In the online business world, there are a LOT of marketing activities that you can implement.
TikTok, Instagram Reels, Pinterest, Emails, SEO, Paid Advertising…
The list goes on. And honestly, it’s pretty exhausting just typing all of those, much less trying to do them all in your business.
But what if I told you that you DON’T have to do all of those to be successful in your business?
There is a way you can do ONLY marketing that works for your business!
If that feels like something you want to do, but aren’t sure how to make it happen, I’m here to show you the way!
Identifying the Marketing that Works in Your Business
The only way to be able to identify what is truly driving your business is to measure your marketing and sales efforts.
But let me guess… the thought of looking at numbers makes you feel a little nauseous, huh?
It’s like that sometimes, but don’t worry…
This Nerdy Nelly has the Pepto™ for your numbers nausea.
Read “The least intimidating way to measure your marketing” to get started on your measurement journey!
The second thing you’ll need to do to identify what’s really driving your business revenue is to find your blind spots.
What might you be missing?
Where might your feelings be affecting the decisions you make about your marketing, more than your actual data?
The next step?
Interpret the date you now have!
Are the marketing efforts that you are making doing what you’d hope they would do?
If so keeping doing your thing, boo!
If not, it’s tie to make a change! Which leads us to the last step.
Taking action on your data!
When Should You Let Go of Ineffective Strategies
I know it’s scary to stop doing something you’ve always done, or to make a change to the way that you are doing it!
If you have hard facts that “that thing” isn’t driving results you are best served by moving on, so that you can spend your resources more wisely
OR drastically changing the way you approach that marketing effort, so that you can generate different results.
(The *annoying* quote about how if nothing changes, nothing changes comes to mind here — but I’ll spare you.)
Using your data allows you to make informed decisions about where to spend your resources!
How do you stop doing something you’ve always done?
This Harvard business review article says you should:
- Shift your mindset
- Increase your understanding
- Clarify your priorities
- Give control
- Give support
You can take these steps and tweak them just a smidge to meet the needs of your small business
- Decide what you want to change — write it down!
- Get clear about why it needs to change — journal it out. What patterns or trends did you see that make you decide you need to make a change?
- Decide how you will make changes and what they will look like — write down all of the patterns or trends that you noticed with the things that are working.
- Take back your control — take some space to decide how you want these changes to benefit you
- Give yourself the support you need to implement said changes — read: grace. Change is hard, but you don’t have to be hard on yourself.
How to Invest More (Time, Energy, or Money) into Marketing That Works
Now that we’ve identified the marketing activities that didn’t work for you, and have a plan for how to make a change — let’s chat about how to use our resources wisely!
Go back to step #3: Decide how you will replace all of the marketing activities that don’t work with marketing activities that you identified as revenue drivers. (Or maybe a new marketing activity that you’d like to try)
(Example: You identified that Facebook groups aren’t resulting in leads, but that Pinterest is. Here’s where you will make a plan to change how you are currently spending your time. In what ways could you slide the time that you generally spend in Facebook groups to make your Pinterest strategy more effective?)
Congrats! You used your change plan to develop a new marketing experiment!
And remember: a marketing experiment = a plan and a record of the results of said plan!
With your plan in hand — it’s time to get experimenting 👩🏼🔬🧪
How to Develop an Iterative Process for Your Marketing
An interactive process allows you to review the results of your marketing experiments and use them to develop new experiments, so that you are constantly improving said results.
The speed in which you experiment will help you determine how often you might want to review your results.
What do I mean?
Maybe you are planning a short term effort — like a quick 6 week launch. You’ll react to your results much faster inside of a launch cycle.
Maybe you are new to the blogging game — you’ll give that effort a much longer runway.
The benefit to an iterative process is that you aren’t recreating the wheel each time (yes, you can still try new things!) but you‘ll be applying the learnings from your previous efforts to each of your new experiments!
So, how do you do MORE marketing that works (and ditch the rest)?
It’s simple:
- Identify what marketing efforts are really driving your revenue
- Let go of ineffective marketing strategies
- Invest more of your resources (time, money, and energy) into the marketing activities that are driving revenue
- Implement an iterative process for your marketing efforts
Need some help with the process? Download the Marketing Measurement Playbook for a step by step guide to getting started measuring your marketing efforts.
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