Four States Small Business Blog

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.

As a business owner, you understand that digital promotions can be an effective part of your marketing strategy. What may not be as clear is how to make it work. Zimmer is here to help. We’ve put together 6 tips for effectively using digital promotions to grow your business and increase ROI.

Your sales cycle is the period of time from the identification of a lead until you close the sale. Sales cycles vary considerably among different types of businesses, products, and services. Understanding your sales cycle provides a view of the customer’s journey, or buying funnel, and can help you plan your marketing in a way that is both effective and realistic.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.