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Activate Your Return on Investment
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Do you spend a lot of time thinking about your own marketing materials and website, tweaking messaging in the hopes of striking just the right chord, considering what changes you can make with the hope that the next small adjustment or creative spin will be the magic bullet that converts all your visitors?
A Passive Strategy
While the work we put into our websites and the content on them is indeed important—it’s where conversions, and maybe even transactions, happen, it’s where people who have heard about your business come to find out more, and it’s a home base for your fans—what good is the content on your website when there are masses of potential customers who don’t even know you exist and aren’t visiting your site?
Looking inward and taking charge of what you can easily control may be satisfying but it’s not rewarding. At least, not on it’s own.
Activate your ROI
You probably know that ROI stands for return on investment. Let’s use investors (the people most comfortable with investment) as our beacon. What do investors do? They invest money in multiple funds, stocks and/or ventures looking to grow their money. But they never invest in just one stock. Investors don’t put all their eggs in one basket.
Like investors and their money, don’t put all your marketing eggs in one basket. You wouldn’t be alone. Many businesses put too much stock in their website, and expect it to do all the work for them. Interested in a real return on investment? Put some time and money into ways you can reach your target audience, specifically those who may not even know you exist. And spread the wealth.
To get customers onto your website, you need to get off your website.
Read the Room
The surest way to reach an audience who doesn’t know you exist is to put yourself in their shoes. Who are they? Where are they? What do they do, for work? For fun? What do they listen to, read, watch, or search for online? Are they on social media? Do they spend a lot of time on their smart phones? Where do they eat? How do they travel? Do you have one audience or many different types of audiences? How do they make decisions? Where do they make decisions? Or, who makes decisions for them?
Get Uncomfortable
It’s time to step outside the confines of what you control, and move into the realm of Advertising. And, yes, that means spending some money. In this age of digital, you can feel confident in knowing that the money you spend on most digital advertising will lead to some clear understanding of ROI. You can never know the exact path of every dollar, but if you want to start reaching the masses and mix it up a bit (which is what you need to do), you need to be prepared to spend some money.
There are so many advertising avenues to choose from, and the trick is to find the right marketing and advertising mix for your business. It may take a few tries to get the recipe right, but with so many different possibilities, you’re sure to find the right blend. Keep in mind, we don’t recommend all these strategies to all clients. A healthcare business would certainly take a very different approach than a restaurant, for instance. Some of our favorite strategies to bring about real ROI include (but are not limited to):
- Google Ads (Search, Display, Video, Shopping ads)
- Retargeting
- Social Media Advertising
- Streaming Radio
- Streaming TV/Video
- OOH or Out of Home advertising (such as advertising on Buses, Bus Shelters, Subways, Billboards, etc)
- Sponsorships
- Speaking engagements (giving seminars, speaking at events)
- Content Marketing
- Influencer Marketing
- Podcasts
With the right mix of these winning strategies, you will be on your way to an increase in traffic to your website, customers on your doorstep, and measurable ROI!