Living Entrepreneurship Blog / Babson Entrepreneurs

4 Life Saving Tips for Small Business Marketing

Marketing for any small business is incredibly time consuming, and if you’re only one person or a small army of hardcore marketers, you want to make sure you’re optimizing around acquiring new customers and re-selling to current customers.

  1. Focus on the RIGHT numbers. While marketing can be a volume game, it’s easy to measure the wrong metrics and to aim for the wrong goals. We came across that problem when we were shooting for high volume traffic, but it wasn’t converting as we expected. The Key Performance Indicator should have been sales, not traffic.
  2. Spend money to get money back. Sure, goodwill is a good idea. Advertising is good for branding purposes too. But will these things help you reach your goals, which mean more revenue and more profit? Will goodwill turn into an amazing piece of press for your company that in turn will lead to sales? Will that branding campaign cause more people who were initially hesitant to purchase at one point, to actually pay for your product or service at another time? You have to have justification for your initiatives, as well as proper metrics to measure the effectiveness of the programs; otherwise you’re just wasting time doing things that might not be working or things that do not work as effectively as other things.
  3. Double down on what’s working. It’s important to know what is affecting the bottom line and focus more of your efforts on what will help you reach your business’ goals. Cut out the fat and stop doing things that aren’t as effective as other things you can do or things that aren’t effective at all.
  4. Test, Test, Test! If what you’re doing works well enough for you, then that’s great, but if you want to take your business to the next level, test out ways to make what you’re doing even more effective. Try out new things with CRM like offering different sales and promotions, rearranging your website and its contents for readability and usability, or just testing a few things with your email marketing.

About the Author: Danny Wong is the Lead Evangelist for Blank Label, a provider of men’s custom dress shirts. He specializes in Small Business Marketing and Search Engine Optimization.

This was originally posted on SmallBizBee.com