So, you’ve decided to expand your small business marketing efforts beyond word-of-mouth. Great! But where do you start? When it comes to online marketing strategy, it’s easy to get lost in the brambles of bad advice.
To eliminate confusion, start with the following 2 tactics:
- Track the results of your efforts
- Analyze your competitors’ marketing efforts
Track Your Results
If you don’t track, how do you know where to make improvements and changes to your marketing and advertising efforts?
Without tracking, you’re wasting your marketing budget.
You can save a lot of money right off the bat by merely tracking and analyzing what works and what doesn’t.
Here’s how:
- Google Analytics
- Tracking Numbers (used responsibly)
- Ask every single new customer how they found you
- Work with your marketing agency or team and making sure they’re reporting transparent results – not just vanity metrics.
By analyzing your results, you’ll have a clear picture of where you need to focus your efforts, as well as what you need to alter. That way, your marketing efforts will bear the most fruit.
Get Competitive Insight
If you don’t know what your competitors are doing, you can’t leverage their successes and failures.
- 90% of Fortune 500 companies look at what their competition is doing on a regular, ongoing basis.
You don’t have to make the same mistakes, you can learn from the ones they’re making and adopt their successes too.
- Work smarter, not harder.
So, how do you find out what your competitors are doing?
- Perform a competitive analysis
Here’s how:
- Look at your most successful competitors and study their marketing efforts.
- Even if you’re the only business of your kind in your area, find other businesses in similar-sized towns and study the marketing efforts of the most successful ones.
Things to look for:
- Do they have things like a well-optimized website, keyword targets in on-site content, which keywords they’re bidding for in their Paid Media campaigns?
- How do they handle their online reviews? – Do they respond to every review? Do they manage their negative reviews professionally?
- Are they active on social media? Does their audience seem engaged? Which platforms are they leveraging?
If it didn’t work for your competitors, it’s more than likely not going to work for you either. Save your business time and money by paying attention to what the competition is doing.
Final Thoughts
You can make your small business marketing strategy complicated or straightforward. The main things to remember are tracking your results and keeping an eye on your competition. You don’t have to try every tactic. Choose what works for you.
Ready to take your small business marketing to the next level? Click on the chat bubble below or drop us an email to speak with a BizIQ marketing expert.
