How To Use Marketing To Grow Your Business Effectively

The modern marketing landscape can be intimidating for any business. With increased competition in the online environment, all spheres of marketing are getting more complicated: SEO, content marketing, social media, email marketing, paid advertising, and marketing analytics. At larger companies, dedicated positions (and sometimes even whole departments) exist for each of these roles. How can a business without the resources for a marketing staff of 10+ people keep up?

Here are some questions to think about:

• Do you try a lot of different marketing strategies, but don’t have time to see any of them through?
• Are you uncertain about the ROI of your marketing efforts?
• Do you feel like you’re doing a lot, and yet aren’t sure if any of it makes a difference?

The first thing to understand is that it’s perfectly common to feel this way, especially if you find yourself wearing multiple hats and juggling the responsibilities of multiple roles each day. Distraction is a major killer to business productivity – and ultimately – continued growth. The key to a successful marketing system that both works and helps to keep your sanity is focus — keying in on exactly the things that will help you grow your business, and then using your time, energy, and resources on these. At Little Jack Marketing, we help businesses focus their marketing strategies on growth, with this simple, three component system:

1. Traffic Drivers

A combination of ad, content, and social media tactics to drive traffic to your site. To grow your business, you need to grow your exposure to new customers. Rather than focusing on just one source, the key to increasing your number of inbound leads is to design a content strategy that works across channels to consistently engage with customers. Think about: How fully are you currently using paid ads, content on your website, and social media to drive customers to your site? Does the content you create meet SEO best practices? Designing a cohesive system that consistently drives traffic to your site can be time intensive at first, but then takes on a life of its own. The same content you’re using on one channel, say, your company’s blog, can easily be repurposed for another, like multiple social media posts — as long as you make sure to use each channel’s own best practices.

2. Buyer’s Journey Funnel

A cohesive funnel-like approach designed to optimize customer value through conversions and sales. Once you have an audience, you need to give them clear and simple next steps. You can do this by implementing a system that systematically and consistently nurtures every Visitor from Stranger to Customer. The key to this effort is treating the customer relationship like… a real human relationship. Would you ask someone to marry you before you’ve asked them out for a cup of coffee? Of course not! Then why would you expect a customer to make a purchase before they really know who your company is? In the same way that a healthy human relationship progresses, a buyer’s journey funnel looks more like: Each of these steps needs to be considered carefully — it requires its own content creation, landing pages, calls to action, submission forms, and other details. So, while the idea itself might seem simple, it’s the execution and the consistency of taking the customer through the stages that makes the buyer’s journey funnel work.

3. Performance Analytics

A simple, yet methodical approach to turn data into actions that improve the performance of your Traffic Drivers and Buyer’s Journey Funnel over time. As you’ll notice in the above, much of the success of the growth system comes down to carefully designing and tweaking content to be maximally effective at the various stages of the customer’s journey. As good as your inherent marketing sense might be, all that doesn’t happen without careful measurement of your performance — that’s where analytics come in. A careful analysis of your website analytics can make a night-and-day difference in the achievement of your growth goals. Here’s how it works:

Focus on each part of the funnel

Analytics are notoriously complicated. There’s a wealth of data there, but it can be hard to wrap your mind around it all. So, the key is to focus in on each part of the funnel to see how it’s performing relative to the others.

Identify & Review Key Metrics

For each part of the funnel, you’ll be looking at different metrics. It’s easy to get lost in data but to understand the health of your efforts, identify what the top 3 to 5 Key Metrics are. At the top, awareness stage of the funnel this could simply be the number of website visitors. Whereas at the bottom, conversion stage of the funnel this could be the number of sales and revenue. But remember, the Key Metrics are just an indicator to help you identify when and where to dive deeper into the numbers.

Formulate a Question

Reviewing your analytics will lead to some important questions, such as “which referrer ultimately has the highest customer conversion rate?” Knowing what the question is can be half the battle when trying to make sense of analytics.

Put Data into Context

When you see the analytics reflecting your system working, or not working, make careful notes about what you changed in your execution that might have led to these different results

Apply Insights

Finally, once you have some takeaways, it’s key to actively incorporate these into the Traffic Drivers and buyer’s journey funnel components on some kind of iterative cycle. These refinements can be put into practice quarterly, monthly, or on an ongoing basis — whatever works for your team. We hope this walkthrough of our three component growth strategy has given you some ideas on how to streamline your own marketing operations. Of course, setting up these systems can be intimidating, and time consuming — that’s why we’re here to help! Contact us today for an evaluation of your current marketing system and a proposal on how we can apply all the above insights into your business.