How often do you test how effective your marketing strategy is for you business? If you’re like many business owners that we talk to, you’ll answer with “rarely” or “never”.
The most effective marketing is designed to create more sales, more enquiries, more leads and a greater buzz about your business. Marketing is supposed to make your potential clients notice you and encourage them to get in touch, to make a purchase, to remember who you are. Whatever your goal is with your marketing, you need to find a way to assess the effectiveness.
To avoid a huge gamble with your marketing budget and wasting money in areas which are not generating any revenue for you, split your budget over a number of different marketing ideas. Then, once you see how effective these ideas are for your business you can drop the ones that do not bring in profit and put more of your budget towards the marketing that works for you.
As an example, you might be a landscape gardener who wants new clients in his local area. There are various ‘offline’ opportunities such as advertise in the newspaper or local parish newsletters, you could deliver flyers door-to-door, you could form a partnership with a company offering a service that compliments your own – thus referring clients to each other.
One of the key areas that many businesses miss though are their online marketing efforts. As that landscape gardner you should have a website which is designed to capture the attention of your visitors and encourage them into making a purchase with you. It should be targeted to your local customers, so that when they search for you in the search engines – they can find you on the first page of their search results. The cost of this option is relatively inexpensive when you think of the income that it will bring back to the business. As an example, the landscape gardener’s website can be built by AntiSushi for as little as £99.95.
How many print adverts would you get that last for as long as a website?
Whatever you do, make sure you test it!
One of the biggest sins in marketing is ‘over-thinking’ your marketing strategy and spending too long planning everything. You could probably spend the next five years planning your business and marketing strategies out in full, but where will that planning get you, if you never implement it?
Nobody likes to sit and cold call businesses, or hand out flyers on a high street – but you need to take action and do whatever needs to be done to kickstart your business. If this includes making some phone calls, sending out a few emails, delivering leaflets/flyers to prospective clients then you should just do it. By implementing your strategies as well as planning them, people are actually going to hear about your business and bring in revenue to you.
You should always plan your marketing well, but never let your planning become an excuse for you not doing something or not taking action.
This is a new series of Marketing Tips, aimed at helping small business owners to gain new clients, increase their profits and generate more income. We aim to share at least one tip with you each week. These tips are taken from our eBook “Simple Marketing Ideas: Volume 1″, which you can get for free by signing up to our Newsletter on the right —>
Create A Plan And Checklist
Everywhere we go in business, people ask us to write plans and lists. Everything from a business plan to a financial plan or a marketing plan. If you were to create every single plan that you were told to do, you’d likely end up spending the rest of your life planning and never actually get any work done.
At AntiSushi, we’re very big on practical marketing and we like to make sure that your marketing delivers the best possible return on your investment. Without having even a simple marketing plan for your business, you will end up wasting your money and promotional efforts, meaning that you have to sell even more products or even more hours of services to make up for your loss.
It’s actually quite easy to create a marketing plan. All you need to do is answer 3 key questions.
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