How To Trim The Fat On Your Marketing

It didn’t work, I didn’t see any sales, it’s a waste of time and money. This is what you hear from small business owners when they talk about marketing efforts in the past. The reason we do not know whether a campaign worked or not is because of poor tracking and data. If you want to know the success or lack of success for a campaign, you have to make sure you have reliable data and know what’s going on with your campaign.

You also have to set realistic expectations. For example, if your competition is spending $10,000 a month in advertising and getting 100 sales, you cannot expect to spend $1,000 and get 10 sales. If you spend less money you are going to have a smaller conversion rate as well. However, that doesn’t mean you have to spend like the competition to get results. You simply have to make your money work for you and trim the fat in areas it’s not.

One of the reasons companies waste so much money in advertising is because they aren’t given the right direction. For example, a marketing company will not recommend SEO for a restaurant as much as they would social media marketing. Will SEO help? Of course, but not to the extent that a strong social media campaign would. That’s why you have to work with a company who looks at you as an individual and knows where you should put your money and resources.

Another common mistake made by small businesses is to abandon a campaign if it doesn’t equal sales. If you are an author and you post an ad on Facebook that your book is on sale you may get a good amount of traffic but only a few sales. However, rather than abandoning the ads you change your strategy up and offer a free autographed copy to the winner. All they have to do is provide their email address and the monthly contest will bring in thousands of emails. What’s the value in that? You can now send monthly emails to those people, promoting a new sale or news about your books and see more people buying them now that you are contacting them directly rather than just running a few ads.

The key to trimming the fat on your marketing is to get an understanding of what works, what doesn’t and why. If you can figure that out, you know exactly where to spend less and where to spend more.