With so many avenues for marketing, it can be easy to lose track of cost and effectiveness. There are so many different platforms that companies can use to advertise, but how many of these ads are truly getting engagement from unique users? When thinking about effective marketing strategies, you also have to pay attention to numbers from various sites, which designs are eye-catching, and how much capital is going into your marketing budget, including labor, subscriptions, and external consultations. Just keeping track of what you are already doing and how well it is working is a huge lift. There are so many ways that extra costs can slip through the cracks in marketing, and you need to make sure that you do not get lost in this vast landscape.
Inefficient marketing and approval processes result in an enormous amount of wasted time. Having documents that track exactly what tactics you are employing and how effective they are is imperative to cut down on marketing costs. If you are marketing across multiple platforms and websites, make sure you have solid ways of tracking the metrics from each of those platforms. Engagement is easy to look at quickly on social media platforms that give you a number of views versus likes and comments, but where is this information logged? You will want to be able to chart your company’s progress, and documentation can help identify which marketing tactics and platforms are worth investing more in. Not documenting exactly what you are doing and how it is performing contributes to confusion and a lack of growth.
No company can successfully grow without effective marketing, so you need to know which tactic is most effective for your business. There are likely platforms and techniques your team is using that are not getting good results. This results in your user count and exposure stagnating while competitors grow around and above you. Building a marketing campaign across multiple platforms takes months and hard work. Before embarking on an important campaign, make sure you have these procedures in place so your marketing team can make informed decisions. With this data backing your campaign, less unnecessary work will be done, and your marketing will be more effective.
The Importance of Streamlined Approval Processes
Staying organized is the name of the game when developing a major marketing campaign. After foundational processes are in place, approval processes should be streamlined as well. Waiting for edits, corrections, and other feedback from the higher-ups tends to be a long and wasteful process. Managers should be notified of when they need to review mock-ups and ideas and of the proper way to present their feedback. The feedback loop is one of the most frustrating but important aspects of marketing, so it needs to be handled properly. Pouring capital into employing designers, writers, and marketers for their time when it is spent waiting for feedback is a waste of your money and their talent.
Balancing Paid Ads with Credible Third-Party Endorsements
Paying for ads is a marketing tactic that can work in your favor or backfire. Understanding which platforms respond well to your ads is even more important when you are paying that platform to host your ads. The CEO and founder of Outcomes Rocket, Saul Marquez, says, “You could pay as much for ads as you want, but if there’s not a third-party source telling your story, You need that to balance out your efforts on the paid ads.” Marquez stands firm on the opinion that building credibility is an essential part of marketing for any company to grow, especially if they have been investing heavily in paid advertisements. “You could write blogs until you’re blue in the face, but if there’s nobody out there talking about you in a credible way, then it’s going to cost you,” he concludes. Marquez’s company, Outcomes Rocket, has developed the Digital Marketing Maturity Assessment tool to combat stagnation in marketing, which helps mitigate several of the common areas where companies tend to lose valuable capital to marketing by providing a comprehensive analysis of their marketing efforts, actionable insights, and personalized recommendations.
Marketing is an extremely difficult part of business to navigate. You can’t be confident in how to run a business financially without understanding the principles and gravity of marketing. Set your team up for success by dodging these common pitfalls, and keep your company growing.
