, and you can have a lot of work done for you very quickly.
Traditional sales strategies force a company to waste its resources on attempting to build connections that more often than not, just don’t convent into sales. In contrast, an effective inbound marketing strategy automates the relationship building process and allows an already warm-ish lead to learn about your business on their own terms, making them much more receptive to your marketing efforts altogether. As a result, starting with a group of targeted, higher quality leads and allowing them a choice in how they engage with your content helps companies to spend less upfront per lead and allocate less time towards building relationships with leads who won’t end up converting. If you are struggling with generating leads then it might be worth checking out these 50 ways to generate leads. That way you will never run out of ideas!
Boost Sales Team Morale and Customer Relationships
Shifting the burden of lead generation from a sales team to a program like the 360 Direct marketing team doesn’t mean your star sales staff will sit idle. In reality, they will spend more productive hours nurturing warm leads with a faster sales process and higher conversion rate from beginning to end. More efficient sales conversion allows your employees to leverage their unique communications skills for success, rather experiencing discouragement and burn-out that is common with the traditional sales beat.
In addition to better conversion rates and more efficient sales processes, companies that begin their lead generation strategies with their marketing departments also benefit from a better brand image. Unfortunately, traditional sales strategies that require sales persons to engage awkwardly with cold leads often leave the impression of a “manipulative” or “slimy” interaction. No one wants to feel coerced into buying a product or service they don’t want, and saving your elevator speeches for the folks successfully funneled into your lead bank via targeted marketing instead allows your potential customers to view your sales team as helpful and educational on products or services they already have an interest in. The resultant positive customer relationships can increase brand loyalty and the likelihood of repeat purchases.
The total benefits of employing marketing and sales strategies in tandem are many, and as inbound marketers, we are passionate about creating action plans that work smarter, not harder for our customers. For more information on using marketing to retool your overall conversion strategy, connect with one of our experts via our Contact page.
Net Neutrality: What it Means for Small Businesses
noun
“The principle that Internet service providers should enable access to all content and applications regardless of the source, and without favoring or blocking particular products or websites.”
The net neutrality debate has been raging for years now, and with the recent FCC hearings, there finally might be some definitive action one way or the other. But what does the potential end of net neutrality mean for small business and startups looking to use the web and marketing companies near Milwaukee to promote their companies? As inbound marketers ourselves, we are aware that a no-longer neutral Internet will forever change our marketing strategies, as well as the businesses who utilize them.
Why the World Would End Without Small Business Marketing
The most fragile part of the American economy is also the most important, with 2 out of every 3 jobs created being generated by small business.
So how do they compete when they’ve got the odds stacked against them? With lower budgets, smaller markets, and less revenue than behemoths like Walmart, you’d think they’d be out of luck. But just take a look at this one-woman-retailer carving herself a piece of Amazon’s market share. Or this 21st century cobbler with a seriously global brand.
Small businesses make it big all the time – the stories are everywhere. So what’s the difference between the successful ones and those that fail? Well-strategized small business marketing.
Small Business Marketing Creates Niches
Take the previously mentioned small-scale retailer. Darcy Lee has made herself the place for finding the perfect gift for any loved one in a whole lot less time than the hours spent browsing the e-commerce sites of her competitors.
“Heartfelt is all about one-on-one personal shopping and finding the right thing for that special person.”
Darcy isn’t worried about big time retailers duplicating her personal approach, because in this case, bigger means less personal. And personality is the meat and potatoes of her brand.
Small Business Marketing Transmits Personality
Social media is one way to reach out to customers and allow them to bond with you on a level deeper than “Here’s some ________ you should buy. It’s nice.” Posts including pictures, jokes, memes, or something useful other than your product builds trust, and from there, an actual relationship. It’s these emotional ties that make customers choose smaller businesses over bigger ones. A lot of small businesses often find that Instagram is one of the most interactive social media platforms, this is probably because it allows users to like content, comment and also direct message. Small businesses looking to develop a relationship with their customers might want to look for a desktop application that allows them to read and respond to their instagram dms online. This would make it much easier for companies to interact with customers from their computers. However, there are multiple other ways to market your business over different social media platforms.
For some social media inspiration, take a look at what these small businesses have done with their Twitter presence.
Small Business Marketing Creates a Roadmap
Small companies are acutely aware of their stature in comparison to their competitors, and are therefore taking measures to compensate for it. At least that’s what the data says. And according to that data, the little guys (as opposed to enterprise companies) are more likely to have a content marketing plan, as well as someone to oversee and implement it, so their digital efforts aren’t wasted.
So instead of pinching pennies and marketing willy-nilly, successful small businesses are making online marketing an investment. And that investment is growing fast. But that’s only content marketing. There are so many other strategies for small businesses to take advantage. At 360, most businesses we see aren’t aware of all that’s out there, and the ones that are, are reaping the benefits.
Biggest takeaway from this chunk of data: explore your options and put someone in charge of implementing them, because a well researched and well executed marketing plan can only help your business. We should all be dedicated to helping small businesses become thriving enterprises. One such help is CloudPay services that enable business to manage their payroll in an efficient and effective fashion. This would certainly be ideal for most businesses.
So maybe the world wouldn’t end if small business marketing wasn’t a thing. But our economy sure wouldn’t be the same if the millions of small businesses across the country didn’t have a way to survive on a stage monopolized by the Amazons of the world.
Curious about what 360 has to offer when it comes to marketing? Check us out by clicking the graphic below.
The Guide to Growing a Startup with Inbound Marketing
When you’ve just built a new business or are trying to start growing a startup with very little money to throw around in the name of marketing, having someone else who’s been there done that lay it all out for you, can be pretty useful.
Running a new business can be especially tough for a myriad of reasons. You have to worry about so many different aspects of helping your company get its feet off the ground; all as crucially important as the last, in the hope that you can take your business to the heights that you want to see it at. Most entrepreneurs will look into new ingenious ways to make their business more efficient. Whether that’s uploading all of their hard copies to a cloud server or using a company like US Global Mail as a mail forwarding service. The businesses of the 21st century are the cleverest they’ve ever been.
When your business is in its infancy, it can be tempting to forget some of the most basic fundamentals of running a healthy office environment, such as keeping organized files. This is often an issue in offices that rely heavily on the use of paper for their filing but is not as much of an issue for paperless offices.
Offices that employ sophisticated document management software for their filing and scanning tend to find that they rarely have any issues with keeping their files safe and organized, which can be absolutely crucial when starting a business. Companies such as FilecenterDMS.com offer services in this department, and they may be worth keeping in mind for anybody that’s looking to grow their own business from the ground. There’s nothing wrong with putting your faith in a well-trusted software. Similarly, it’s hard to deny the importance of having an experienced veteran by your side when growing your startup.
…Or even if you’ve been around forever, but still need to brush up on the basics of Inbound Marketing, someone else doing the work for you is always convenient.
Wherever in the business world you come from, we have Dharmesh Shah from Hubspot to thank for putting together this fantastic (and entertaining) Slide Share on how inbound can help your business take off, NASA-style.