Four States Small Business Blog

Are you a business owner looking to expand your reach, attract more customers, and ultimately grow your business? If so, you're likely aware of the importance of investing in marketing. For some, $500 a month seems like enough to fuel your business's growth through marketing. But is it really? In this blog, we'll examine whether or not $500 is adequate for conducting successful marketing campaigns.

Topics: Integrated Marketing, Radio Advertising, Marketing Strategy, Marketing ROI, BrandsFormation, Digital Marketing, Advertising, Branding

Have you ever found yourself belting out the lyrics to a commercial while cruising down the highway? Or maybe you've started a spontaneous sing-along with friends because of a song that's stuck in your head? That's the magic of jingles—catchy melodies with a lasting impact.

Topics: Radio Advertising, Advertising Creative, Advertising, Branding

Marketing is the lifeblood of any business, and it's the bridge that connects your products or services to your target audience. However, in today's competitive business landscape, it's not just about spending money on marketing; it's about using your marketing budget wisely to achieve maximum results. In this blog, we'll explore strategies and tips on how to make the most of your marketing budget and get the best return on investment.

1. Set Clear Goals

Before allocating your marketing budget, you need to establish clear, measurable goals. These goals should align with your overall business objectives. Are you aiming to increase brand awareness, drive website traffic, generate leads, or boost sales? Having well-defined goals will help you allocate your budget more effectively, as each goal may require different marketing channels and tactics.

2. Analyze Past Performance

Reviewing your past marketing campaigns can provide valuable insights. Analyze which strategies and channels yielded the best results and which ones fell short. This data can help you make informed decisions when planning your budget allocation. It allows you to invest more in what works and avoid wasting money on ineffective strategies.

3. Prioritize Your Target Audience

Not all marketing channels and tactics will be equally effective for reaching your target audience. Understanding your audience's preferences, behaviors, and demographics is essential. Invest in research to create detailed buyer personas, and then allocate your budget to channels and strategies that are most likely to reach and engage your ideal customers.

4. Diversify Your Marketing Mix

While focusing on your core strategies is essential, don't put all your eggs in one basket. Diversifying your marketing mix can help you reach a broader audience and mitigate risks. Consider allocating your budget across various channels, such as content marketing, digital display advertising, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and SEO. This way, you can hedge against changes in the marketing landscape or algorithm updates that may impact one channel.

5. Leverage Data and Analytics

Utilize marketing analytics such as   Google Search Console to track traffic to your business website and gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of your marketing strategy. Additionally, monitoring traffic stats for your website can help you make informed decisions about what kinds of content to produce moving forward. 

 

6. Invest in Content Marketing

Content marketing is a cost-effective strategy that can yield significant long-term benefits. Producing high-quality, valuable content engages your audience and improves your search engine rankings, driving organic traffic. Allocate a portion of your budget to content creation, including blog posts, videos, or audio content such as podcasts. 

7. Monitor Your ROI

Regularly evaluate your marketing ROI to ensure you're getting the best results from your budget. Calculate the return on investment for each campaign and channel and adjust your budget allocation accordingly. Over time this approach will help refine your marketing strategy and maximize your budget's impact over time.

Build an Effective Marketing Plan

Zimmer Marketing has been busy helping businesses transform into powerful local brands with multi-channel marketing campaigns. We can help you determine the right marketing blend for your needs and ensure your brand has a consistent message that resonates with your audience and drives growth.

Speak with a Marketing Consultant Today!

 

Topics: Integrated Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Digital Marketing, Advertising

Marketing is pivotal to driving success and growth in the constantly changing business environment. When done well, it is a powerful engine that can propel your brand forward, enabling you to reach your target audiences and achieve your goals. However, within marketing, two essential components often need clarification: strategy and tactics. While these terms are used interchangeably, they represent distinct elements of the marketing process. In this blog, we will explore marketing strategy and tactics and how they relate, shedding light on how they are different yet work together.  

Topics: Marketing Strategy, Digital Marketing, Advertising, Branding

As a small business, finding an effective mix of marketing channels is essential to increase your ROI and ensure steady growth for your business. But with an increasing number of available marketing channels every day, especially in the digital space, narrowing down your options and finding the best fit for your company can be difficult. With that in mind, let's look at some helpful tips for finding your ideal marketing channels.

1. Identify Your Marketing Audience

Your first step when planning for any upcoming marketing campaign should be identifying at least one target audience. Doing so will immediately help you eliminate any marketing channel with little reach to your audience or audiences. If you come up with more than one audience segment you would like to market to, you should rank the importance of each listed segment. That way, you can apply limited resources where they will be most effective.

2. Plan for the Buyer's Journey

Individuals that may purchase a product or service from you always occupy a point on a conceptual model called 'the buyer's journey.' Buyers move from the awareness stage through the consideration stage, and finally to the decision stage, where they will decide whether to give you their business. The most successful marketing campaigns reach a person while they are in each step of the journey. For instance, a broad-reach marketing channel such as radio is particularly useful for reaching people in the awareness phase. On the other hand, running ads in a search engine can be ideal for the consideration and decision phases. Choosing the right marketing channels will depend on selecting channels that blend well in an integrated marketing approach.

3. Set Clear Campaign Objectives

Not all marketing campaigns have to culminate in the immediate purchase of one of your products or services. It's important to clearly define your campaign objectives, such as increasing brand awareness, generating leads, driving sales, or enhancing customer engagement. For instance, your primary objective could be building your mailing list so you have an already interested audience segment you can target in future marketing campaigns. 

4. Consider Your Budget

Budget is one of the most essential considerations when deciding on a mix of marketing channels. Opting for marketing channels that you can't allocate enough financial resources to run effectively could be a complete waste. Likewise, your budget may be stretched too thin if you choose too many channels. It's best to opt for a couple of channels that support each other and provide each with ample funding. 

 

Putting It All Together

The ideal marketing mix for your business will reach your market audience at various points in the buyer's journey, satisfies your campaign objectives, and fits your budget. If any of your chosen marketing channels don't align with the above considerations, you should go back to the drawing board and review some other options. Of course, getting some professional support when planning integrated marketing campaigns can also be helpful. If you would like help with your campaign, we invite you to get in touch with one of our marketing consultants.

Contact Zimmer Marketing

 

 

Topics: Integrated Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Marketing ROI, Digital Marketing, Advertising, Branding

Advertising in print media has long been an important marketing channel for American businesses of all sizes. But this has been especially true for smaller, local businesses. The access to local audiences plugged into their communities that local newspapers offer is an excellent opportunity for affordable advertising. But with the rise of digital publications, what is the status of print media, and what are some advertising alternatives? In today's blog, we will look at the condition of print media in America and offer some advertising alternatives to diversify your marketing budget and secure your business's growth into the future. 

Print Media in 2023

For companies that have depended on print advertising in local newspapers and magazines, there is good news and bad news. Let's start with the good: The downfall of print media in the United States has not been as precipitous as the worst predictors have warned. That brings us to the bad news. The trend of declining print media, and by extension, advertising opportunities, continues.   "Total estimated weekday circulation of U.S. daily newspapers was 55.8 million in 2000 and dropped to 24.2 million by 2020,"  according to the U.S. Census Bureau. 

While the around 20 million people still receiving newspapers can still be reached with newspaper advertising, the last two decades have nonetheless seen the national audience shrink by half. Those with access to stable internet connections, and especially those with smartphones, prefer receiving news and entertainment via various forms of digital media. The remaining audience for traditional print media tends to be older, more rural, and more involved in their local community.

Diversify Your Marketing Media

Depending on the demographics of the audience you are trying to reach with your advertising, print media may still be an important part of your marketing plan. However, print advertising cannot reach anywhere near as many readers as it used to. Now is the time to add in other marketing media to grow the reach of your branding message.

 

Advertising Alternatives to Print Media

There are many alternatives to traditional print advertising that we could talk about. But for the sake of simplicity, we'll cover four options that can help you enhance your marketing mix in light of the decline in print media.

Radio Advertising

Radio stands out as a particularly good alternative for businesses that historically depend on local print advertising. Production and advertising costs are low compared to other media, and it reaches regional audiences with the added benefit of audience segmentation based on station formats. Radio continues to boast high numbers of listeners. 

Digital Display Ads

Digital Display Ads can be shown across hundreds of websites while only appearing in front of people matching the characteristics you've identified in your target audience. This is often a useful option if you're trying to reach people getting their news online, whom you may have once reached with newspaper advertising.

Organic Search Strategy

An organic search strategy focuses on ranking your business website high in search engines for keywords relevant to your products and services. Typically this is done with regular topical blogging designed to serve the needs of your audience members. Time is key with this marketing method, as building up your website's competitiveness can take a while. But it is well worth the wait for those businesses that stick with it. 

Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing is like the 'fast version' of an organic search strategy and is often abbreviated as "SEM." With this method, you pay search engines to run ads on your strategic keywords. It is more expensive than organic, but you can begin driving traffic to your website immediately. Businesses with many competitors often use SEM when an organic strategy would be more difficult and time-consuming. 

Revamp Your Marketing Strategy

If you're interested in exploring other marketing options to reduce reliance on print advertising, please reach out to a marketing consultant at Zimmer Marketing. We've helped dozens of local businesses create marketing and branding plans to accelerate growth and secure market share. We would love to help your business, too!

Contact Zimmer Marketing

 

Topics: Integrated Marketing, Radio Advertising, Marketing Strategy, Marketing ROI, Digital Marketing, Advertising

Zimmer Marketing had an excellent year at the 2023 Missouri Broadcasting Association Awards, held June 3-4 in Osage Beach. Combined, Zimmer Marketing's radio stations earned five first place wins and two certificates of merit, including two complete category sweeps! Here's how we performed in the following categories:

Topics: Radio Advertising, Joplin Market, Advertising Creative, Team Zimmer, Advertising, Company Culture

Radio has long been a staple of successful marketing campaigns, but there are an ever-growing number of ways to reach audiences with your messaging through digital marketing. That raises the question,   How should I allocate my marketing budget between radio and new digital channels? The short answer is that traditional marketing media, such as radio, works well with digital as part of a multi-channel marketing campaign. So, it's almost always best to use a blend. Below, we'll explain how best to balance radio and digital marketing.

Topics: Radio Advertising, Marketing Strategy, Marketing ROI, Digital Marketing, Advertising

With the November 2022 midterm election coming up in a month, now is the critical time to make a persuasive appeal to voters. However, getting your campaign's message out can be difficult in this noisy and busy world. That's why Zimmer Marketing is such a great choice to partner with your political campaign. We own six radio stations in the Four States and are a full-fledged marketing company. Radio on its own reaches 90% of voters and costs a fraction of TV advertising. But more than that, Zimmer Marketing integrates radio and digital media to reinforce your consistent messaging to the voters. So, whether your campaign needs 30-second radio spots or a full campaign website, Zimmer Marketing reaches voters with your message.  

Topics: Radio Advertising, Advertising

All business owners have certain fundamental questions they need to have answered to build a successful business. And perhaps the most crucial question to answer is, "What makes my business different?" Answering this question is necessary for you to create a robust growth strategy, and it also must be something your customer can answer because it is why they will continue to bring you their business. 

What is a Difference Maker?

At Zimmer Marketing, we use   Chuck Mefford's BrandsFormation marketing system. In his system, finding your "difference maker" is one of the first steps on the journey to creating a successful brand. It's what will get you out of the no-win scenario of a race to the bottom with your competitors. After all, we can't all have the lowest prices. No, it's better to take a hard look at your business and figure out what's truly unique about it. That way, you can craft a message that resonates with your potential customers and successfully brand your business.

How to Find Your Business' Difference Maker

All business owners have certain fundamental questions they need to have answered to build a successful business. And perhaps the most crucial question to answer is, "What makes my business different?" Answering this question is necessary for you to create a robust growth strategy, and it also must be something your customer can answer because it is why they will continue to bring you their business. 

What is a Difference Maker?

At Zimmer Marketing, we use   Chuck Mefford's BrandsFormation marketing system. In his system, finding your "difference maker" is one of the first steps on the journey to creating a successful brand. It's what will get you out of the no-win scenario of a race to the bottom with your competitors. After all, we can't all have the lowest prices. No, it's better to take a hard look at your business and figure out what's truly unique about it. That way, you can craft a message that resonates with your potential customers and successfully brand your business.

How to Find Your Business' Difference Maker

Since your difference maker is what will define your business and set you apart from your competition, it's important to get it right. To find your difference maker, you need to look at every aspect of your business. If you get your hands on Chuck Mefford's bestselling book, BrandsFormation, he provides a helpful checklist to do this. But assuming you don't have his excellent book, you need to put yourself in the shoes of your customers and examine your business from their perspective. 

Let's imagine you run a roofing company. You review your business from top to bottom, and you find that you provide fast service, offer a quality product, and have competitive pricing. All those things are good, but they also happen to be the same things your competitors emphasize in their marketing efforts. Then one day, one of your customers remarks to you about how happy they were that their hard didn't get torn up by your roofing team. You've always insisted that your crews make sure not to disturb customers' turf or yard features with their machinery. And, come to think of it, you've seen other roofing companies leave a royal mess behind after a roofing job. You've found your difference maker, and now you can craft your message. 

Making Your Difference Maker Into Your Message 

Once you've discovered your difference maker, you need to craft it into a message. That's the message you will use to define your business and present to potential customers consistently. A well-crafted message based on your difference maker will set you apart from your competition and be immediately associated with your company in the minds of your potential customers. To go back to our roofing company example, based on their difference-maker, they could make their message, "We tear up old shingles... not your yard!" When delivered consistently over time through the proper marketing channels, your message will be associated with your company. For our roofing company, the next time somebody needs their roof done and doesn't want their yard to be a mess, only one company will come to mind. And that's the company they'll call.

Find Your Difference Maker with Help from Zimmer Marketing

At Zimmer Marketing, we've helped countless local businesses find their difference maker, craft their message, and put their message out through diverse marketing channels, including radio and digital marketing. If you're ready to start your BrandsFormation, today can be the day! Or, if you want to learn more about BrandFormation,   consider attending a BrandKamp. We host BrandKamp's twice a year. At BrandKamp, Chuck Mefford presents a free workshop to help you turn your local business into a great local brand!

 

Topics: Advertising, Branding