Image SourceWhen you run a business, you’ll find that your attention is pulled in all sorts of directions. You need to focus on countless areas to ensure that your company thrives. Whether that’s recruitment, staff retention, product development, market research or anything else. One key area that you really need to invest time, money and effort into, however, is marketing. At the end of the day, your business can run perfectly smoothly. You can have a great team behind you. You can have brilliant products at competitive prices. But if people don’t know your business and products exist, you’re not going to make many sales. Marketing is what puts your products out there. So, what techniques should you get involved with in particular? Here are some key pointers to help you along the way.
PPC
PPC advertising is definitely something that your business should be advertising. No matter what you’re selling, who you’re targeting or any other factors that affect marketing campaigns, PPC tends to be a great investment for all. Put simply, PPC stands for “pay per click” and is a widely used form of online advertising. Chances are, all of your competitors, large and small, are putting in bids on pay per click adverts. When you invest in PCC, ads that you create will be spread about the web. You can get Google PPC, where your ads will appear at the top of Google searches. You can get PPC ads on banners on websites, in website sidebars, and scattered through articles or blog posts. The key benefit of PPC advertising tends to be that you only pay for the ads each time someone clicks on them. In short, you pay for actual exposure, meaning you’re more likely to profit. For more information on PCC, take a look at this PPC explainer.
Social Media Marketing
If you have a target audience who spend a lot of time on social media (which, nowadays, is most of the population), you need to make sure you have a social media presence. Key ways to achieve this include:
- Setting up your own business social media pages
- Collaborating with social media influencers
Calculating ROI
Of course, when you invest in any marketing tactic, you need to calculate the ROI. ROI stands for “return on investment”. You want to make sure that you’re generating more from your marketing campaigns than you’re spending on them. You can calculate ROI by subtracting the initial value of the investment from the final value of the investment (which equals the net return). Next, divide this new number (the net return) by the cost of the investment. Finally, multiply this figure by 100. When your ROI calculations yield a positive figure, you can say that your net returns on the investment are in the black. This is because the total returns exceed the total costs. If your ROI calculations yield a negative figure, yournet returns are in the red, meaning that the total costs exceed total returns. Continue investments that are in the black, let go of those that are in the red.
As you can see, investment in marketing can prove really profitable. Hopefully, the tips above will get this journey off on the right foot for you!
