When starting a marketing campaign for your business or company, the first thing you want to establish is a way to track the success of your campaigns. This will help you figure out what is working for your company and what’s not working. By establishing clear cut ways to track your marketing efforts, you can determine where your ideal audience is viewing your marketing efforts and if they are responding to it.

Traceable Codes

There are 2 main ways you can use traceable codes in your marketing campaign as a way to measure their success. If you are sending out mailers that indicate a special sale or promotion that you are having, use a specific code on the mailers that the users have to enter in order to access the discount. When the promotion or sale is over, you will be able to determine if customers found the sale via the mailers and unique code you used and how effective the mailers were. The other way traceable codes can be used is by adding them to your coupons that you offer. You may choose to offer coupons to your newsletter subscribers and a lesser coupon to all of your other potential costumers. With 2 unique coupon codes, you will be able to trace which coupons were the most effective.

Sales Campaigns with Unique URL

When sending out mailers or a newsletter to your customers, you can include a specific, special URL that the potential customer has to type in or click on in order to get to the offer or discount. This way, you will be able to track how many people accessed the discount via the specific URL.

Offer a Gift with Specific Purchase

A great way to track a marketing campaign is to offer a small, free gift with the purchase of an item. You can offer this free gift when the item is purchased with a specific code, through a specific URL, or during a short time frame. You will then be able to check how many customers redeemed the free gift offer.

Sometimes the usual phone call or email is just the complete wrong way to follow-up with leads.  While tempting, keep in mind that you may catch prospects at a bad time, lead them to feeling like they’re “being sold,” or have them ask you to stop attempting altogether.  How can you spark action and interest into that lead without a hard sell?  Simple!  Here are 9 types of information you can send to your leads to keep their attention:

Recorded Webinars
Webinars are a convenient way of educating a large audience with minimal costs associated.  What is also great about them is that they can be recorded!  If you’re going to deliver a great presentation that highlights your expertise, make the most of it by saving the recording and using it as a sales tool for future leads and inquiries.

Recorded Sales Demonstrations
In sales, you may come across a situation where you have to deliver multiple demos for the same company before you can close the deal.  While every point of contact is an opportunity to get closer to the lead, make sure they don’t forget you (and can show you off to colleagues) by sending them a recorded demo.  That way, they can refer back to it at their convenience and never forget the greatest parts of your company.

Digital Company Brochures
If you have a fantastic printed brochure, turn the original PDF file of it into an electronic sales tool!  It’s a great way to sum up all of your company’s benefits and services into one well-designed package, and your leads can then save it on their desktop.  Be sure to share this via a software that handles electronic fulfullment so that you have a history record of sending it.

eBooks
Educate your audience with an enticing eBook that includes interesting facts about your audience’s pain points, and the solutions to those problems.  You can subtly promote your services and products within them, but have this eBook act as a reminder to all that you’re the answer to their problems.

Videos
Position yourself as the expert by giving tips, best practices, and a summary of services in 1-2 minute video clips.  Send this along to your prospects as a conversation starter, and let them get to know you through creative videos.

Podcasts
If you have team members who are fantastic speakers, podcasts may be the best approach to take when trying to capture their knowledge.  You can get away with longer podcast sessions as opposed to videos because the listener can listen in the car, at their desk over lunch, or on their morning run. Invite educational guests and keep folks coming back monthly for more knowledge!

Infographics
If you have a great graphic design team, and some captivating statistics, highlight both of these resources in an infographic.  They’re interesting, fun to look at, and share-worthy.  You can share information about the industries your target audiences are in, how you have increased success for clients, or how you’re keeping up with new technologies.

Service and Product Sell Sheets
Perhaps your leads don’t need the entire brochure, all they may want is a one-pager that goes over key benefits of one service or product they may be interested in.  Think real estate; they’ve mastered the 1-page sell. What’s great about having electronic sales sheets of your various offerings is that you can send a mixture of them depending on what your lead needs, and not clutter up their mind with too many ancillary services that don’t suit them.

Surveys
This sales tool is beneficial for two big reasons.  If you deliver a survey with weighted questions, you can customize the end results of what the survey would say based on the lead’s answers.  It also helps you qualify the lead in finding out what type of offerings would best fit their needs.

The bottom line?
The sales process doesn’t always have to be direct.  Take more of an inbound marketing approach and let them come to you. Sometimes the best way to keep the conversation going is to send educational and informative materials that will captivate your leads and get them excited about what you have to say so when they are ready, they come to the expert first (pssst…that’ll be you!)

Is it more important to post content frequently or to post content about the right topics?  Creating content with targeted keywords and phrases is vital for companies.  Below are two important steps to ensure that you can do that successfully.

Identifying the Right Keywords
The first step in identifying the right keywords involves answering the question, “What should I create content about?”

Oftentimes, we look internally for those answers.  What do I want to write about?  What am I passionate about?  While those questions are important, we need to always consider the overall goal.  Typically, that is to build an audience and to drive traffic to our website.

Thus, we must ensure that the topics that we want to create content about also match up to the interests and passions of our target audience.

At that point, we should find a way to build a list of the words and phrases that are associated to those topics.  These items do not need to be stored in a fancy, complex system — you could simply keep them in a document or spreadsheet!  But the bottom line is, make the list!  Do not rely on yourself to try to remember the words and phrases that you should use when creating content.

Promoting and Sharing the Words and Strategy
The list of keywords must certainly have a big presence within the walls of a marketing department (whether those walls are physical or virtual).  But they also should be shared among employees from all departments.  Why?

Well, more and more, people from all walks of life and backgrounds are creating profiles on social networks. Perhaps they primarily use their accounts to talk about personal topics.  But if they occasionally interact with a customer or prospect on those channels, or if they link to your company’s website, or simply list its name in their bio, they are representing your brand.

By sharing the list, you will be creating opportunities for all employees to build awareness of your company’s products and services.

Oftentimes, there may be an employee that wants to contribute to the online conversation about your business, but they are just not sure what to say. Sharing the list can be the spark that ignites more conversations about the topics that are vital to you and your audience.

Since the cost of large-scale radio, television and print advertising is out of reach financially for many small businesses, you might have given up hope on ever being able to afford an effective cross-media marketing campaign. Plus, advertising via social media and your website is quick, easy and inexpensive, which is why it’s so easy to get stuck in the digital advertising rut and stay there. If you’ve been wanting to break out into other forms of advertising in addition to digital advertising, but don’t think you can afford it, consider this.

The number one factor that determines whether or not your marketing campaign is worth the dough you’ve invested is your return on investment. The more people that you can turn into customers with your campaign, the greater your ROI will be. To boost your ROI, be sure to put your advertising dollars where they will have the most effect by tailoring your campaign to your market.  ROI can also be boosted by limiting your investment to only relevant and cost-effective communication mediums that you’re confident will be reach your target audience.

For example, instead of sending out mailers to everyone in your community, do some research so you can send mailers out to residents who will be most interested in your services. Also, purchase advertising space  in relevant publications to your target audience and don’t spend unnecessary money “just to get word out.”  Make sure your communications and targeted and relevant.

Keep in mind that it’s not so much about how much advertising you’re doing as it is about when and where you’re doing it. Five thousand brochures given to the wrong people will do little for your business. However, if you hand those brochures out at a community event where attendees are interested in your products and services, you will gain new customers.

Narrowing your audience allows you to spend less money on advertising while improving your ROI, which will make your cross-media campaign much more cost effective.

You want to get your company’s name out there, so it’s easy to think that all you need is as many touchpoints as possible. Radio, television, print: you’re using repetition so that people will think of you the next time they need your service. However, you need to think a little bit further than just repeating your name over and over again. You want to find a way to condense all of the amazing and different things that you do so that your marketing becomes more personalized to your business.

Let’s say you run a bakery, and if you look at other people’s website you find that they all start to sound like carbon copies of one another. Fresh ingredients, great taste, custom ordering are all far too generic for people to get any real sense of why they should pick them over other people. It’s gotten to the point where everyone checks Yelp before they even think about going to a website because it’s too difficult to get any real sense of the truth. When you approach your marketing the same way you approach your business, you can start to unravel where it is you distinguish yourself from your direct competitors. You can only fool people for so long, so start by being as upfront as possible. In this way, your marketing becomes personalized to you. Then you can start driving that home through the many different mediums available to you.

No matter how you set yourself apart, stay true to your original message so people can expect consistency from you. You can always offer new services or discounts, but don’t look desperate or imply that you’re skimping on quality. Real marketing takes time, so stick with it and don’t be discouraged.