When Will You See A Return On Your Marketing…

Launching a new marketing campaign is nerve wracking; you’ve put all that time and money into it and there’s no way to know if it’s definitely going to work. For new businesses, the prospect of pumping a big chunk of their startup money into a marketing campaign and hoping it comes off is scary. The worst thing about it is not having a sense of when you might start making a profit, and if you can even survive until that moment.

Knowing when you’re likely to start seeing that money come back in is important because it can help you to plan and divide up your cash to make sure that you don’t run out before breaking even. Digital marketing is the most popular form that most businesses rely heavily on so we’ll focus on that. This is how long it’s likely to take before you see a return, and how you can make sure you survive until then.

Paid Marketing

The first aspect of digital marketing is paid marketing; that’s any pay per click adverts directing people to your site or products. The good news is, return on these kinds of ads is usually pretty instant, if they’re working that is. If you haven’t seen much action after a couple of weeks, it doesn’t look good.

Owned Marketing

Owned marketing tends to refer to websites in this context. The return that you see and how quickly it comes depends on you. The bad news is, you aren’t going to see an immediate return when you launch a new site. Most of the time, it’ll fall down the search listings a bit and you’ll see a drop in traffic. It takes the search engines a few months to reindex new sites but you’ll start to see an increase in traffic after that.

Earned Marketing

Earned marketing is organically generated marketing through customers, in other words, word of mouth. This isn’t costing you anything so you don’t need to worry about that, but you aren’t likely to see a return anytime soon. You need to establish yourself well and really impress customers before they’ll start telling their friends about you.

How Do You Survive?

When you add all that together, you’ll get a small return on your paid marketing quite quickly, but more significant avenues like your website or social media pages are going to take a few months at least before they start making you much money. That means you’ve got to keep your head above water.

The first thing to do is manage cash flow. Invoices that take ages to come through are one of the number one problems for small companies. You can use a cashflow finance company who will pay you most of the invoice right away, then the rest when the customer pays. That helps keep the cash coming in so you don’t get in trouble.

Overestimating is the other important thing. A couple of months is just an estimate, there’s no way to know for sure. If you split your cash over three months exactly and can only survive if you start seeing that return, what are you going to do if it doesn’t happen?

Put The “Prod” Back In “Product” With Your Product…

Whether you’re an entrepreneur with a thriving business or a salaried worker tinkering away on a project there’s a unique sense of exhilaration that comes with the invention of a unique product. From that first spark of inspiration to the development of a working prototype it’s a time of real excitement and self affirmation. Wouldn’t it be a tragedy if all this hard work and effort were to be rendered pointless if the product’s release were to fall on deaf ears? Wouldn’t it be a mockery of justice if your product were to be unleashed upon the market with a whimper rather than a bang and for your ingenious product to be consigned into the trashcan of history, uncelebrated and unnoticed.

Here’s where the importance of marketing comes in. The right marketing strategy can make the difference between your product becoming a household name and becoming a forgotten obscurity languishing forgotten in a few dozen basements.

Before you start to market your product…

Before you even take to the workshop you will hopefully have carried out tireless market research. You’ll have identified a public need to solve a problem that only your product can solved. You’ll have found a gap in the market and know exactly how your product will fill it. You will know exactly who your target market is and what influences their behavior. You may even have a good idea of what products they may be using that are similar but inferior to your product and how your product will scratch an itch that your competitors cannot reach. You should also have consulted a patent lawyer to make sure that you won’t be infringing on anyone else’s invention and / or copyright.

Take a bite from the Apple

When it comes to illustrating the power of good marketing there’s no better example than the Californian consumer electronics giant Apple. Apple’s “Get a Mac” campaign was a masterclass in marketing efficacy that helped the company to become 100% wealthier than the American government. The campaign was clever and funny but although it directly compared the Mac with it’s closest competitor it neither made false or needlessly boastful claims nor did it fall into the trap of disparaging Microsoft’s product. Perhaps this was due to the friendship between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

If your product offers a significant upgrade or advantage over another similar product on the market, you could do well to base your marketing campaign around this. You might even be able to piggyback on your competitor’s popularity.

Get optimized

When potential customers look at your product they’ll have a very specific set of expectation which they’ll expect to see in the product descriptions in online retail outlets. Since nobody knows the product better than you, it may be tempting to write these yourself but there’s actually a compelling argument in favor of outsourcing this. Entrusting your product optimization to a company like Grow Online has some distinct advantages. Through a structured and keyword rich approach to product description they’re proven to be able to increase traffic and conversion rates. They will have in depth knowledge of search engine algorithms that they will be able to use to your advantage.

Know your niche

Remember your market research! Many an entrepreneur has fallen short trying to be all things to all consumers. It’s important to know what your target market values and know your niche. Take a cautionary tale from the automotive world. Czech manufacturer Skoda committed a marketing faux pas in the ‘90s that almost did permanent damage to their brand. They marketed themselves on their affordability and resultantly they came across as being cheap and inferior. And cheap is a label that no auto manufacturer can afford to bear. Thus, they shifted their focus at the turn of the millennium with a campaign based around the brand’s reliability and the exceptional value for money they offered customers. The campaign even had a playful and self-effacing slogan; “It’s a Skoda. Honest”. Ensure that you don’t misplace the emphasis when it comes to developing your marketing campaign.

Embrace the power of brand collaboration

If your product comes from out of nowhere it can be laborious and time consuming to build the consumer trust that is essential in building a successful brand. Brand collaboration allows you to pair your product with a brand that produces complementary and non competing products. This will enable you to piggyback on their popularity and capitalize on the goodwill toward the other brand which consumers will read as an endorsement of quality.

Successful examples include Bonne Belle’s Dr. Pepper flavored lip balm and Go Pro’s collaboration with Red Bull.

Never Forget The Power Of Real-World Marketing

When looking at how to spread the brand, increase awareness, build referrals, and drive conversions, it’s easy to follow the modern focus on spending all your time online. It’s easy to measure the data there, to reach more people, and to achieve results. Real-world materials cost more, they reach fewer people, and you’re not always certain they work until some time after. However, if you neglect the real world, you’re neglecting a sizeable portion of your market that might not be in the right online spaces to encounter your brand. Here are a few ways to make sure you still catch those valuable potential customers.

Paper’s still relevant

We keep hearing that print is a dying medium, but that’s not true for print of all kinds. Physical mail marketing still offers one of the highest return on investments, even when compared to social media, emails, and other online strategies. Never neglect the sheer influence you can have by placing your brand in the right place, either. Flyers and other paper marketing methods are easy to distribute and cover plenty of ground with. When it comes to capturing attention, however, few work as well as renting out some space on a billboard. They are an easy way to immediately establish some legitimacy and visibility in the business and they’re not interruptive like most online marketing methods, so their message tends to sink in a little more.

Driving your brand

You can take that slowly infiltrating essence of the billboard and make it much more effective by taking it on the road, too. Some businesses drive from place to place, so you could be making better use of an asset you already have by applying some marketing to it. If you’re willing to find cheap vans for sale, you can even maximise the amount of space you have to provide your details and show off your brand across the whole town. In terms of cost-effectiveness, it’s some of the easiest marketing out there. Discounting the cost of the vehicle, which you likely already have, it’s just a single application that keeps doing its work for as long as you keep driving around. It’s particularly effective for tradespeople, of course.

The face-to-face

Do you think that, given the opportunity, you could convince most of your target market in person? Then why aren’t you taking that opportunity? It depends on the industry you’re in, of course, but attending trade shows and other networking events can be some of your best shots at getting a face-to-face with the people interested in your industry, i.e. the people most likely to convert and become customers. Trade shows take preparation, of course. You need speaking material at the ready, your best salespeople with you, and a booth set-up that’s going to compete with the other attendants. If you get it right, however, there are few public displays better for you brand.

You don’t have to give up online marketing to share some focus on the real world, nor do you have to go vice-versa. Find your balance and make sure you’re covering all your bases.