5 Fixes That Immediately Improve Your Marketing Efficiency

When it comes to business, the importance of marketing cannot, and should not, be overlooked. Marketing is an essential ingredient to the key elements of any business.

A comprehensive marketing strategy enables a business to increase their sales, grow its business, and engage their target audience.

It sustains a company’s presence and ensures the continued success of a business. Any type of business — from new startups to local mom and pop shops — can benefit from great marketing campaigns.

And with digital marketing leveling the playing field, businesses should be more enticed to acknowledge the importance of marketing strategies and campaigns. Tools available today such as social media and marketing automation platforms mean businesses can deploy winning marketing campaigns that don’t break the bank. This enables businesses of all sizes to compete against big name brands.

But any marketing effort deployed requires a process that must be maintained to deliver success. Whether it’s campaigns to build brand awareness or drive growth in revenue and leads, most aspects of your marketing strategy will require a process and, most importantly, time.

Here’s a list of five adjustments and quick fixes that can be employed to make a big difference in the efficiency of your marketing efforts.

1. Integrate automation

Marketing and sales automation systems are critical tools of any modern marketing plan. Their ability to address inefficiencies in your company’s marketing plan is key to boosting performance and productivity. Integrating a marketing automation tool to your marketing workflow reduces attrition brought on by long lead generation and sales funnels.

Marketing automation is a tool that can be leveraged to reduce administrative tasks, overhead expenses, and operational inefficiencies. Automation can serve to fuel improvements in creative output from team members, streamline processes, and increase profit margins. The increased productivity brought on by marketing automation will have a great impact on a business’ bottom line.

Automation enhances the majority of marketing processes, enabling marketing teams to hone in on best practices, facilitating efficient strategies to drive sales and grow the business.

2. Know your target market

While knowing your target audience may seem rather elementary, few businesses understand the importance of fully optimizing their marketing plan to hone in on prospective audiences.

In today’s competitive market, making assumptions about your desired or target audience simply won’t do. Businesses must have intimate knowledge of every target demographic to deliver an engaging campaign that generates desirable results.

Customer experience is the future of marketing, and businesses must be able to tap into a consistent brand experience to cut through the noise and stand out from competitors.

A few practical and actionable ways to know your target market include creating customer personas, monitoring comments and engagement, creating one-to-one moments with your clients, and conducting surveys.

These tools enable your business to define its target market. Once you know your audience, these insights enable your business to immediately deliver a tailored marketing strategy to the right audience, at the right time, every time.

3. Conduct market research

Along the lines of defining your audience, a quick fix that delivers incredible efficiency is market research. Understanding the competition and the trends within your industry is crucial to avoiding costly mistakes.

Having done your research ensures your business has a well-defined marketing strategy that can effectively compete with any business.

Market research enables your business to put its marketing dollars to work in an effective and measurable manner. The Internet and digital technology are great tools for market research. With a little research, your company can transform its marketing plan to meet the needs of its consumers, adapting to market forces when necessary.

4. Optimize pages for search

The rise of mobile phone technology and the Internet as a whole has transformed how consumers interact with businesses. And while brick and mortar stores still hold the lion’s share, e-commerce and online options are on the rise. The consumer market is undergoing a seismic shift with the passing of every year.

Businesses need to be aware of the importance of having an online presence. For many, their online presence is key to increasing their market share and growing their business. This new way of engaging with consumers is driving growth across every industry.

Any business with a website must understand the importance of optimizing web pages for search engines. Optimizing your website pages is a quick fix that will deliver positive results in the long run. HTML elements such as titles and image alt texts and tags should be optimized, as both will have a direct impact on search rankings. URLs and meta descriptions also play crucial roles in your company’s search ranking.

These can be done immediately to great effect. Be sure to perform an SEO audit of your website to target the highest traffic web pages that can be addressed immediately. This will ensure your website increases its ranking on search engines with immediate effect.

5. Implement analytics

Integrating analytics into your marketing takes the guesswork out of any strategy or campaign. Gaining insight that’s completely measurable and actionable enables your marketing team to evaluate successes with any marketing initiative.

Making decisions based on data ensures marketing campaigns are more efficient and deliver on maximum ROIs.

The importance of measuring analytics means your strategies are optimized to be sustainable. And a sustainable business strategy ensures your company can continue to make improvements to outgrow its competitors. Measurable results also warrant accountability, ensuring the marketing budget is not spent on frivolous and ineffective strategies.

The quickest path to implementing analytics to your marketing efforts is through Google Analytics. This is free web analytics tool can be implemented immediately so your website gains insight into traffic, click-through rates, and bounce rates.

These fixes address many common problems marketing teams face when trying to improve the efficiency of their marketing efforts. Each fix addresses multiple touchpoints important to any marketing plan.

By applying these fixes to your marketing strategies, your business will start developing effective marketing initiatives that will make a big difference in your marketing efforts.