Quick Tips To Make The Most of Your Marketing Spend

If you’re spending money on marketing – whether that’s directly or indirectly – you want a solid ROI for your efforts. Oftentimes, you don’t achieve that goal for various reasons that are out of your control. Other times, those factors are within your control but the returns still aren’t there.

There are simple steps you can take to make sure you get the returns you’re looking for without expending extra effort. In this guide, you’ll learn some quick tips that should be applied to every marketing campaign to increase your chances of success.

A clear and SMART goal

Almost every marketing campaign exists to produce an ROI but many of them are poorly defined. People set out to ‘produce revenue’ or ‘increase ROI.’ The problem with chasing a goal like that is no one knows what success looks like.

How much revenue should they produce? And what’s the target for increasing ROI. If these things aren’t defined from the outset, then nothing is good enough or everything is good enough.

Use SMART goal setting to define the parameters of the marketing campaigns you launch. Once set, be sure to communicate those goals with your team.

This will help steer everyone in the right direction. If a campaign or initiative isn’t on track to hit the target, you can make changes to it or scrap it early without wasting resources.

Focus on the big things

In marketing, it’s easy to focus on the minutiae like button colors and placement. While these may create small gains for you, they’re not what you should spend most of your time on – at least not in the beginning.

When an initiative is still young, most of your attention should go towards the big picture items like the overall messaging, target market, and even the platform you’re using to push your messages. Once you have that dialed in and are getting good results, you can start to focus on the smaller things that’ll produce incremental improvements. Not before.

Use quick testing

No matter how well-designed a marketing campaign is when you first launch it, there’s room for improvement. This is one of your biggest opportunities because a campaign that’s underperforming can be turned around and one that’s doing well can be made even better.

The nature of your campaign will determine what you can test and what you can’t test. For example, if you’re doing SEO, it’ll be more difficult to test what’s working and what isn’t. It can take months to get feedback.

If you’re using paid ads as part of your marketing mix, you can make tweaks and see the benefits or drawbacks within a day or two.

Whatever kind of marketing you choose, there are a number of things you can test:

–          The overall messaging (headlines, body copy, unique angle)

–          Imagery used

–          The format (video, text, images, audio)

–          The amount of information given upfront (long copy vs short copy

–          Etc.

These are just a few suggestions. When testing, be sure you’re running split tests as opposed to testing one after another. This is important because attitudes and audience members may change so your data won’t be accurate if you run tests one after the other.

Conclusion

As with anything worthwhile, marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. It never ends so instead of prioritizing quick wins, focus on the big picture, and lay out clear goals. Once you have your goals in place, focus on the big picture until you have the basics down. Only then should you start testing the smaller elements and chasing incremental growth.