Targeted marketing is vital during tough economic times to build business resilience and push growth
As we move into yet another challenging year for the economy, business owners will be keeping a close eye on their business’s expenditure. With budgets squeezed, many businesses opt to cut back on the services they see as auxiliary to their operations. Marketing can be an area that gets grouped into these cutbacks. But is it a straight forward cut back, or should it be a review to create efficiencies and do more of what is working well?
Without a sound marketing strategy in play, businesses can find themselves stuck in limbo, losing potential opportunities through inactivity, and losing their edge on their competitors too. So, how should you maintain your marketing during tough economic times to build business resilience and push growth?
Approaching business marketing through ROI and clear communication
Businesses must run efficiently, especially when the business climate is uncertain. For this reason, business owners need to be clear on the return on investment of all operations in their business and this includes marketing. ROI and timescales should be built into each of your marketing campaigns and communicated internally from the outset. This allows a business owner to assess the cost of campaigns against the revenue opportunities and enables marketing to have the right amount of time to test and build an effective campaign.
Today’s digital driven marketing is not simply about brand awareness, engagement and driving traffic. Effective campaigns will involve a more complex process that requires the implementation of strategies across multiple digital and traditional platforms. This can make marketing activities within a campaign tricky to assess individually, which is why using benchmarks is so important. While initial activities will involve a number of estimations based on the knowledge of the target market and the data analysis of previous activities, benchmarks will help identify the progression and achievement of these activities over a given period. Perhaps more importantly, this approach will help marketing to hone the next steps based on sound analysis of the overall campaign data.
Reviewing the marketing activities and budget
Now is the time to make sure marketing is doing more of the right things. To provide a clear picture for the management team, marketing needs to include meaningful data from campaign activity (with explanation – positives and learnings) as well as insights on all marketing leads that have been gained over the last month. This could include what the lead responded to, how they contacted the business and if they converted into work, the lead time from enquiry to client and how much revenue was generated. This is all key to driving the next round of activity. If the data is there, it is also useful to see if the lead is seeing communications from the business through any other routes, e.g. social, email marketing.
With the data and monitoring tools available, effective marketing is not about shooting in the dark. It is governed by thorough market research, structured through planning, governed by clear objectives and reported on through accurate data.
Outsourced marketing model
As an outsourced marketing service provider, these measures are incredibly important for us to truly grasp the objectives of our clients and how we can facilitate growth for their business through effective marketing tactics.
Following key marketing metrics means we provide our clients with clear data to drive their marketing forwards. It also means we can keep your marketing cost-effective, focusing on those activities that active a good ROI.
In tough economic times these activities are vital for a business to remain visible and adaptable to new income opportunities as they arise.
Want to find out more about how we can help with your marketing campaigns?
If you would like to find out more about how Dataholix can help your business, please do get in touch.
You can find out more about our team and their experience, here.
