Your first month’s reports are in for your online marketing plan, and the numbers, while encouraging, seems a little low. You know for a fact that you should have more interactions on Facebook from your contacts, and your click-thru-rates from your tweet links are growing, but not fast enough to reach your goals within the estimated timeline. Beyond your social media efforts, website traffic is also seeing some increases, but you know your competitors are still getting the lion’s share of site traffic.
What to do?
The beginning stages of an online marketing plan are often a test to gauge your target market’s response, however, it can be hard to invest money into a month or two of work that is only used as a test environment. So, as a business owner, how can you increase the ROI, return on investment, for an online marketing plan that is showing smaller response rates than you expected?
Diversify your Media
In other words, spread the wealth of your marketing budget over a few more online options including:
- Pay-Per-Click Banner or text ads on search engines like Google and Bing or niche industry websites.
- Email Marketing to existing contacts on a weekly or monthly basis promoting your services and industry news.
- Submit articles educating your target market on your company’s position in the industry through niche article marketing sites.
Track your Progress, Often
As you share online content, whether it be social media related, blogs, articles, ads, or emails, monitor the click-thru rates, shares, and comments on a weekly basis. Why so often? As noted, at the beginning of an online marketing campaign, you need to test your target market’s response to your online marketing message to hone it to increase their interest. That means you’ll need to monitor those responses a little more often in the beginning until you find the sweet spot that garners consistent response from your contacts. Some free tools that can help with your metrics are:
- Bit.ly– real-time track-able short links to insert into tweets, posts and content.
- Google Analytics – add the analytics code to your website pages to gauge traffic, geo-targeting and SEO efforts.
Realistically, you should be able to get a better feel for your target market’s wants and needs after a month or two of the above implementations, allowing you to then arrange your budget to those media sources that provide the best ROI for your online marketing plan. This is one area where diligence will definitely pay off.