The following article is an excerpt from IMPACT’s free Ebook, “Key Components Missing from Your Marketing Strategies.” For more expert tips on optimizing your marketing campaign, be sure to check out the full Ebook.
We’ve already covered one of the most common missed tasks, which is keeping tabs on your marketing stats. If you are a business who doesn’t have any analytical software or that hasn’t employed an inbound marketing firm to keep track of that information for you, then you’re at a huge disadvantage. Inbound marketing is proving to be more effective than outbound marketing techniques, so it’s imperative that you pay attention to just how well your online marketing strategies are performing.
Another common missed task by business owners is education. The online world is constantly changing, and businesses must try to keep up as much as they can. If you want to have the best possible marketing routine, you need to continually educate yourself on new marketing schemes and try out new marketing ideas that you learn about. This is what will keep your business above the grade and put you ahead of your competitors.
And that brings up another important task that is often forgotten: testing. If you want to see how well your PPC campaign is doing, or how well your landing pages are doing, then you’ll need to test, test, test! Your marketing campaign should be all about trying new ideas that you create based on analytical data that you receive. For example, with HubSpot’s A/B testing software, you’ll be able to see just how well each of your landing pages is doing. This will allow you to take a good hard look at the landing pages that are doing well, and those that aren’t. You can then incorporate different aspects of the good pages into the bad and then further test them to see if those strategies work. This will help you fine tune your marketing campaign so that it’s working as well as it can.
But the unfortunate thing is that a lot of businesses put these things aside for two reasons:
- they don’t understand the importance of it all
- they just don’t have the time
Marketing Strategies Often Put Aside Due To Time
You’re not a lazy business owner, but one thing’s for sure: you are BUSY! Chances are you live on coffee and, on a good day, get 4 hours of sleep a night. And now you’re supposed to find more time to do marketing tasks…?
We’ll start with one of the best but most time consuming marketing methods out there: blogging.
This chart shows how much time the average business spends on blogging. Nearly ¼ of the businesses on this chart spend anywhere from 1-3 hours a week blogging. Now, you may be thinking, “Well that’s manageable!” but businesses that spend such little time each week blogging aren’t really making a huge impact on their marketing campaign. The more often you blog, the more leads you’ll get:
And blogs certainly aren’t something to be ignored. As time consuming as they may be, they definitely will result in a number of positives for your company, including brand recognition and sales:
Bottom line: You need a blog. Make the time for a blog and you won’t regret it.
Another common task that’s missed because of time constraints is social media. Social media, if you do it yourself, can and will take a long time. After all, creating regular Twitter and Facebook posts is no easy feat. Most marketing firms will suggest that you post to your social media account at least 2-3 times a day too, which means that while you’re trying to balance your books you’ll have to be brainstorming and coming up with ideas for your social media marketing campaign.
It is time consuming. But social media plays a huge and important role in increasing your business:
As we can see from the graph above, social media is the 3rd most credited reason for bringing more leads into one’s website. It certainly isn’t something that should be ignored.
Email marketing is yet another vital task that seems to be neglected a lot these days. Some businesses do this because they don’t think that their email marketing campaign is effective any more. Others do it simply because they don’t have the time to write emails or even try to gather email addresses from potential leads (which is easier to do than most businesses realize!) If you take the time to make at least 5 high quality landing pages, you can easily start to build up an email list with potential leads. If you use a good CRM or email management software, once you have it all set up and ready to go, running an email marketing campaign is easy.
There are a lot of different tasks that go into having a good online marketing campaign, and while it’s not possible to do them all on your own, there are tools available to you that will make it a lot easier to run and which will save you a lot of time. Setting up and familiarizing yourself with those tools can be tie consuming, and even confusing, so it may be a good idea to hire on an inbound marketing agency for some help while you’re starting up.
Not sure if your marketing strategy is paying off? Contact IMPACT today and learn how we can help!
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