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.
