Using Marketing to Manage Business Growing Pains
Marketing is an investment in the long-term success of your business — but like any investment, how and when we engage in it heavily impacts ROI. One of the reasons continuous year-round marketing is worth the money, especially during busy or difficult times, is because it helps us transition more smoothly through business growing pains. With a consistent marketing strategy, companies can better manage lead flow, employee turnover, and expansion when it matters most.
Manage Lead Flow With Marketing Strategy
Continuous marketing, even during busy times, prevents “feast or famine” business cycles and the stress that comes with it. When lead flow is more predictable, it’s easier to make additional investments in new facilities, equipment, and talent with less risk and worry. For businesses contending with the challenges associated with new growth, this particular benefit is key to making that growth sustainable and retaining loyal customers through difficult transitions.
A well thought-out marketing strategy also gives businesses the opportunity to plan ahead instead of trying to market from a place of panic, which is typically when you have the least amount of time and resources to allocate to marketing. Better planning results in better execution — making it possible to increase the return on your marketing investment simply by making it a part of regular business operations.
Another way that continuous marketing eases business growing pains is by streamlining the sales process and increasing the confidence of sales staff. Updated, well-targeted marketing materials can save your sales team time, and helps them take advantage of unique opportunities in the moment. It also enhances their communication with individuals who are more visual than auditory in the way they learn new information. By better accommodating the way potential prospects want to communicate with your sales staff, we can shorten sales cycles and improve the morale of your sales team.
Manage Recruitment With Marketing Strategy
Marketing for recruitment is very different from marketing for lead generation, and both are necessary to adequately manage business growing pains. This means that even if your business already has a handle on your lead generation marketing, it’s not time to get complacent. You will also need to put together a solid strategy for recruitment in order to manage the increase in workflow that will likely result from successful lead generation marketing.
Hammering out a marketing strategy for recruitment before crunch time hits is key to funneling qualified team members to your business as needed, without suffering through periods of being under or overstaffed. Just like lead generation marketing, giving yourself time to develop a recruitment strategy improves the ROI of your investment in talent acquisition, streamlines overhead, and avoids sinking resources into failed campaigns.
Continuous recruitment marketing during busy times also helps increase your capacity to take on new customers — but finding the right talent is often easier said than done. When competition in the labor market is high, businesses need to work that much harder to reach the talent they desperately need. The smarter and more calculated you are in creating and executing a recruitment marketing strategy, the more sustainably you can grow even when economic barriers and labor market conditions create roadblocks.
Business growing pains are a natural part of building a successful company, but that doesn’t mean we have to completely surrender to them. To learn more about using marketing to manage growth, connect with a 360 Direct team member via our Contact page.
How To Make Your Next Marketing Campaign Succeed
Launching a marketing campaign doesn’t have to be a nail-biter. Set yourself up for success by covering fundamental campaign bases using a little preliminary market research, tactical coordination, and strategy.
Employ Multiple Tactics To Achieve Your Goal
Every campaign needs to start with a focused goal. Not all of your marketing campaigns will necessarily have the goal of immediately resulting in new sales. Many are designed to help prospects a little further down the sales funnel, making them easier to convert. Motivate your prospects to move down that funnel by providing value to them at each touchpoint using a clear call to action. For instance, if your goal is growing your email newsletter, offer coupons or free downloads when they provide their email address. Or, if you’re trying to get their emails in store, offer them a free Custom Water bottle and the coupon, as well as your brand logo, can be on the water bottle’s label. Nearly all customers love freebies so using them is a great way to attract attention.
Whatever your goal is, you aren’t likely to reach it without taking a multi-tactical approach to a marketing campaign. It can take up to seven touchpoints for a lead to convert, meaning a one-off radio ad or single sponsored social media post will not generate overwhelming results on their own. Instead, stay in front of your audience with a series of corresponding tactics for better total ROI.
Know The Audience Of Your Marketing Campaign
The success of a marketing campaign can be dictated by how well you know your target audience. Narrow down your demographic and craft language, imagery, and offers that speak to their needs and values. The preliminary research is worth the effort, because dollars spent on anything ineffective is still wasted resources, even if the marketing tactic is low cost. To ensure your marketing efforts aren’t going to waste you’ll want to deeply understand your audience insights and play to the requirements and behavior of your existing customers.
In that same vein, choosing ad platforms and mediums that your audience frequents or will respond positively to is essential to the success of a marketing campaign. The tactics you choose depend entirely on how your target market wants to be approached, which may require mixing both traditional and digital marketing tactics in the same campaign.
Follow Through On Your Marketing Campaign Tactics
It isn’t enough to simply execute your tactics and expect your leads to convert. Following through with your marketing tactics requires coordinating each one in a timely way, tracking them, and touching base with new leads at the end of the campaign.
Following through also means staying the course. Don’t change tactics mid campaign, even if results are slow to trickle in. Remember that it takes several marketing touchpoints for a lead to convert, so don’t get discouraged by low response rates early on. Wrapping up before your marketing campaign has run its course only deprives you of useful data.
Whenever possible, measure the efficacy of your tactics by checking analytics, recording the number of inquiries received, or emails collected. This valuable insight can be used for a retargeting campaign, or an entirely new campaign down the line. The more data we have, the greater our chances for success.
For more information on how to craft a successful marketing campaign, connect with an expert here.
How Your Brand Can Survive Facebook’s News Feed Changes
By now, you’ve probably heard the “bad” news that the Facebook algorithm for prioritizing its news feed has changed in a way that could potentially damage your ability to leverage the social media platform as a marketing tool. The New York Times has already declared publishers and brands to be the “losers” in this newly restructured Facebook universe, signaling a domino effect of panic amongst marketers and businesses alike. However, not all of us social media experts believe that the sky is falling in the wake of these changes. As a matter of fact, www.360direct.com already has a strategy for how brands can keep playing under the new rules.
Who Really Loses Under the New Facebook Algorithm
It’s easy to forget that changes to Facebook’s news feed prioritizing certain types of content over others has happened before, and brands have not only weathered those changes, but grown their following and reach as a result of them. Just as before, the goal of the latest news feed change is to allow users to have a richer and more personal experience that fosters social connections instead of anti-consumerist sentiments in a brand-weary audience. With this new strategy, Mark Zuckerberg also plans to limit the influence of disingenuous clickbait news sites and sensationalist blogs responsible for circulating falsified content that angers Facebook’s users. The only types of news organizations that will see an increase in viewership are local news pages, which Facebook has promised to feature more regularly.
The clear winners in this new Facebook algorithm are users, who will hopefully benefit from less annoyance and controversy clogging their feeds. As a result, brands and news organizations that do not produce engaging, quality content will see their numbers drop because their material isn’t creating, “meaningful interactions between people.” In order to continue generating likes and shares, content creators will have to funnel increased marketing acumen into their posts in order to persuade Facebook users to interact with their content, which in turn helps those users continue to see posts and shares from their favorite brands. Brands with high engagement may not see a big difference in their reach at all. Regardless of how large your Facebook following is, your active followers should still see your posts. Facebook users that already enjoy your content and have updated their newsfeed settings to feature more of it will still be able to do so, which maximizes the reach of both organic and sponsored content to those who actually want to see it.
Brands Dictate Their Own Success
Brands are the wild card in this equation. Some companies will likely suffer if they continue with the same organic content strategy as before. Even those with a substantial follower base will experience less exposure if they keep pumping out lackluster content, as original content from people is prioritized over their products and services. However, those with an effective sponsored content and remarketing Facebook ad strategy may not see much of a dent at all in their ability to reach a targeted audience at all. Regardless of whether or not you’ve already tried Facebook ads, now might be the time to test them out, because any change in news feed algorithms may impact your success. Speaking of testing, businesses should plan on spending more time in the coming months testing their content posts to see how the new algorithm will react to various types of posts.
Given that Facebook’s ads remain relatively inexpensive and accessible for almost anyone seeking to push out content to a targeted audience, they are a viable option for most brands. Those that began boosting posts and sponsoring content a long time ago are already ahead of the curve, and you may want to think seriously about catching up.
The other mitigated factor of the latest algorithms, is that with a larger number of people being drawn to Facebook due the more meaningful connections they make, the larger your pool of targetable audiences becomes. If Facebook didn’t make these changes, it’s likely that user angst against the constant stream of negative news stories and advertising would drive them away from the platform altogether, and subsequently damaging your brand’s ability to connect with anyone at all.
As marketers we believe that social media posts and advertisements should have as much research and strategy behind them as any other marketing tactic, and in an Internet age where every brand out there is fighting for clicks, it’s all the more important that companies seek help from experts before investing real money into their web presence. For guidance on developing a targeted social media marketing strategy and action plan, connect with a member of the 360 Team via the Contact page.