Business owners wear many hats, often juggling several at the same time. One of the many hats business owners commonly wear is the marketing director’s hat. In the hectic shuffle of the day to day running of a business, sometimes, marketing gets put on the back burner.
This is one of the biggest mistakes you can make, and you may not even realize it is happening. In the constant hustle of maintaining and growing your business, you can not afford to lose sight of the importance of marketing. Marketing is the number one driver of sales for most businesses. Without sales, your business will fail.
How to Make Marketing More Effective
If you want to make your marketing efforts more effective, you will need a long-term marketing plan. This plan should have stated benchmarks and goals and it should be measurable. If you can’t quantify and track the progress of your plan, you have no way to determine if it is effective.
Use key performance indicators to help you measure success. Key performance indicators include things like:
- Return on Investment (ROI): The amount of money you make in sales less the amount that you spent on marketing for a specific campaign.
- Cost Per Lead: How much you spent to acquire each new lead (this does not account for the quality of the lead).
- Cost Per Conversion: How much you spent in marketing dollars for each sale you made (this focuses only on the number of high quality leads gained).
- Incremental Sales: A calculation of the number of sales made from a particular marketing campaign.
Using these indicators helps you measure success. Find the strategies that work best for you and invest more in those and less in others that didn’t work as well.
How to Make Marketing Easier
The best way to make marketing easier is to have a good plan and stick to it. You don’t want to spend time going over the same thing twice and you don’t want to waste money on poor results. Here are some tips and tricks to make marketing easier:
- Have a system in place to measure the results of your marketing before you start a new campaign.
- Don’t overlap marketing campaigns. It can confuse customers and dilute the accuracy of your ability to track results.
- Establish clear goals and benchmarks. This can help you to determine exactly which parts of your marketing were more and less effective.
The most important tip is: Get help if you need it. Marketing campaigns can be complex and failure isn’t cheap. If you need help, don’t be afraid to enlist the help of a reputable professional. A marketing professional will be able to help you develop a manageable, measurable, and successful long-term marketing strategy.
