Four States Small Business Blog

Are Your Marketing ROI Expectations Realistic?

Posted by Mark Zimmer on June 27, 2017 at 8:00 AM

Successful marketing ROI doesn’t come with the press of a button or the flip of a switch. It requires careful and strategic planning. It also requires setting realistic marketing ROI expectations that enable you to properly plan and evaluate your campaigns. We’ve written this article to be a quick and simple reference to help you ensure your marketing ROI expectations are realistic and achievable. This should help you better evaluate your marketing strategy and goals.

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Topics: Marketing Strategy, Marketing ROI

The Power of Branding: How to Increase ROI for Your Law Firm With These Quick Tips

Posted by Kylie Davis on June 22, 2017 at 8:10 AM

Creating a brand for your law firm is essential for an effective legal marketing plan that connects with your target audience and increases ROI. Your branding is an external expression of how you position your law firm and distinguish it from the competition. To increase ROI, all the elements of your branding must be meaningful to your target audience, and the personality of your firm should be reflected in your brand voice, logo, tagline, and other parts of your branding strategy. In this post, we discuss how to use the power of branding to increase ROI for your law firm.

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Topics: Marketing Strategy, Marketing ROI, Legal

Are Outside Factors Impacting Your Marketing ROI?

Posted by Chad Elliot on June 21, 2017 at 9:00 AM

Most businesses understand the importance of tracking and measuring their marketing ROI, but they often fail to consider the outside factors that can have an effect on it. You could be succeeding at developing an effective message for your target audience and deploying it across the right channels to reach your audience, but external factors might negatively impact its effectiveness. Factors having nothing to do with the effectiveness of your marketing campaign can skew results, making it difficult to accurately measure ROI. It’s important to consider how outside factors affect your marketing ROI, whether in a positive or negative way, because they are often unavoidable.

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Topics: Marketing Strategy, Marketing ROI

The Dos and Don'ts of Branding Your Law Firm Effectively

Posted by Chad Elliot on May 9, 2017 at 8:00 AM

Branding through marketing is critical for every business, even when that business is a law firm. After all, while clients are probably already a qualified lead by the time they approach your firm, branding is why they know about your firm to begin with. Even so, you’ve studied to win in the courtroom, not the marketplace, and law firm branding may seem outside your wheelhouse. That’s why we’ve put together a list of twelve do’s and don’ts to help you start branding your law firm effectively.

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Topics: Small Business Resources, Marketing Strategy, Marketing ROI, Legal

Why the Highest Performing Companies Treat Marketing as an Investment and Not an Expense

Posted by Mark Zimmer on February 7, 2017 at 8:30 AM

This may be the point in the year when you and your marketing team are taking a look back at the marketing efforts of 2016 and evaluating what exactly it cost your company. Or, if you’re a new business owner, you may be determining what kind of expenditure you’ll need to make to start advertising. Either way, there’s something important you need to remember to do: view marketing as an investment. Quite simply, marketing isn’t something that’s merely nice to have or a good idea that you can get to later, and the costs associated should never be considered without the ultimate impact it has on your bottom line.

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Topics: Marketing Strategy, Marketing ROI

Budget vs. Results: What You Need to Know So You Aren't Wasting Your Marketing Dollars

Posted by Mark Zimmer on January 31, 2017 at 8:30 AM

Invariably, what decision makers are looking for when evaluating any spending is results, and it’s no different when considering a marketing budget. Results are the only thing that matter when you get to the bottom line. In today’s article, we’ll touch on why you should be planning your marketing budget to get results, as well as help you put those results into perspective so that your marketing budget doesn’t get wasted.

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Topics: Marketing Strategy, Marketing ROI

5 Questions to Ask to Determine if Your Donation/Cause Marketing Budget is Actually Contributing to Marketing ROI

Posted by Mark Zimmer on January 23, 2017 at 8:30 AM

Contributing to local causes can help bring brand awareness and show corporate social responsibility amongst your community, which is why it is worth including it in your marketing plan. According to the 2016 Edelman Trust Barometer, 80 percent of consumers think that companies should make an extended effort to improve social and economic conditions in their region while increasing their profits.

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Topics: Marketing Strategy, Marketing ROI

How to Use Radio to Effectively Boost Your Digital Marketing ROI

Posted by Mark Zimmer on January 6, 2017 at 8:30 AM

Digital marketing is a valuable tool for businesses of all types and sizes. That’s because the internet plays a crucial role in how people make their purchasing decisions. In fact, 81 percent of consumers today conduct online research before buying a product or service.

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Topics: Radio Advertising, Marketing ROI, Digital Marketing

How the Desire for Instant Gratification is Hurting Your Advertising Results

Posted by Pam Larimore on December 30, 2016 at 8:30 AM

It’s not hard to recognize that we live in an instant gratification world. From fast food to movies on demand, we’ve become accustomed to rapid response. Kissmetrics, an internet data company, reports that 47% of consumers expect a website to load in under 2 seconds and 40% will abandon a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. For some consumers, two-day shipping for online orders is too long; they desire click-and-collect services that allow them to order online and pick up their items the same day.

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Topics: Marketing Strategy, Marketing ROI, Consumer Behavior

How Long Will It Take to See Results from Your Advertising? And Other Important Marketing ROI Questions Answered

Posted by Mark Zimmer on December 29, 2016 at 8:30 AM

The desire for instant gratification is often part and parcel of human nature, whether you’re looking at the world as a customer or as a business owner or marketer. As the path to purchase fragments, and micro moments and personalization become more important, immediate gratification becomes easier for the customer. However, as tempting as it is to look at marketing ROI in the same way, business owners need to remember that advertising is an investment, and advertising success and brand development take time to achieve.

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Topics: Radio Advertising, Marketing ROI