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Marketing is one of the biggest areas in most businesses, next to finance, operations and HR.
The tools, techniques and people you use are all part of ensuring efficient and effective sale of your product or service. Without a proper structure, training or budget you could be wasting time and money on a marketing plan that isn’t giving you a return on your investment.
But how do you know if this is happening?
There are many ways to market your business. You can use online platforms such as Email Marketing and Social Media. Or you can use conventional marketing practices such as PR and Advertising. There are an endless amount of ways to produce campaigns and market them to consumers. What isn’t endless? Which strategies will work for your kind of business.
For example, a huge corporation like Apple may not advertise the iPhone X in a local paper magazine. In contrast, a small farm shop may not have the budget to produce a full-scale TV advertisement to broadcast world wide. You can see the problem.
The first step to ensure you are not wasting money on marketing: choose your marketing practices wisely. Choosing the right strategy comes from deciding what your objectives are. If you are an online shop selling a clothing brand, your objectives may be for brand exposure and making sales. For this you could try advertising on Social Media and using Influencer Marketing or PR to gain brand exposure. These practices are fitting with platforms you are using to sell your products. They are likely to be the places in which your consumers spend most of their time.
The second step would be to check how successful your campaigns are using analytics. Track things like your website clicks and post engagement on Social Media against analytics on your website. This can tell you whether your campaigns are helping you achieve your objectives. If someone finds your website through Social Media and buys something, it is worth keeping your Social Media pages up to date. But, if you find most of your website visits are coming in after a recent magazine campaign, this is likely to be the area your money is best spent.
The final step is knowing your consumer. If you know where your ideal consumer is spending most of their time, you know where to market to them. If your ideal consumer is an elderly lady, trying to advertise to her on Facebook may not be beneficial. However, putting adverts in the paper or on TV will be beneficial. If you are advertising in the wrong place you know you are wasting your money on marketing.
Bottom line is spending hundreds or even thousands of pounds on marketing and not receiving a return on your investment means something isn’t quite adding up. Keep track of your marketing budgets and make sure to spend money on the areas beneficial to your objectives.
If you want to learn more about marketing, read our inbound marketing checklist by clicking below.
