Effective Marketing - Shouldn’t your marketing be based off of performance? If you’re in business you know there are hills and valleys, and right now it’s time to be more efficient with your marketing. This doesn’t mean cutting jobs or spending less but watching the bottom line as well as what marketing efforts perform for you. Your performance should be based off what results you get from any marketing campaign.

Prior planning prevents poor performance, but how do you know if your campaigns work if you don’t track them? Ask yourself these questions.

1. What tools do you have in place to see the effectiveness of your print ads, radio ads, television ads, website, and other marketing vehicles?
2. Do you ask your customers how they found you?
3. Do you know if your website can be found easily or is it buried on page 25 in all search engines?
4. What marketing techniques work and what produces the best results?

How do you measure success? If you get one call from your radio ad, does this mean it’s a bust or a success? Every company or business owner asks if it’s spending the correct amount in one area, or should they be spending in other places. What it really boils down to is what are you spending and do you increase profitability from your efforts. Here are five basic things to consider before you start your marketing.

1. What is your budget and for what duration can you sustain the funding?
2. Identify your target market, demographics, and goals.
3. Identify what your business needs to call a campaign a success.
4. What it costs – What is your return on your investment? Is it worth the risk?
5. Eliminate risk. Don’t spend $20,000 on an old marketing tactic that never produces results.

The bottom line here is for you to get the maximum exposure, the most cost effective process, and eliminate overextending funds to marketing that does not work for you. Understand how you can be effective, and where your marketing dollars are going.

It’s important to manage every aspect of your marketing to profit and remain a player in your respective industry. In some cases when budgets get tight, businesses start cutting their marketing team or marketing funds without evaluating what they can do better and where they can reduce costs in the marketing process. Here are a few ways that you can save.

Cut out the middle man. If you working with a marketing firm you can save more than 20% by performing these tasks in house.

1. Media buying – Contact and deal directly with local newspapers, radio stations, and magazines.
2. Creative design and development – Do you need to pay $125/hr for design work and can you get the very same results for less?
3. Track your performance – Identify what works, and what doesn’t.
4. Evaluate & revise your goals and marketing plan.
5. Adapt to change. If you are missing a critical piece of marketing like a website get one designed correctly so it works as a marketing vehicle.

Cut spending where it’s needed and evaluate what works. Evaluate if your website is a brochure or a marketing tool, and if people can find your web site.

Just recently we saved a business thousands of dollars per month on Google Adwords by correctly redesigning their business website. We restructured their search engine placement, optimized their website, and implemented a search engine marketing plan that works. Currently this business website is found naturally on page one, and two of all major search engines, and they get 65% more leads from being visible to possible buyers.

We have a name for this - it’s reverse marketing. We take a current business website, give it an overhaul, and let the website actively market the business. The advantages are that the business doesn’t have to spend additional money just to get found online, and it integrates cross promotional material to drive traffic to an already successful tool.

Many people ask us if just adding keywords will help search engine placement. In short, the answer is maybe. Correct placement starts with the very basics of website design, how it’s coded, and if you have the right components. If you add oil to an already deficient vehicle will it help? It’s possible, but wouldn’t it be more helpful to fix the deficiencies so the vehicle has the potential to be more efficient first.

Tags: Effective Marketing Fargo, Fargo Internet Marketing, online website placement, website design business fargo