Market your business right

 Use your marketing budget wisely and be patient and persistent to see results. Here’s how

The beginning of every year offers the chance for a fresh start and the opportunity to define how we would like the next 12 months to unfold. Aside from the personal resolutions that most of us have made and are doing our best to keep, a lot of businesses also use this time of year to identify new goals they would like to achieve throughout the year.

 

What are some of the resolutions for your company in 2021?

 How exactly do you decide the correct approach to garner the results you’re looking for?

It’s easy to get caught up with the ‘hot’ trends you hear about or the specific initiatives your competitors are focused on, but at the end of the day, every brand has unique needs to fill, and thus it requires a unique marketing plan to fulfill them. 

A Great strategy

The first step of any excellent marketing plan is always a strategy. This Period of research and planning is how you can gauge what’s going to work best for your brand, and how to distribute your marketing budget.

You shouldn’t be jumping into something because you think it’s probably the right channel, because your competitors are doing it, or because it’s the most cost-effective option. A strategy outlines which channels will provide the highest  return and generate the most impactful results based on your unique value.

You’ll often hear percentages thrown around as to how much you should be spending on marketing. In reality, those numbers don’t work for most of the brands because they lack a deeper understanding  of their sales funnel. The simplest way to determine your marketing budget is to identify how much a sale is worth, or how much you’re willing to spend for a qualified lead, and base it off of that.

Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts, and massive wins don’t usually happen with a tight or unrealistic budget . Gone are the days of inexpensive campaigns, or getting to page one on google without efforts.

Encourage Repeat Visits

A significant portion your marketing budget should be used for tactics that help to drive repeat visitors to your website. Users coming to your site once are far less likely to convert or make a purchase than a user who is familiar with your brand because they have been to your site a few times before. As consumers, we do our research before making a purchase. If we’re looking for a running shoe for example, typically we’ll visit a few sites to look at styles, brands, or prices, before making our final decision and clicking “buy now”. As marketers, bringing visitors back to your site after they’ve visited once is essential to fostering a conversion, generating a lead, or making a sale.
When you already have captured the interest of the user, you don’t want to lose them.
Email marketing is one of the most effective approaches to generating repeat website traffic and staying top of mind with users that are slightly familiar with your brand.
Encourage audience to take a look at your products one more time, offer an exclusive  discount for your service, or share a case study that shows how your company has helped improve other businesses with the product or service you’re offering. Show your value through email, generate brand awareness, and ultimately drive users back to your website once again.
Retargeting advertisements are essential in terms of staying top of mind with your consumers and making sure that you’re not losing any traction with your users as they consume content on other websites. Once a potential customer has visited your site, you’re able to serve them with banner advertisements on other sites that they visit.

 

Persistence and Patience

Whatever channel you’re focusing on, understand that in order to see results from it, you need to allow time. Making decisions based off findings from a few weeks’ worth of campaign data won’t give you a clear picture of what is going on. Your budget must allow for each channel to take the necessary time it needs to start performing as you need it to. To exemplify the importance of time, consider a marketing tactic such as search engine optimization.

In the past , SEO was much simpler. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case, While SEO doesn’t require actual dollars to secure a ranking, it does take a great deal of time and effort, which is a cost itself. However, at the end of the day, the long term results of proper SEO practices are indispensable.

Paid and organic collaboration:  Using paid and organic initiatives collaboratively is the ideal marketing mix. Simply focusing on paid digital advertising spots , or focusing  on generating  only organic website traffic won’t work well, however using both paid and earned media in tandem will provide results that are much more significant and meaningful.

Consider social media, facebook, twitter, Linkedin, and Instagram are all great resources for reaching a specific audience and providing them with engaging content. However, while they are completely necessary, organic posts alone won’t get you anywhere. You need to allocate some of your marketing Budget towards promoted posts to drive real brand awareness. You can’t completely eliminate additional social spending or you won’t produce results .

 

2021 Marketing Resolutions

For all marketers doing their best at starting best their year off right and accomplishing their 2021 resolutions, a well developed business plan with a reasonable budget, milestones, and trackable events is necessary. Take advantage of digital marketing and your ability to track all of your initiatives in realtime, measure them, and shift your resources as needed to help certain areas perform better.

You cant jump into your marketing plans blindly  and throw some money as you feel it is needed. Remember that at the end of the day persistence and patience is quintessential to any successful campaign.