Achieving the best returns on your marketing doesn’t happen by luck or coincidence. It takes meticulous research and professional know-how to make your budget go further. Marketing success and business growth usually go together like two pedals on the same bike, so you shouldn’t be cutting corners if you want to maximise leads and sales.

Ensure you’re spending money in the right places by following the research tips below. Or get in touch with a WEBPRO professional for a personalised consultation today.

Know your target audience

With any marketing campaign, you need to know who is your target audience. You might not have the same target audience for every campaign, especially if campaigns are geared towards different products or services. For example, financial advisers promoting first mortgage advice services and pension services might have a slightly different demographic, possibly by age. You could find out the specific demographics by looking at past sales or completing market research.

Many businesses make the mistake of assuming their overarching target market is the same across all their marketing campaigns, but this might not be the case. Understanding this is the best place to start with your marketing plan as it prevents mistakes that cannot be easily or cheaply corrected later. This information will also feed into other crucial decisions.

Know where your market hangs out

Once you’ve identified who your target market is for a specific product or service, you need to identify where the people who match your target audience are hanging out.

If you’re using an offline marketing strategy like leaflets and posters, you need to know when and where your market is located. For example, is there a certain area of the city they’re more likely to be and at a specific time? On the other hand, if you’ll be using a digital marketing campaign, you need to know where these people are online. What social media platforms do they use? Do they usually search online with a desktop or mobile?

These are the sort of questions you’ll need answers to. Once you have these answers you can use them to inform your marketing strategy, including what strategy you’ll invest in and which ones won’t offer the best returns based on research.

Be prepared to track and change

Even the best and most experienced marketers don’t set up a campaign and sit back. You need to continually monitor the results of your campaigns to uncover exactly how the target audience is responding. There could be certain aspects of the campaign – such as wording or an image – that are causing the campaign to not be as successful. Different options within the campaign can be tested with A/B testing to maximise results.

But your marketing campaigns aren’t the only thing you might need to track and change…

Is your website set up to convert?

Sometimes a marketing strategy can be well-researched and executed, but it still doesn’t get the results you were expecting. If this is the case, you may need to look at your website. A website that isn’t optimised to convert leads could be costing you sales and wasting your marketing investments.

To check if you’re website is set up to convert marketing leads, check:

• If it has a user-friendly design that is easy to navigate 
• If it has a low or high bounce rate 
• If leads are dropping off on or near the checkout (it could be delivery costs or payment methods that are the problem)

Many of these things can be checked with Google Analytics. If you’re not set up with this tool then speak to WEBPRO for immediate support.

Recap…

Making your marketing budget go further with better returns is all about meticulous research before choosing and launching marketing strategies. You need to zone in on each marketing campaign's target audience, which may not be identical to your other campaigns depending on what product or service you’re promoting. You then need to identify where the target audience hangs out, and how they respond to different phrases, images and other media. Last but not least, you need to monitor campaigns and make changes, possibly to your website so it's better set up to convert marketing leads.

WEBPRO Knows

One marketing survey found that marketers who are organised and plan are a whopping 674% more likely to be successful!