Continued Marketing

Don’t treat the symptoms, fix the problem! Many companies view marketing as a service to utilize once something is going wrong (i.e. not enough customers or recognition). Continued marketing is your company’s sustenance and helps you get where you want to be and stay there. Even recognizable brands such as Apple know the importance of continued marketing and spend billions of dollars each year on their marketing efforts.

Achievable Goals Through Continued Marketing

1. Shape Your Customer Base

   Your business is always evolving, make sure you target your appropriate audience. Constantly evaluating your messaging, visuals and strategy will keep you on the right track to maintaining and growing your customer base.

2. Don’t Lose Out to Your Competitors

   If you are not presenting your business to your target market, someone else will be. Your company is constantly improving, but people’s perceptions tend to remain fixed when they first discovered you. It can take years to create your reputation, don’t become stale, and let your audience get further out of sync.

3. Maintain Momentum and Opportunities

   It takes a lot of effort and time to get to a point where your company is in demand. If you are practicing continued marketing then there should always be more demand than you can actually meet. This gives you the opportunity to pick and choose your customers and focus on what is most important to you (i.e. profitability, time, most fun, etc.). This also gives you the advantage of having a waiting list for when things slow down, keeping your cash flow and business going.

4. Ensure Your Future

   The number one reason for continued marketing is to secure your company’s future. Simply put, marketing creates business. Your pipeline might be full right now, but how about in six months, or three years? Don’t lose momentum, in the long term it will cost you more.

Don’t let your current success be the end of your journey, focus on achieving steady continued growth with ongoing marketing projects.

Which Marketing Efforts Should You Focus on Now?

Now you know why it’s important and how it will help with your success, so let’s talk about how to execute continued marketing for your small business.

• A/B Testing

  A/B or split testing is a way to compare two or more versions of something to figure out which performs best. It can help you to determine “What is most likely to make people click? Buy a product? Or fill out a form?” A/B testing can be used to evaluate anything from a website design to copy on a page, even different locations for a button. This information is huge in creating successful marketing campaigns. Of course, you should A/B test for each new campaign, but as your digital presence evolves it is also important to continue with testing to make sure your marketing efforts are evolving as well.

• Website Evaluations

  Your website is your digital storefront and the face of your business. It not only establishes credibility but showcases your brand and promotes a positive impression of your company. Maintaining that positive impression means you need to be constantly evaluating your target audience and adjusting your messaging, visuals, and strategy accordingly.

• SEO Optimization

  Maintaining your website’s SEO and search engine rankings requires the use of many different techniques and there are a number of ways you can, and should, go about it to help you be successful. One way to do this is by creating blogs or news posts regularly. Also, a good rule of thumb is to have quarterly reviews to go over your website copy, content, keywords, metadata, and your overall SEO strategy, this way as your business grows your website is updated with the most relevant content and the right growth strategies. However, even with constant updates and changes, a website can still become dull just by having an old design. Ideally, you should plan on doing a redesign of your website about every three years to stay modern.

This blog post focuses specifically on optimizing the content for your website, though most of the techniques discussed here can also be applied to other digital marketing efforts.