Marketing is a strange beast. Sometimes you’ll work for months to run a campaign, and it’ll still take you many more months to properly assess whether your investment of time and resources was a smart idea. Other times you’ll come up with a spur-of-the-moment idea that goes viral or helps generate a huge amount of traffic on your website. Most of the time though, marketing is an iterative learning process, even for experienced marketers. That means there are always ways to make your campaigns more effective and to plan better, maximizing your return on your investment. Here’s how you’ll do that, learning how to make the most of your time spent marketing your business.
Tracking
Without effective tracking and monitoring, your business will be in the dark about how successful its marketing efforts are. You won’t able to go into high-level meetings to show just what your business is getting out of your marketing efforts, and you’ll not know which types of campaign are working best and which you should possibly discontinue. All of this means that tracking is an essential ingredient to marketing, as it can both justify all the work you’re doing and show you how to do it better next time around.
Tracking your marketing campaigns is relatively simple. It’s the data-crunching afterwards that can take some time and should usually be left in the capable hands of someone you trust with numbers and data. You’ll looking to see the month-on-month growth of your business’ user base, sales and traffic, and how that relates to your marketing spend. Having this in an easily presentable form for your board or your colleagues will help to show off the great strides you’re making in your marketing.
Optimization
Following on from the above, you can’t optimize a marketing campaign without tracking its effectiveness. In order to track that effectiveness, you’re going to want to set KPIs, or key performance indicators. These can take the form of click-throughs, reach, traffic, or conversions. Conversions are often the holy grail for marketers as they show that you’ve not only encouraged people to click on a link, but that you’ve attractedthe right people – the people who will be so interested in your business they’ll want to trade with you.
Let’s say you’ve run a campaign on all the major social media platforms. It’s the same campaign, with small tweaks for each platform in order to optimize your marketing content. You’ve spent the same amount of money on each one in order to promote your posts. After a month, you’ll be able to see which of these platforms has generated the highest conversion rate, which will give you a better idea of which platforms you should use for marketing in the future. The same goes for every different aspect of your marketing efforts – from the color you use in your posts to the messaging that goes along with them.
Organization
If you’re not an organized marketing team, you’ll likely be wasting time and money where you should instead by running a tight ship that generates a high return on investment. Organization might feel alien to your team, who are, after all, creative workers. But as a marketing manager, you have to run a tight ship yourself, and that means institution systems and changes that’ll encourage your team to work harder, smarter and faster. You want your team to be dynamic, communicating effectively with each other even if they’re working remotely, and collaborating on new marketing materials at a moment’s notice. You can do that by using software designed to help you manage your marketing efforts.
One of the best platforms to invest in in terms of organization is what’s called a Digital Asset Manager, or DAM. These platforms host all of your marketing content in one place, which is an excellent way for all of your workers to easily access every single design, video, and piece of copy that you’ve ever created. In turn, this will streamline the whole content creation process, giving your team more time to think creatively about message and positioning optimization and spend less time searching endlessly for documents and files.
Focus Groups
If you’re struggling to find ways to really speak to your target consumers, you should consider running a focus group, or a similar initiative, which could help you to learn what makes your customers tick. You could do this in person, on Zoom, or via an email survey which will essentially ask your existing customers why they were drawn to your website and to purchasing products from you. These questions might seem a little forced, but they’re essential if you’re to better understand how web users stumbled across your firm and decided to shop with you.
If you’re new to the concept of focus groups, you can ask an external agent to organize one for you. These firms are often positioned at the intersection of research and marketing, which is the perfect place for you to start your discovery journey into what really makes your target customers tick.
Budget Management
Most marketing teams have a set budget. That could be $1,000 or $100,000 per month. It doesn’t matter what your budget is – only what you’re doing with it to generate more revenue for your business. If you’re lobbying your superiors for a higher marketing budget, you’ll want to show that you’re managing your existing budget well, and that this is money well spent. That means taking account of all the tips above, but also being careful with what you spend.
As well as crunching KPI data, you should also consider crunching the financial data for your team. Track hours spent by your team on each project and keep tabs on all subscriptions you’re paying for to help you create and share content. It’s only with a firm and reliable financial plan and effective budget management that will you’ll able to convince your superiors that they should invest more in your department and your ideas.
If you’re looking to improve the marketing efforts that you’re making at your firm, these tips will help you generate more impressive KPIs and a higher ROI on your campaigns.
