Marketing is a big area for small businesses. But there is so much to get your head around that getting started—and making a success of your marketing—can be a challenge.
But it needn’t be.
There are many steps that you can take to make sure your marketing gets results and boosts your ROI. Here are a few of the most important that can help to make a real difference.
Set Up an Email List
It doesn’t matter what industry you are in: An email list should be considered a must-have feature on your website.
Collecting email addresses from customers from your website—or from your store or restaurant—will help you to create what many marketers refer to as their most valuable marketing assets.
With an email list of customers and potential customers at your disposal, you can send targeted messages on a regular basis, building trust, building relationships, and making more sales.
Email lists are cheap to run—and the emails themselves are free to send—so there is no reason why you wouldn’t want to start your own list.
As it grows, it will provide you with a fantastic opportunity to stay in touch with your target audience and continue to provide them with value over the months and years.
Email marketing is also easy to track, so you can experiment with different techniques to improve open rates and click-through rates, which will help you to make more sales.
Focus on Building Relationships
If you decide to work with a digital marketing agency to help boost your ROI, one of the first things that they will tell you is that it is all about building relationships.
For agencies like Think Big Engine, this is a key concept that some small businesses don’t fully get the hang of to start with. Instead, they start trying to go in for the sale immediately without spending the time to build up relationships.
This is a mistake, especially when it comes to channels like social media. Yes, you can advertise on these platforms with some amazing results. But it’s mainly about getting involved in the conversation, talking to your target audience, sharing great content, and building your reputation and brand image.
So keep this in mind, especially on social media, and put a lot of focus on building relationships.
Track Everything
One of the best things about digital marketing is that it is very easy to track. By ensuring you know exactly what is happening, you can improve your advertisements, emails, SEO, and more to get the best results for your business.
Whether it’s something as simple as using Google Analytics to find out how many people are visiting your web pages, or testing landing pages against each other to improve your conversion rate optimization, there are always opportunities to improve your performance.
Keep an Eye on Your Competition
Whatever you do, make sure you keep a close eye on what your competition is doing. You don’t want them to get ahead of you in areas where you should be dominating, whether that is in the search engines or on social platforms.
Sign up to their newsletters, keep an eye on their social media activity, find out where they are getting backlinks from using a tool like the Open Site Explorer from Moz. Then make sure you are not missing out on any tricks, and keep pace with the competition.
Don’t Neglect Traditional Marketing
With all the talk of digital marketing, it’s easy to forget about traditional marketing like sending out newsletters and advertising in newspapers, on the radio, and even on TV. But the truth is, these can still provide excellent results.
Indeed, if your competition is only focusing on digital marketing, you may find that this is a good way to improve your own results. So never discount traditional marketing, and work out how you could use the two types of marketing together.
Finally: Be Consistent
All of these tips can help you to make the most of your marketing efforts and see positive results. However, none of them will be worth much if you are not consistent in your efforts.
Consistency is key to success in any form of marketing, so never give up and decide not to pursue a marketing technique until you have given it some time to generate results.
Once you find out which techniques work best for your business, you can put even more effort into these on a consistent basis and really boost your marketing ROI over the months and years ahead.
Author
Gregory Duffie is the Owner and CEO of Think Big Engine. A SQL Server database developer by trade, Greg is a serial solopreneur that enjoys helping non-technical folks and small businesses navigate the new rules of the Internet.
