Your business likely doesn’t need a full time dedicated marketing department to run an effective marketing campaign.
In fact, quite often the very best marketing strategy is to take a step back, reevaluate the basics, and then select only a few key tactics to pursue.
Rather than chasing a dozen different tactics at once, simplifying allows you to concentrate on only the tools and technologies that are likely to provide the rest return on investment.
This approach saves time, money, and headaches, and is a whole lot easier to track.
1. Identify your target market
This step may take a bit of time but it will pay off in spades down the road. If you know who you’re trying to serve, it becomes a whole lot easier to figure out where they are, what they do, what they read, and how to best market to them.
2. Focus on ONE customer segment at a time
Even if you’re in a business that serves a wide variety of different customers, try focusing on one segment at a time for at least a month and use this time to learn more about them. This in turn will make it a lot easier to create effective marketing messages tailored directly to their needs.
3. Cut out everything you know isn’t working
These could be things like newspaper ads that haven’t returned an ROI in years, a radio commercial that doesn’t seem to be converting into customers, or even a social media channel that has simply failed to gain any sort of measurable traction. Worst case scenario, you can always add them back in later.
4. Cut out everything you think isn’t working
Tracking and measuring your marketing is always the best policy. Sometimes however, it simply isn’t realistic to assign an exact value to a certain activity. After you’ve cut out everything you know isn’t working, then it’s time to move on to things that you have a hunch just aren’t providing the value that they’re costing in time and money.
5. Focus on the top 20%
If you’ve been in business for a year or longer than you likely have a pretty good idea of what’s been effective in the past. These could be things like a specific social media channel, a content marketing campaign, an email marketing initiative, online pay per click advertising, or even offline marketing initiatives like word-of-mouth referrals or in person networking. Once you’ve cut out everything that isn’t working, it’s time to funnel those resources towards your top 20% marketing activities.
6. Recycle, reduce, reuse
Sometimes in marketing there’s a best way and then a slightly more realistic way of doing things. Creating unique content for each and every channel you own such as your website, blog, and each social media channel is the best way but in order to simplify your marketing sometimes choosing a slightly less time intensive path can work just fine. For this reason, you can aim to create one piece of content, and then syndicate the content across all your different channels. While not ideal, it saves time and money, and is a great short term strategy to leverage a single piece of content.
7. Sharing is caring
Creating unique content for your website and social media channels is time intensive. For this reason, one of the best ways to simplify your marketing is to simply share what other experts are already posting. This not only helps you cut down on costs, but it also helps your business look less promotional, and a lot more helpful.
8. Get back to basics
A search engine optimized website and a single social media channel can be all your brand really needs to gain serious traction in the marketplace. The best search engine optimized website templates I’ve found (and use and recommend) is the Genesis Framework from StudioPress. In regards to social media, Facebook is the most widely used and has the greatest advertising options. Twitter is best for intermediate social media users, and Pinterest is perfect if your target market is predominantly women.
9. Choose your major marketing objective
What is the one single thing you want potential customers to do? Do you want them to call, fill out a form, sign up for an email list, visit an in store location, or make a purchase online? When you get clear about your one major marketing objective it allows you to cut out everything that doesn’t directly relate to achieving your primary goal. Every thing you do is then is either helping you achieve this objective, or not.
Marketing is an important part of running a successful business. If you’re feeling overwhelmed and things seem like they’re getting out of control, the best thing to do is take a step back and look for ways to simplify.
Doing a little bit well will always beat doing a whole lot poorly.
