Optimizing Your Marketing
Your marketing is one of the most important aspects of your business. It’s how you let customers know who you are and what you have to offer, and as well as telling them about specific products, it’s how you can communicate your business’ values, ethos, identity or in short, your brand.
Good marketing could be the difference between a failing business and a successful one, so today we’re taking a look some steps you can take to optimise your marketing campaigns for your customers – and for success!
Get Your Communication Right
The key purpose of marketing is to communicate with your customers – about sales or events, about prices and products, and about the values of your brand. If your adverts aren’t communicating what you want them to, then something has gone wrong with the creative side of your marketing.
While advertising is, to some extent, where art and commerce cross paths, it is possible to quantify and assess how successful an advert is at communicating what you want it to. A market research company can help with creative testing, ensuring your adverts are communicating what you want them to effectively, and aren’t also sending messages you don’t want!
Choose Your Metrics for Success
It’s hard to understand how successful – or not – your marketing is unless you pick specific metrics for what constitutes success and measure them consistently. This is true of any project: if you don’t decide in advance what you want to achieve, it’s impossible to say whether you’ve met your expectations, exceeded them or failed.
It can be hard to directly track the success of traditional advertising, as it’s hard to know whether you should attribute sales to the advert, to loyal customers or other factors. Digital adverts are easier to track, and you can look at their performance through the prism of clicks, of conversions or other actions like emails or sign-ups to a newsletter. It’s also well worth tracking your ROI – your return on investment. That shows you if your investment in your marketing is paying its way, and it’s something you can boost with good targeting.
Target Effectively
The best adverts in the world won’t do your business any good if your customers don’t see them. To make your marketing really work for you, you need to know who your customers are, and where they spend their time – both geographically and digitally. This allows you to target them specifically, placing your adverts on their commuter routes, in the newspapers they read, and on the social networks and websites they browse. If you’ve got high-quality products and well-designed advertising but aren’t seeing conversions, your problem could well be with your targeting!