Four States Small Business Blog

Welcome to the second installment of our B2B marketing best practices blog. With the first [article link] we introduced ideas like thoughtful buyer personas, the buyers journey and marketing funnels and how to use them, and the value of local SEO here in Joplin, MO.  

Quantifying the success of your marketing campaign is an important part of making sure you efficiently use your marketing budget. This is true even with mediums such as radio advertising.

One of the most effective ways to reach your target audience is through advertising. It should be an integral part of your overall marketing strategy to help connect with current and potential customers. Getting more revenue from your advertising efforts doesn’t always mean you need to spend more money. It’s essential to take a hard look at what you’re currently doing to maximize your advertising budget to its full potential. Here are five different ways you can boost the effectiveness of your ad budget.

When designing a marketing strategy, your target is to drive more sales and increase your net revenue. This requires careful planning and balancing, as businesses do not necessarily want to increase their investment in marketing, they want to invest smarter. They want to maximize their marketing dollars and see bottom-line movement.

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!