The challenge with marketing in small business, is that you just do not have enough budget and resources to market like the big guys. This can create a challenge when coming up with new marketing campaigns and ensuring those campaigns are yielding the best possible results… Typically in larger organizations, they have budget and resources to develop messaging for campaigns. However, even with their large budgets, market surveys, research, and other methods, the large corporations will have a better understanding of what messages will resonate the most, but at best, they are just more of an educated guess. The only real true way to understand what messaging will yield the best results is to test, then test again, and once completed, do more testing. Testing is the only true way to understand what messaging will produce the best results, and in this article we’ll cover some of the basics for testing messaging and campaign effectiveness.
Analytics Tools – Before anything, you need to get yourself familiar with analytics tools available to your business. Some tools may be free and others will be fee-based. In this article, we’ll focus on the tools available at no cost, because even at their basic levels, free can add significant insight to your campaign effectiveness. Another reason for focusing on these tools is that we find most organizations we speak with are not aware of the analytics built in to the tools they use today.
Here are a few, for example:
E-Mail Software – Most e-mail software will have built-in analytics for tracking open, click, and unsubscribe rates along with other useful metrics.
Social Media - Some social platforms have analytics built in to monitor interaction levels. However, even at its most basic level, the easiest way to track social media is to keep track of follower levels from a month-to-month or week-to-week standpoint.
Google Analytics – Google analytics is an extremely powerful free website analytics tool and fairly easy to use and install. Google analytics will give visibility into items, such as which channels are driving website traffic, page click rates, time on page, traffic pattern, and more. Quite simply, Google analytics is one of the most powerful free tools available today.
CRM / Order Entry Systems – Although the most difficult to track, as you are relying on human data entry, these systems still can be effective. A simple question during the sales process like asking how someone found out about your business can yield some interesting results.
Once you have the tools and basic understanding of how they work, it is time to start testing and tracking. Here are a few simple tactics that can be implemented today to start testing campaigns and measuring effectiveness.
Splitting the List – Overtime, your company has hopefully developed a list of newsletter or e-mail recipients—this is a great base of your ideal community. An easy way to test campaign effectiveness is to break the list into equal and random buckets of two, three, or even four different segments. Once these segments are created, the goal would be to try different messaging across the list. The key is to try different structures in your subject lines, content, and content presentation. Tracking how each list performs every month across open, click, and unsubscribe rate will uncover what messaging yields the best results. Each month should be used as an opportunity to implement the changes from what was learned in the prior months and continuing to test new messaging across the different segments. Overtime, you should start to see an increase in overall interaction in your e-mail campaigns.
Social Messaging – Unfortunately without paid tools, Social Media is a little more difficult to track. However, all is not lost as there are still tactics that can be implemented to ensure you are moving in the right direction. Some social platforms, such as LinkedIn, can show interactions of individual posts which can be helpful, but also time-consuming, to track depending on how often posts are made. Instead, we recommend tracking social media on a week to week (or month to month) basis focusing on follower levels and Google Analytics traffic. Tracking follower levels is a great way to see if your messaging is attracting new followers. And by testing messaging and frequency, you should be able see a trend in follower growth. Also, Google analytics is another tool that could be used for this purpose since it can track how much traffic is being sent to your site via each social media platform.
Website Design – Quite possibly the most overlooked aspect of any marketing asset a small business has, is their website. Most tend to look at their website to showcase their products and services, which is a good start. However, we find that after launch, most small businesses leave their website as is and almost never update it or work to make improvements. This day and age, websites are becoming one of the most powerful assets a business can have and could be a full article all on its own. However, for the purpose of this article, we want to focus on the effectiveness of a website from a lead generation perspective. A proper website should not only be a showcase of products and services, but should also be an asset that generates leads (interested buyers) for the business. Unfortunately, the most traditional ways businesses set up their websites is a simple “Contact Us” page and phone number. While “Contact Us” and phone numbers can generate leads for the business, there are other “calls to action” that can be built into the website to generate additional leads. Calls to action can be tricky, as it is difficult to understand what will compel someone to reach out to the business. Only through tracking lead flow from each call to action and testing messaging, location, and pages will you be able to understand what works best. HubSpot has a few great examples you can view here: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/call-to-action-examples
Advertising – Small businesses tend to spend a small fortune on all types of advertising and it never ceases to amaze us when we see the exact same ads used time and time again. Depending on how much your business spends on advertising, this could be the single biggest mistake your business is making, period… Why? Much like the theme of this article, how do you know if your ad is actually yielding the best results? Truth is, you don’t! Sure, that ad that has been running the past six years is generating some leads and business, but what if you could double, triple, or quadruple the effectiveness of those campaigns with the same amount of advertising spend you are putting into those ads today? The simple answer is to test different messaging across your campaigns and see what gets the most phone calls or visits to the website. The easiest way to test the effectiveness is to either create custom website landing pages or to track each campaign and see how many submissions you receive. Another way is to simply train your staff to ask how they found out about your business and to track within your order entry system or CRM.
Again, the biggest challenge in marketing, whether you are a small business or not, is that you never know what messaging will actually relate to your ideal consumer to produce the best results. Your business is already spending time and money for marketing, and by testing, you can ensure that time and money is being well spent. Testing is the only way to truly be sure that effort is being put in the right place.
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