Top 5 Ways Business Owners Can Stretch Their Marketing Dollars Further

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As a business owner, you’re pressed for time at every turn and you’re constantly watching the bottom line. You know a solid marketing plan can help generate brand presence, improve ROI, and build customer trust. But it’s easy to make a mistake and watch your time and marketing dollars yield little or, worse, no return.

Here are 5 effective ways you can stretch your marketing dollars further and achieve results:

1. Define a Clear Objective.

Too often, marketing efforts don’t start in the right place with a clear, definable, and realistic objective. Before each campaign ask yourself (and your team), what are we hoping to accomplish? For example, if your goal is to generate more subscribers (also known as lead generation), your marketing objectives are the steps you take to get there.

So, a clear marketing objective to increase your lead generation efforts might include creating landing pages to capture readers’ contact information in exchange for a free, valuable whitepaper provided by your company.

Of course, the ultimate goal here is to improve revenue by converting leads to customers, but building a robust subscriber list is a way to measure the success of your marketing campaigns and a key step to increase profit for your business.

2. Track Results and Create Reporting.

By creating a clear and definable objective, you can now track and measure your success. To return to our previous example, you can analyze how successful your lead generation campaigns are by looking at the data and seeing how your campaigns contributed to a more robust subscriber list.

If you did not see the results you desired, don’t worry. The whole point of tracking results and creating reporting is to quickly discover what’s working and take action to improve campaign performance.

Here are some key metrics you can dive into to improve your performance:

• Click-Through Rate – Seeing a low CTR with your ads? Check the ad itself and test variations to get more users to click-through to your site.
• Low Conversion Rate – Look at your landing page, form, and content on the page. The content should match your ad and the landing page should be persuasive to get the contact to sign up.
• High Cost per Conversion – Look at your budget. You may be over spending and not producing leads. There could be an issue with the marketing channel, bids, or campaign. Analyze the data and make actions accordingly to optimize your performance.

By looking into these metrics and taking action, you’ll stop wasting money on ineffective campaigns and, as a result, stretch your marketing dollars further.

3. Develop a Flow Before You Launch

For every marketing campaign, think through the entire process from start to finish before you launch it. It will save you on money, wasted resources, and headaches.

To return to our lead generation example, make sure you know your target audience and what will add value to their lives. If your whitepaper fails to attract new leads, the most common cause is that the offer is not enticing enough to get your target audience to take an action.

You’ll also want to nurture these leads to accomplish your ultimate goal of converting leads into sales. You can do this by having a robust email campaign set-up (like this example) that includes thanking your subscribers, offering them more valuable content, or exclusive promotions. Have this all in place before you launch to make sure that you get the most value out of your leads and bring them back again and again.

4. Hire Smart

If you decide to hire marketing help, be smart about it and do your research. A few good questions to ask before hiring:

• What’s their past track record?
• Have they executed similar campaigns?
• Are they up-to-date, self-learners?

We’ve been in the marketing industry for over 10 years and we know how successful marketing teams have a robust and proven track record, ample referrals to share, and the drive to stay current in today’s marketing landscape. We’ve created campaigns for our clients with proven success, increased conversion rates, and, you guessed it, improved ROI generation.

If you want to learn more about what we can do for you, check out our case studies.

5. Marketing is About the Customer

It may seem simple, but far too many business owners waste marketing funds talking, well, about themselves. This is the wrong way to go since people care more about themselves than your company. Always ask: what are my customers pain points and how do my services help? Then drive your marketing efforts to highlight your benefits.

Get your free marketing assessment and let us give you a taste of what we can do for you.