What Data to Look for When Planning a Marketing Strategy

Marketing is crucial to every business in today’s digital and competitive world. You need the right tools and strategies to stay ahead of the curve. If you don’t, you could risk letting your competitors take your customers and falling behind in your market. So use the following data when planning your marketing strategy to ensure success:

Market Size

When it comes to proper marketing with big data, you need to understand the market size you are looking at. For any given company, there is a market cap and if you do not know what this is, you might overinvest or ignore opportunities.


Use resources available cheaply and for free online that let you research how many potential customers you could have. Looking at your competitors is another way to find this information out. If your product or service is too expensive for a small market, then you need to know this ahead of time so you don’t waste the research dollars on rolling it out. It lets you decide how best to spend your time.

Keyword Searching

In addition to market size is the actual keyword search total. For your certain products and services, there will be a number of people actually searching for it in a month. This is available to see on Google’s Keyword Planner. You can see the estimated numbers of people looking for certain keywords around your brand and products.


Make sure that the numbers are big enough to justify an entry into a new market or continuing in an older market. If not, use keyword searching to find a new opportunity that your competitors have not uncovered yet. This could give you a crucial headstart on them.

A/B Testing

You should always be testing your marketing campaigns. If not, you are missing out on great data that can help you grow your business. One method of testing is called A/B testing.


This method of marketing testing involves using data collected from your visitors. When someone hits your site, it tags them and tracks them throughout their total visits, engagement, and conversions (like signups or purchases). This allows you to see how effective a certain campaign is. The higher the conversion rate the more you should invest in that particular marketing strategy. However, with A/B testing you gain other insights such as which headlines, images, and copy to use.

Sales

Big data lets you crunch a lot of numbers. However, before getting fancy, consider the basics. Look at your historic sales numbers. Which products and services are purchased the most? Before rolling out new projects, make sure you are getting the most profit you can out of your proven winners. Perhaps there is a way to enhance the value of a certain product, or to raise the prices and still maintain most of your customer base.

Demographics and Profiling

Your customers are all individuals. However, the one thing they have in common is that they purchased your products or services. If you collect enough marketing data, you can use it to decide how to plan your marketing goals in the future.


A great way to do this is through customer surveys that identify the age, income, gender, and occupation of your customer base. This allows you to see which combination of factors align with the best customers you have. For instance, perhaps the most profitable customers all come from a certain geographic region. That would mean you should double down on your marketing campaigns in those regions.


When it comes to marketing, data is becoming more important than ever. Companies that do not use big data are going to fall behind while those who do will see massive growth. Be sure to look at the data metrics above and put them into action in your business. That way you can enjoy more conversions and profits without as much time, effort, or energy in the process.

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Tips for Building Your Web Presence

 

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In SEO, link building is the practice of accumulating relevant links in order to build up site authority, and rank for certain keyword phrases on search engines. However, link building is often associated with questionable practices like link buying and link spamming. Too many businesses focus on buying sitewide static links, and building a specific number of links. Once they achieve that goal, they tend to forget about their link building efforts. What they have failed to discover is that a successful link building strategy is one that is natural, builds your web presence, and strengthens your brand.

In this day and age in the online world, there are a variety of effective ways to build your brand and links such as using video sharing websites, blogging, and participating in social media. The types of online brands with the most successful online strategies utilize all of these methods of brand building and link building. Sitewide links, or links that are placed on all pages of a website, have lost a lot of their value for the simple fact that they are unnatural. Sitewide links are the links in a template or sidebar under a section such as “friends,” “links,” or “resources.” Many websites get the majority of their inbound links from sitewide linking, but they must build a strong web presence first in order for those sitewide links to be credible and effective.


Tips for Building Your Web Presence
Foundational link building consists of building your web presence in order to really “earn” those sitewide links. You can build your web presence by writing and distributing online press releases, writing guest posts for well-known blogs in your niche, and participating actively in social media and networking sites to build your brand.

Many link building strategists get inpatient and try to build thousands of links in a period of just a month or so. Your ranking may temporarily improve but search engines will spot the unnaturalness in your site’s accumulation of inbound links and come to devalue it. Focus on building your online brand first prior to accumulating so many links. This can take anywhere from six months to a year. Of course there are exceptions to this rule, but to ensure that your long term link building strategy is effective, it is a good idea to keep this timeline in mind.


Build a Diverse Link Portfolio
You can get real power from your links by diversifying your link portfolio. Sitewide links should make up only about 10% of your link building portfolio. Other methods of link building include the following:

Video – Videos can be uploaded to websites like YouTube. Not only will they include a link back to your site, they will show up in search engine results for searches of your company name, product, etc.
Press Building Tactics – In order to generate press and tons of links and traffic to your site, hold big contests and giveaways, and donate money to charity. Anytime you do these things, contact the press and let them know what you are up to in order to get some media attention.

Documents – Upload documents like ebooks, brochures, white papers, and marketing materials to document sharing sites like Scribd. If you upload a document to your own website, you can build links to it by writing blog posts and press releases about it.

In sum, focus on building your web presence and online brand so your links come naturally. No matter what kind of changes happen at Google and other search engines, as long as you focus on maintaining a natural link building strategy, you will not notice any effect on your ranking. A natural web presence will always persevere.

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Set Your Sights on a Marketing Strategy

If you don’t take aim, you won’t hit your target. This, according to Stuart Atkins, author of Small Business Marketing: A Guide for Survival, Growth, and Success, is why it’s essential for any small business owner to develop a strategic marketing plan. “Without a marketing strategy, small business owners will be continuously reacting rather than being proactive,” explained Atkins, who also teaches marketing part time at California State University, Fullerton (CSUF). “Small business owners need to be focused and have objectives, and a marketing plan provides this.”

 

Atkins recommends five key elements for an effective marketing plan.

A mission statement

Your mission statement should be short and concise. Ask yourself: What business are you in? What is the mission and purpose of your company? It should also include a brief value proposition explaining the benefits of your products or services.

A SWOT analysis

A SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis is a strategic tool often used in the initial stages of planning. A SWOT analysis is helpful for viewing all aspects of your business objectively—including its competitive advantages and where you need shoring up. Keep in mind that strengths and weaknesses are internal to a company; opportunities and threats are external. Atkins recommends making a list under each category, being especially honest when it comes to your business’s weaknesses (such as lack of capital, poorly designed website or untrained employees), which some folks tend to gloss over.

A list of objectives—not goals

Goals and objectives are different. Goals are certainly important and you need to define them, but at the same time, they’re broader, more distant, and aren’t as action-oriented or immediate as objectives. Objectives are more short-term, specific and results-oriented. According to Atkins, they’re designed to help you reach your goals in stages. And, it’s important to list three to five objectives—what you’re specifically trying to accomplish within a certain timeframe.

A target marketing strategy

Next, develop a demographic profile of your target client or customer. This target marketing strategy should define the characteristics of your customers. For example, are they primarily female, male or both? Younger or older? Well-off or budget-challenged? You get the idea. Also, try to develop a psychographic profile of your target—their values, beliefs and lifestyle.

A marketing mix

The marketing mixis your product, price, place and promotion. What are you offering? What is your pricing strategy? Where and how will you deliver this product? Will folks come to you online? Will you have an office or storefront? Will you go to them? Promotion involves how you intend to communicate your product and services from a marketing standpoint.

Implementation, evaluation and control

Now it’s time to really do it—implement the plan, evaluate the results and make changes if necessary. Atkins calls this the “postmortem” of all four of the above elements. It’s an honest, objective assessment of what you did right and what you need to change. He suggests reviewing your marketing plan on a quarterly basis, although the frequency may depend upon the business. This gives you enough time to get results, but it’s also short enough that you can make corrections and tweaks before going too far astray.

“Almost all small business owners are time-starved these days and between this and the battle to get attention, it’s easy to lose focus,” noted Atkins. “A strategic marketing plan will keep you focused on hitting your objectives.”

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