How to Determine the Best Marketing Tools for Your Business: Exactly What Do You Need?
Most small businesses (and even some large ones) realize they need to boost their marketing efforts, but don’t know what will actually work. Most marketers would say that a good place to start is your goals and objectives. But that’s too simple and a great way to get stuck in a rabbit hole for a while.
The fact is, most business have some version of the same goals: get more leads and make more money. A better place to start is analytics: not analytics about your company, but about your competitors.
Truly valuable analytics will show you what your competitors are doing in terms of marketing on a weekly—and even daily—basis. You will be able to see what is working for them and how well it is working.
For example, a marketer with a strong background in analytics and access to a robust analytics platform will be able to tell you how much traffic is being driven to your competitors’ websites and what is driving it. For example:
1. New webpages and what’s on those webpages
2. If they have launched a new marketing initiative and if so, what it involves
3. Where they are focusing their efforts and how successful those efforts are
4. What strategies they have abandoned or minimized
5. If they are entering new markets (either geographically or product-wise)
6. If their business is struggling—and maybe why
7. If they plan to or have launched a new product and what that is
8. If they are been acquired or are about to be acquired
9. If they are planning an acquisition
10. How your competitors’ marketing efforts are playing out over time
11. All this and a lot more.
So before making any big marketing changes at your business, the fastest and most cost-effective way to pivot marketing is to see what’s working and not working for your closest competitors. Analytics will allow you to do that. In addition to frequent, in-depth reports about specific competitors, you should be able to see how you benchmark against your competitors nearly in real time.
Regular analytics are essential for understanding how your own business is doing—that’s for sure. But they also yield very valuable information on the types of marketing that are likely to be successful for your business.
For a no cost discussion of your situation and how we can leverage metrics-based marketing to grow your business contact us: 630-363-8081 info@smartprcommunications.com.
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