Small business marketing is one of the harder things to do in a small business, especially when you’re trying to compete against big corporations with much bigger budgets for consumers’ attentions. But you still have the potential to fight back and grow your small business into an empire through smart marketing. Here are a few ways to improve your marketing campaigns:
1. Allocate Bigger Budgets
Based on the lifetime value of your customer and payback periods, you can usually compute a higher target cost for acquiring a customer. To simplify all the technical speak, what I mean is you don’t have to think about only affording $50 for marketing to close one customer if your gross profit is $50 on an average order which is $100. If you know that customer will come back and purchase one-month later, you now have up to $100 to spend in closing that one sale because that initial loss will pay for itself within the next month. If your customers generally come back and purchase 4 times in a 6 month period, you can allocate $200 to acquire one customer with a payback period of 6 months and anything after that is profit. Calculating budgets like this will allow you to allocate larger budgets so now you can compete with the big boys in marketing.
2. Think about Conversion Rate Optimization
Did you know you could double your revenue without doubling your costs? It’s certainly not an easy task sometimes, but focusing on conversion rate optimization can be one of the more profitable things you do as a marketer. Cleaning up your sales funnel to convert more customers are a higher rate is incredibly useful because once you increase your conversions, you can do the same amount of marketing, but always get better sales than before. This is the smart marketer’s way to more revenue and more profit without increasing costs.
3. Double-down on What’s Working
If you see something that’s working, spend more time and energy on improving and scaling those channels because you’ll be much more efficient in those efforts than if you were to spend more time and money playing with marketing channels that aren’t working well. If you know something works and you can scale it, spend more time doing so until you’ve reached that channel’s full potential, then explore new areas for growth.
Danny Wong is the Brand Manager for Blank Label Group, working with the startups Blank Label, Thread Tradition and RE:custom. Danny also blogs at HuffingtonPost, TheNextWeb and ReadWriteWeb.
