Four States Small Business Blog

According to TalentNow, nearly 73% of employers struggle to find qualified candidates for their open job positions. This is partly due to low unemployment rates, as the national average is 4%. If you can relate, you may have already tried all the usual avenues for finding your next employees, including online job boards like Monster, Indeed and CareerBuilder. And although these boards are popular among job searchers, their one-click applications and lack of vetting can leave you sifting through an unending list of applications from unqualified candidates.

Marketers use a number of acronyms everyday, but KPI might be one of the most important, right behind ROI. A key performance indicator (KPI) is a metric - typically expressed as a numeric value - that indicates the growth, success, or failure of an advertising campaign or individual channel or component.

Digital marketing is a powerful tool for businesses of all sizes, and you’ve already taken the leap and made investments to run digital campaigns for your brand. The question is, is it working? Do you actually know how to recognize if it is or isn’t working? You need to be measuring your progress, and if you’re not, you might be wasting your money or failing to reach your true potential.

A CNA (customer needs analysis) is a critical first step to building a good relationship with a media partner, but it’s even more critical to seeing positive ROI across your marketing campaigns. We took a good look at what a CNA is and what it entails in a previous post.

Essentially, a CNA is a business profile that helps media partners understand where your company has been, where your business is now, and where you want to see your brand go in the future. It involves asking questions you should often already have the answers to, and highlight areas where you need help developing better answers. You should expect it to be the first step a new media partner takes because without it, you can’t create a meaningful marketing strategy or achieve the best possible ROI for your efforts.

And now we’ve come to the third and final installment of our series about achieving small business success by generating powerful results with their marketing. As we’ve mentioned, there’s a three-part formula necessary for producing that success, whether it’s for a nationwide advertisement or local Joplin marketing campaign: branding, a business website, and a 21-52 marketing plan. In Part 1, we took a look at branding for small businesses, and in Part 2, we discussed why you need a strong business website.

Advertising is supposed to be a tool, and one that provides clear results for your business. You need to be seeing returns on your investment (ROI) for each of your advertising choices. If you aren’t, then why are you advertising? That’s just a waste of time and resources, not to mention a big waste of money!

Discounts, special promotions, and sales are often a big draw to customers — in fact, two of the top motivating factors for how American consumers choose where to shop are price (81%) and the availability of discounts (71%). But is that what actually drives results? Is that all that keeps customers coming back? In today’s post, we’ll take a look at what drives consistent results, as well as when you should actually be using discounts.

At the end of Q2 2017, Procter & Gamble, the biggest advertiser in the U.S.A., announced that due in part to the fact that it cut back its digital marketing budget by as much as $140 million, it was able to beat earnings expectations. Specifically, despite a slump in consumer spending, P&G reported a 15% rise in all-in net earnings to $2.3 billion, or a percentage point of profit margin, and at least half that gain is a direct impact of cutting its digital advertising budget.

Brand awareness plays a vital role in the success of your small business. But how do you know whether your brand awareness strategy is working? Like every other aspect of your marketing strategy, it’s important to track and measure brand awareness to understand if you’re getting the results you want and maximizing ROI. Tracking brand awareness can be challenging, so in this post, we’ve put together some tips for getting started.

Believe it or not, 18% of small businesses admit that they don’t track any metrics or key performance indicators (KPI) related to their marketing, however, tracking marketing metrics is critical to the success of every marketing campaign, not to mention an overall marketing strategy. That’s because marketing metrics are the only way to know for sure that you’re seeing the results that you need, along with the ROI you want, from each of your marketing efforts. Without them, you have to guess whether you’re reaching your audience effectively, spending your marketing budget on the right channel and tactics, and growing your business. Tracking these metrics provides a history and basis of comparison to ensure you’re improving along the right track.