What is the most valuable resource for your business? Some would say that it is your marketing; your ability to identify your customers and satisfy their needs. While performing marketing activities can boost your business’s bottom line, it can also be wasteful and time-consuming without a proper content marketing strategy for optimum lead generation.
Time, however, is arguably the most valuable resource for their success. As a limited resource, you need to make the most of every business day and your marketing efforts to meet your business goals.
Here are 4 ways to be more efficient with your business marketing.
Maintain your email marketing list
Your email marketing list is a core part of any online marketing strategy. This is your list of leads and customers, anything from hundreds to many thousands of people who have given you permission to contact them directly about your product or service.
Growing this list is important, of course. That’s not the only thing you should focus on, however, if you want to maximize efficiency. Every year, a percentage of people unsubscribe from mailing lists for one reason or another. Looking after your subscribers will significantly reduce the numbers leaving yours.
Provide your followers and subscribers with the answers they need. Add value with specials, exclusive content, and time-sensitive deals. Your content also needs to be good enough that your subscribers would miss it if it didn’t arrive.
Ways To Be More Efficient With Your Business Marketing 1Usefulness is not the only factor, though. Your headlines, subject lines, delivery times, and more, all affect your subscribers and, therefore, the effectiveness of your email list marketing communications.
With a marketing automation platform, one system can organize and monitor your email campaigns, leads, conversions, open rates, and more. You’ll also have the opportunity to perform split testing throughout your email campaigns. In this way, you’ll be able to continually optimize your emails and get the most out of every communication.
Efficiency increases further when your marketing automation system takes over emailing your leads and customers. It will have the ability to monitor your marketing to such an extent that it can send personalized emails not only to segments of your subscribers but also to individual subscribers based on past behaviors. Your leads can receive automatic emails at the best time to make a buying decision.
Have an editorial calendar for your online content
If you don’t already have an editorial calendar, creating one is a top way to improve your business marketing efficiency. If you already have an editorial calendar, give it an overhaul.
Your calendar should contain the details of the content that you plan to create, such as topic, headline, target audience, and keywords. It should also remind you when content needs to be complete and on what venues it will be posted.
Make sure that your calendar includes content for social media as well as for your blog and email campaigns. If you have more than one person performing content writing and social media marketing, assign their tasks in the calendar so that everyone can stay on track.
Creating content involves research, writing, optimizing for SEO, promoting the content, and then tracking its effectiveness. That’s a lot of moving parts. Optimizing your editorial calendar is another area where marketing automation will streamline your processes.
You’ll be able to see what’s happening when and you’ll also be signaled when an item is due. At a glance, you’ll have the opportunity to see which of your efforts is performing, which might work better in other formats or on other platforms, and which might be retired entirely. [If you need assistance with setting up an editorial calendar please contact us.
Use Video
Video is a personable, cost-effective, and increasingly popular way to communicate with potential customers. You don’t need a huge production budget to make a behind the scenes clip of your small business. You can very quickly create content that is shareable and that gives customers a good idea of your company’s mission and its ethos.
Video is a personable and wide-reaching medium that allows you to communicate powerful messages quickly and effectively.
An animated video is also fun and shareable. Done well, it can significantly improve your brand awareness and contribute to a sense of trust and authority.
Invest in Social Media Advertising
Using Facebook as an example, businesses now reach only a fraction of their subscribers with each unpaid social post. The bottom line, as well as being important to Facebook, is that paid social advertising works. It gets your brand in front of your target audience!
If you want to boost particular posts, paying for ads is a great idea, as long as you follow a little advice.
Target your audience carefully – Facebook Ads has powerful tools for focusing your message to a specific audience according to gender, age, geography, interests, and more. Know your audience and build out personas to help you target the right people. (Here’s an example image for an imaginary new product for dog owners in the Philadelphia area.)
Go slowly – Invest slowly at first. See what works and make simple tweaks to assess changes in the effectiveness of your ads. Perform plenty of split testing to refine your ad creatives.
Consider the time and date – the same advert is likely to have different results depending on when you run it. Think about whether your customers are sleeping, at work, or commuting, or at home. Where are they in the world?
Focus on your goals – a business that wants to boost brand awareness may post a different kind of ad to a company that wants to grow its mailing list, which in turn may post a different add if the aim is to inform existing customers of a discounted product.
Using paid advertising can save you time seeking comments and shares by attracting vast numbers of the right visitors in a short space of time.
There are so many strands to a content marketing strategy that any small business selling a product or service online could do with a marketing department.
With an automated marketing solution, businesses like these can have the power of a marketing department without the overheads and with a predictable, monthly fee.
At Six10 Digital, we are an ActiveCampaign Partner Agency, providers of a world-class marketing automation platform that allows you to plan your strategy, track its implementation, monitor its performance with detailed analytics dashboards, and then modify your content marketing strategy to get the most out of your time and money.
Whether you are trying to find time to nurture your email list as it deserves, looking for gaps in your editorial calendar, attempting to track shares of your company video or testing the performance of Facebook ads, it helps to have all of your marketing efforts accessible, trackable and analyzed in one location.
If marketing puts your customers at the core of your business, improving your marketing means better understanding your audience and serving them more effectively. Marketing automation can improve every area of your business.
