Business owners do not have to sit around and play victim during troubling times. In periods of uncertainty, where your dollars go matter more than ever and all marketing efforts ought to be measured for return on investment per marketing channel and further evaluated for effectiveness when measured against one enough.
If you are not measuring your efforts, you need to develop ways to do so or work with a trusted partner to help you make more sense of your marketing.
Let’s dive into how you can develop a winning marketing plan that’s actionable:
Have S.M.A.R.T. Goals
Implementing smart strategies start with having them align to the S.M.A.R.T. principle:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant, and
- Time-based
Before you set out to conduct any marketing campaign, your goal should be clearly defined and understood by those working on it.
Let’s say you want to double your revenue through expanding what your business does digitally, you have to have a more specific goal than simply “doubling more revenue”.
To make this goal SMART, give a time span, specifics relevant to tasks associated with the goal, and ensure that it is measurable.
Here’s a great example of how to go about this intended goal:
“Through a digital marketing campaign, our company’s goal is to double online revenue in six months by investing in a mix of paid and organic channels, focusing primarily on Google Ads and Facebook Ads based on previous return on ad spend data.”
The above example goal outlines a measurable period of time, and will use relevant and attainable data and tactics to get it done.
Review your current channels and marketing ROI
In general, if you intend to make money from a marketing channel, it’s important that you measure and assess your strategy based on that specific channel’s benchmark metrics, specifically return on investment (ROI), or ROAS (Return on Ad Spend), where applicable.
This is particularly important in the digital marketing era, because all efforts can be readily tracked, including customer conversions or costs associated with lead generation strategies. If you are unable to track these particular areas currently, we’d advise you to partner with a consulting group like Schiffbauer Consulting Group to understand your goals and help you achieve them.
When it comes to the digital space, your first mission before even spending a dollar should be to optimize your website prior to sending any paid traffic to it. With this, you will want to ensure proper analytics are set up to track customer interactions throughout all campaigns. Once you have campaigns running and know your analytics, you can use that data, paired with monthly revenue data, to estimate the conversion rate you aim to earn with your future campaign efforts.
Implementing a winning strategy
Once you have an idea of your current returns across your marketing channels, have set reasonable revenue goals, and have outlined methods to optimize your efforts, you have to put these strategies in action.
When you’re building a paid internet marketing campaign in particular, keep in mind that every step in your plan should be based on revenue goals. If they are not, you are essentially throwing money away. If you’re going to use Facebook Ads as part of your campaign, for example, it should be understood by all key stakeholders on why that method will help you reach your revenue goal.
Even in the year 2020 and as accessible as these tactics are, paid digital marketing efforts are not being fully leveraged by small businesses. And it’s not their fault or your own fault for that matter if you feel like this may be foreign to you.
Traditional marketing agencies and companies that “sell-off” one particular marketing service have not educated you on why it is important to have a measurable marketing mix that can be tracked for return on investment. These entities want to sell you on their way, and more often than not, it is not the right way. Between sending vanity analytics monthly with no measurable context to selling you on bulk impressions, these firms are not looking out for your best interests.
At Schiffbauer Consulting Group, we work with our clients to understand their business, its problems, in order to provide solutions that will differentiate your business. In troubling times, you need a partner that you can trust. Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions on building a winning marketing plan for your business.
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