How to Be More Efficient with Your Marketing

As a small business owner, it’s natural to feel the need to use the latest and greatest marketing platform to engage with your clients. We’ve all been there before; you hear about the success a business is having with Pinterest, so you spend time and resources incorporating Pinterest in your marketing strategies. Three weeks later, you wonder why you aren’t seeing the same results.

As a leader or marketing decision maker, you need to understand not just the different marketing platforms available, but you also need to pinpoint where your customers live and engage. Just because another business uses Facebook for lead generation doesn’t necessarily mean that Facebook is the most efficient and effective platform for you to be spending time, resources, and money.

Instead of spreading yourself thin across multiple platforms, invest your resources in the particular platforms that attract your audience. Here are five tips to ensure you’re being efficient with your marketing:

1) Determine Platforms: This first step might seem easy, but oftentimes, businesses aren’t identifying all the viable platforms they can use for marketing to — or communicating with — their customers. Spend time figuring out what platforms exist and what each does most effectively. At our company, Influence & Co., we chose to focus first on platforms that all of us had prior experience with, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. We knew that most of the people in need of our services were entrepreneurs and learners like ourselves — and we’d find them in the places we frequented.

2) Identify Where Your Customers Live: Business owners tend to get easily distracted by larger platforms (Facebook, Twitter) and think that because those platforms have the most users, they must be the right ones to invest in. In reality, that may not be the case at all. Figure out not only which platforms your customers are using, but also what platforms they’re engaging on. As a company, we realized early on that although Facebook is a great option for most businesses, it wasn’t a good fit for our marketing needs. We spend more time on professional networking sites, like LinkedIn and Google+, because that’s where our target market is engaging.

3) Gather Data: You’ve identified a few platforms your target market is visiting regularly and developing real connections through — now it’s time to try them out. You need a large enough sample size on these platforms to determine whether they’re worth your time, money, and resources over the long haul. Spend at least three or four weeks’ time on each platform you think will be most effective and see what data comes back. Not only do we gather a large amount of data on the platforms we test out, but we also look to industry experts or the platforms’ best practices themselves to determine how we can take advantage of these platforms for our specific needs.

4) Spend Resources on What Works: After you’ve spent ample time and resources on researching, identifying, and gathering data, you should take a look at which platforms were most effective. Take your top two or three performers and focus on those. By not spreading yourself too thin, you’ll be investing in the platforms that have (at least initially) shown they can help grow your business.

5) Stay Narrow and Consistent: Whether you achieve success or not with these initial marketing platforms and strategies, focus on the platforms that deliver. Continue to pull data from each of your platforms to identify which ones are doing well — and which are not. Initial success with a platform doesn’t lock you into a lifelong relationship that won’t change or pivot based on your current needs as a business. You’re dating these platforms, not marrying them.

6) Rinse and Repeat: This cycle of identification, research, data analysis, and investment should be continuous. Don’t get caught up in the hype surrounding the latest and greatest platform; always remain aware of what’s going on outside your current marketing strategies and continuously consider whether you’re on the right path or need to make some tweaks.

At the end of the day, you need to be investing your company’s time, resources, and money on marketing. The biggest mistake companies make is overinvesting without a true understanding of what they’re doing and where their target market is actually engaging. Slow down the process, identify where you really need to be, and focus on what works.

via Business 2 Community http://www.business2community.com/marketing/efficient-marketing-0625713?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=efficient-marketing