Most people’s marketing campaigns don’t produce too well. But should you stop a low producing campaign?
It’s hard to overstate the importance of marketing. From new start-ups to long-established local stores, every type of business can benefit from increased sales. Heightened brand awareness is another result that a great marketing campaign can offer.
The truth is if you are not marketing your business, you’re not making progress. No matter how great your product or service is, without marketing it, you’re more likely to stand still. Your marketplace will start to ignore you and you will find it increasingly difficult to move forward and find new customers or clients.
Marketing is a broad term. It is one that both business owners and consumers are quick to confuse with other terms like advertising and public relations. Try to think of marketing itself as a big umbrella. It shelters other actions like direct sales, advertising, and public relations. These are all tactics that make up different parts your marketing strategy.
Some of the world’s most well-known and celebrated companies have succeeded using two simple tactics. These tactics are:
- Making great products and
- Marketing them well.
Marketing isn’t rocket science, but it isn’t necessarily straightforward either. Knowing your business isn’t the same thing as knowing how to market your business effectively.
Here are some reasons to keep your marketing campaigns going!
1. You’ll make more sales
When people know your business exists it is easier for them to become your customers. If your marketing campaigns are doing their job properly, you’ll start to see an increase in sales shortly after you get started. We suggest between 3 and 6 weeks depending on the marketing action.
This time scale depends on the type of product or service you sell and the type of marketing you are engaging in. Online advertising like Google Adwords can start sending you traffic within minutes of starting your campaign.
By marketing your business online, you can easily keep track of which campaigns are generating sales and which aren’t.
2. You’ll increase awareness
Your best customers may see your advertisements hundreds of times before they buy. Many people see an ad or online recommendation and, instead of buying straight away, remember the brand name for future reference.
Raising awareness through consistent and persistent promotion plants your business’s brand, its product, and its benefits in the mind of your target audience. By raising awareness through marketing, you’ll build an audience of potential customers. These prospects know who know who you are, know what you can offer, and know exactly where to find you.
Don’t quit if your marketing campaigns don’t drive increased sales right away, as raising awareness is equally as important.
3. You’ll learn your metrics
Whether you’re marketing a bakery or an enterprise software company you have to know your metrics. This is the key to keeping your marketing campaigns profitable. If you can pinpoint exactly how much your average customer is worth, you know exactly how much you can afford to spend acquiring each new sale. Do you know what your average client spends with you?
This makes it far easier for you to optimise your spending on marketing platforms like Adwords and Facebook. It also makes it easier for you to increase profit margin.
Once you’ve calculated key performance indicators like your cost per acquisition (CPA). Move onto lifetime customer value (LCV), or average revenue per user (ARPU). You’ll find it far easier to launch other marketing campaigns and optimise them for profitability.
Launch your campaign, get as much data as possible, and trust your metrics. Once you’ve got the data, you’re in the power position to grow your business and increase sales.
4. You’ll ensure consumers trust you
Who do you trust more: your friend or a complete stranger? The more well known your company becomes, the more people will trust you. The more people trust you, the more likely they are to buy your products and services.
Building trust isn’t something that will be an overnight thing. Think of the companies that you trust. Generally, the companies we trust the most are the ones we’ve seen – either through advertising or by doing business with them – for years.
The earlier you start marketing your business, the longer your target audience will have known you. Start as soon as you launch. Start to build a relationship with your target market. One that forms an image of sturdiness, reliability, and honesty will get people to respond by trusting your business to live up to its image.
There’s a reason people pay more for Coca-Cola or Pepsi than they do for a bottle of store brand cola. They’ve spent years forming a bond with the brand, and as a result they trust it more.
5. You’ll build a social asset
What could you do with a list of the names of one million potential customers? As marketers love to say, the money is in the list. By marketing your business now, you can build a powerful social asset that you can sell products to next week.
Whether you opt for an email list or a Facebook Page, giving your audience a way to connect with you gives you a powerful platform for selling products. It also gives you the opportunity to ask your audience important questions.
No matter what your business sells, you can develop a powerful social asset to use for promotions and outreach. Sell shoes? Send users to your Facebook using a creative ad campaign targeted at sports gurus. Sell auto parts? Advertise to local car gurus using Google Adwords and build a powerful promotional list.
Every great business has a social asset that it can marketing to. Whether that is in the form of an online database or an offline address book. Begin to build your social asset today, and in a few years you could have a powerful list for promoting your products and increasing your sales.
6. You’ll learn your marketplace
When you first start your business, your target marketplace can look as huge as an ocean. Once you start marketing, you dive below the surface. Instead of seeing an expanse of blue water, you start to see different communities. You will see subcultures and a huge network of different connections.
Marketing opens your eyes to the reality of your industry. Once you start your own campaigns, you will begin to notice what your competitors are doing. This information will help you develop your own campaigns and learn more about your target audience. You will get a better feel for your industry.
You can also start to learn why customers chose you over your competitors. By polling your customers (instead of presuming to know that you know why), you can learn what drove them to your product. Learning to use tools like Google Analytics, you’ll find out which keywords and websites are referring the most customers to you. Using a Facebook Page, you’ll discover what your customers love to comment on and share.
7. You’ll discover what works
Have you ever seen an advertisement and wondered how anyone could possibly be persuaded by it? A lot of the best ads look and feel like the worst.
Marketing your business, you learn which types of advertisements and marketing tactics are effective. You also learn which ones aren’t.
There are hundreds of marketing strategies you could use to find customers. Old-fashioned direct mail or faxing can be extremely effective within some industries. Experimenting with different marketing methods helps you find the ones that work.
Stay focused on acquiring data and test, test, test. This Udemy course, Optimization & A/B Testing Statistics, will help you learn how to test different advertising campaigns and marketing methods.
For more information about how the Udemy Optimization & A/B Testing Statistics course stacks up you can check out the independant course review from CourseMarks. Look, it scored an impressive 7.6 on student feedback!
Continue to split test until you discover the best tactics, headlines, and target audiences for your business.
8. You’ll develop an ‘ideal customer’ profile
There’s a customer waiting out there for every business. Effective and creative marketing makes it easy for them to find you. Over time, as you build a database with the information you’ve acquired from your marketing campaigns, it also becomes easier for you to find them.
Your ideal customer profile includes variables like age, income and location. But hobbies, interests, and occupation are also important. Once you’ve marketed to hundreds or thousands of customers, look at your data and search for patterns and characteristics. You can use this information to profile your ideal customer.
The more you can learn about the people you’re marketing to, the better. Use polls and surveys to learn more about what your customers are looking for. Use their data to better target your marketing campaigns. Google Analytics will help you find the regions where your business achieves the highest conversion rate.
Don’t build products based on the feedback of your customers – that’s a recipe for failure. However, dig deep into the data you generate from your online marketing campaigns and spot trends. Look out for details that you can use to hone in on the type of people that matter the most to your business.
9. You’ll learn how to test and optimise
Knowing how to test different headlines, images, and advertisements is one of the most important skills you can possess. A headline that sounds great in your mind might barely engage your audience. Another that sounds contrived and silly could be the perfect eye-catcher for generating leads and making sales.
If you can’t test and optimise, you’ll never know which headline is the winner and which is the loser. Some of the world’s biggest companies launch online marketing campaigns with hundreds of different images and headlines to be tested. They are looking to find the one combination that produces the greatest return on investment.
A/B and multivariate testing sound complicated, but they’re surprisingly easy once you’ve mastered the basics. If you really don’t want to get into this level there are a host of companies who would be happy to help you.
10. You’ll build a powerful brand
Some marketers set out to sell more products. Others set out to build a brand that’s memorable. The smart marketers set out to do both at the same time.
The ultimate goal of your marketing campaigns should be to have customers come to you. Big brands like Google and Facebook don’t need to remind people that they exist. Their customers already know them and trust them enough to make them part of their daily lives.
Branding is what separates your business from your competitors. And branding is what makes customers choose you instead of someone else. It’s your business’s style, reputation, and culture all rolled into one. Brands are essential, and without marketing your business you’ll struggle to develop a memorable, powerful brand.