It’s great news to see that 56% of small and medium sized businesses are planning to increase their budgets in 2016.
Of particular interest is that many will be concentrating those increases on digital marketing.
For those of us in the online advertising world this is indeed great news, but behind this lies a problem. Almost half of small business that participated in this Small Business Marketing Trends Report said they don’t know whether they are using their marketing dollars effectively, and an additional 14% said they KNOW they aren’t.
The fact that so many businesses don’t know if they are seeing good ROI with their marketing campaigns is a problem. But as with most problems there is also potential opportunity. If we want to stand out from our competitors we must educate our small business clients on ways to evaluate how their digital marketing is helping them reach their goals.
Doing so will also help cement relationships with advertisers which is always important, but even more so with small businesses as over 70% say they do their marketing in-house and don’t use an ad agency or third party.
So how do we prove return on marketing investment to clients investing in digital advertising?
Go over your monthly reports with the client. While this may seem like an obvious suggestion – believe me, most salespeople do not take the time to do this. You may think your reports are self-explanatory but don’t assume your clients understand them.
Offer to track conversions with their digital campaign. Just about any action that a user takes on a client’s website (Contact Us, download a coupon/more info, clicking to a certain page, watching a video, making a purchase, registering, signing up for newsletter, etc.) can be tracked with a conversion pixel. Before your campaign starts ask the client (and make suggestions) on what may be good conversions to track so that you can show them this information in each monthly report.
Look at the client’s Google Analytics. Make sure that your clients have Google Analytics installed on their website before they run a campaign with you (it’s free). Then offer to review the Google Analytics reports each month with the client to tie things like overall increases in traffic to the website, increased landing page traffic, and increases in organic and referral traffic, to the digital campaign you are running. Need a quick tutorial on the basics of Google Analytics? Click here.
These are three quick and easy steps any one (but few do) can take to show small businesses that don’t know if their marketing is working – that their digital advertising is!
