When your business was just starting out, you probably put a basic marketing plan in place. For most small businesses, this means setting up social media accounts, defining their ideal customer and working out ways to optimize your site for conversions.
As the company grows, the marketing plan gets adapted and can deviate from schedule fast. You may grow tired of some administrative tasks, so you automate them. Maybe you hired people to help. Perhaps you started out writing a blog — then found you just weren’t a natural writer.
Switching up your marketing can boost results and invigorate your staff. It takes less than a day. Here are the recommended steps.
1. Analyze your traffic.
In order to improve your online marketing, you need data on what worked in the past. In some ways, revising a strategy is much easier than coming up with a fresh one, because you should have lots of data to work from. If you’re not currently measuring the source of your traffic, install Google Analytics code immediately, and perhaps a secondary tracking code from a service like Statcounter. Let your data build for a month before coming back and starting again.
2. Re-target your campaign to the right networks.
Social media marketing is incredibly resource-intensive. Putting personality and effort into every network is impossible unless you plan to pay a full-time marketing agency. As part of your refresh, look at the source of the highest converting social traffic and focus intensive efforts on delivering frequent updates and great content to that network. For business-to-consumer companies, this could be Facebook or Twitter. For business-to-business companies, LinkedIn may feature higher in your stats.
3. Look at your delivery methods.
As entrepreneurs become more pushed for time, it’s tempting to automate some types of marketing to lighten the load. Automatic posting and content delivery can turn audiences off rather than offering them beneficial updates. If your social media automation, autoblogging or scheduled posts are not getting results, it’s time to wind back the clock and revert to a more personal approach.
4. Look over your most popular blogs.
Is your evergreen content still bringing traffic — and is that traffic converting? Did your blog lose focus? Have you hired a content writer but found that they don’t have niche expertise? People will always respond much more favorably to high quality content, rather than frequent posts that fade and die quickly.
5. Watch how your leads respond to marketing messages
Building email marketing lists, Facebook Likes and Google +1s is great, but if those followers never interact, they are worthless. Don’t keep paying for Likes or Followers if you aren’t seeing conversions. You must focus on value for readers. If you achieve high standards, the traffic will follow in time.
Prepare for launch
Fresh leads offer new opportunities and can boost a flagging business. Prepare your team for an influx of new custom. Providing you have the resources, you’ll be able to capitalize on your refreshed campaign’s success.
For more tips, read the full article:
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/251892