1. Create an Effective Marketing Plan and Define a Budget
If you’re serious about marketing and growing your business then you need a marketing plan and an effective budget to achieve your goals.
The first steps toward creating an effective marketing plan and budget are:
- Having a great idea
- Performing lots of research
- Setting goals
Photo credit: Campaign Creators
To build a great marketing campaign, you need the right offering that will appeal to your target audience. Also, thoroughly researching your idea, value proposition, and potential demand for what you’ll be offering will help you find the information you need to make the best decisions for your marketing campaigns. Additionally, you’ll, of course, need a very clear goal, as without it you can’t measure results and the success of your campaigns.
For defining your marketing budget, you need to check the percentage of the total budget that your industry is spending on marketing and you must be specific about your goals. It is difficult to be accountable for the success of your campaigns if you only have vague goals., An important rule of thumb is to set realistic goals. An unrealistic goal is one of the main reasons marketers give up on their campaigns.
2. Optimize your Website to Generate New Clients
It may seem obvious, but one of the reasons businesses don´t succeed online is because they fail to optimize and update their websites.
Not every website is built to generate leads. A high-converting website is laid out with a good understanding of the goal of the end user who’ll be coming to its site. Whether that goal is to get general information about a company, pricing, understand how something works, etc - the website must anticipate what the user is looking for, so that it can make it easier for the user to find it.
An important element to keep in mind is that for many businesses the website’s goal is to generate new clients. Thus, you must design your website with lead generation or e-commerce sales in mind. When a visitor arrives on your website, it’s an opportunity to make a great impression. Make sure you make an amazing first impression so the visitor would have no hesitation to contact you and be willing to give you their contact information so you can contact them, and they can come back to learn more about your business.
However, if you present a low-quality or valueless website, your chances of gaining a lead or sale will be greatly reduced.
Having a well-optimized website can double or even triple the number of leads you generate from your campaign.
Along with conversion-optimized web design, you should also consider a non-popular but important step: A website audit analysis.
Conducting a website audit is an essential task if you want to improve your website’s performance in the search engine results pages (SERPs). The audit results will show you where your website stands, what’s good and bad about it so that you can improve it in order to increase your search engine rankings, which will help you to generate more conversions and offer an overall better user experience.
Think of a website audit as your report card for your site’s performance. It doesn’t matter how clean and well-designed your website is -- if there are issues with your web pages, most or all of your marketing efforts would be futile.
3. Make your Life Easier by Automating your Business
Automation is one of our passions, here at Bloominari, our digital marketing agency in San Diego, we love and use automation because it helps us save time and makes our day-to-day work life easier.
What’s Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is a term used to define processes and/or software that automates manual marketing tasks. In business, marketing reps spend hours processing information about their leads. With marketing automation, these manual tasks can be eliminated. Your marketing team can then focus on their most important tasks, which is to interact with leads and convince them to become customers.
In short, marketing automation will benefit the overall efficiency of your business and will improve its performance.
CRM
An important tool that many of today’s popular marketing automation software services include is a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. A CRM is a tool that lets marketers manage important information about their leads and customers, with the goal of helping them to close new sales.
To increase the number of customers you have, and to make them repeat customers, a CRM is an essential software technology tool that your business must invest in. Some of these tools include Salesforce, Hubspot, AgileCRM.com, InfusionSoft, ActiveCampaign, Copper, Zoho, Insighthly and many others.
With automation, marketers don't need to engage in tasks that are time and energy consuming.
Apart from this, business automation eliminates human errors and makes important information available to marketers in order to turn prospects into customers and serve current customers better.
4. Start an Email Marketing Campaign
After acquiring an effective automation system, you need to start using it. Email marketing is one of the many useful tools you can use to automate your company’s marketing and promotion efforts.
With the right automated email campaign, you can engage your audience, and deliver better customer experience.
Automated email marketing is designed to improve customer lifetime value. For companies, this involves taking prospective customers, new customers, and existing customers on a path — and helping them to see the value in your brand/product.
Drip Campaigns
Drip campaigns are a series of automated content sent to leads by Email at specific times to nurture them to take specific actions and move them down your sales funnel. They're also known as Nurture Campaigns or Campaign Automation.
Whether you're in the e-commerce market or blogging industry, you likely benefit from using drip campaigns to improve your marketing success. But the success of your email campaign won´t consist of how many emails you send but rather in the quality of your Emails’ content.
Writing emails is not enough to get your subscribers interested. You must make up your mind in regards to what you’ll write about (that people actually care to read), and should then ONLY write relevant and persuasive content on your emails.
Your first email marketing campaign, may not be perfect. You just need to know the basics. There are things that you only learn as you get more experience with it.
But how can you gain experience if you don’t start? Get started now that’s the beginning of the year, and I guarantee it that in 12 months you will have improved and revised your original campaign at least a couple of times, and will have improved it on every iteration. In today’s digital marketing world, testing, and re-testing is how you get the most optimal results - there’s no magic key or answer to almost anything.
5. Improve your Search Rankings by Optimizing your SEO and Copywriting Strategy
Current online trends indicate that buyers want and value quality content. “Quality” in this instance could mean helpful, interesting, useful, persuasive, or/and well-researched content.
If you want to rank higher in Google and other search engines, it´s important to keep the quality of the content you share.
This, therefore, makes copywriting an integral part of every SEO strategy. By using high-quality content, you can quickly increase your Google ranking to help you stand out from your competitors.
The competition for ranking high in Google top listings is getting tougher each passing day. To help you gain an advantage over your competition, you need to evaluate and improve your SEO strategy as well.
Conclusion
Follow these lessons, commit to learning more about automation, SEO strategy, website optimization, and effective marketing strategies and you will see an improvement in your marketing results this year.
If you’d like to learn more about any of these strategies or need to implement them ASAP on your business, contact our San Diego marketing team and we’ll be glad to help you!
