Why, as business owners, we need to change our perception of marketing to start thriving!
Lately, we’ve been thinking about how to help businesses that won’t, or don’t think they can afford to, embrace the idea of marketing. As with many things in life, sometimes all that is required is a change of your perception.
It’s proven that most high-performing companies treat marketing as an investment and not an expense. There is power in being seen, but there is even more power in being seen by the right people, at the right time, with the right content.
How is Marketing an Investment?
With so many expenses to juggle, it can be easy to lose sight of what marketing does for your company. When you have a limited budget, especially if you need to trim your business down to something leaner, you may be wondering, is marketing really the best place to put my money?
Don’t worry! We all have that thought from time to time and have grappled with these challenges. Especially if you’ve experienced marketing failures. No one wants to throw good money away after a bad marketing spend.
In this article, we are going to give you our key insight on how to set the standard for your marketing spend to make sure it is in fact an ROI (return on investment) and not just another expense.
So Let’s Get The Basics Down
This calls us back to the basics: an investment is defined as spending money and/or capital to generate profitable gains, whereas an expense is something that requires you to spend money, as with bills. Paying the rent for your office or brick-and-mortar location is an expense.
As a business owner it’s easy to get hopelessly caught up in the expense of marketing and lose sight of the bigger picture. However, if you invest money into the right marketing to tell your story, create leads, spur sales, and generate revenue, then you’ll ultimately grow your company. But on the other hand, if you categorize marketing as an expense, you blind yourself to the benefits and returns your initial strategic marketing plan provides.
From product and package design, to how many words are on the front page of your website, to the content you share with your audience, everything you communicate to your customer is a marketing decision, and therefore an investment in your business’ future. Marketing is not an expense the way a box of pens or internet service is an expense. Every website, content shared, social media profile, radio ad, or tweet directly impacts your business and its potential. If these things (or any marketing initiative) have the power to sell a product or service, and we know for a fact they do, then failing to utilize them properly, or at all, is business backfire.
Peter Drucker, known as the father of business consulting, once said, “Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two—and only two—basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.”
Changing the Perception: Focus on Building Your Castle
When businesses treat marketing as a cost, they tend to focus on short-term sales and ignore the long-term. For these companies, most of their marketing dollars go toward tangible purchases, for example, an ad or a click on Google. These expenditures provide returns, but they have minimal ability to continue to drive value after the money has been spent. One ad can result in a sale, but it is unlikely to help to retain that customer or to continue to draw customers following that one click.
If you want your company to continue growing, your goal should be to build a castle around your business as much as you can. This can only be achieved by continuous investment of marketing dollars into your company’s owned assets.
Investments can include updating your message and website every year, providing regular value to your email lists, producing customer video testimonials for use as sales tools, developing a series of educational webinars, and investing in the development of relevant and high-quality content (photo and video) that can really inspire and captivate your audience. These efforts may or may not produce quick returns but they will certainly aid in strengthening your business over time. The problem is if you only look for marketing initiatives that guarantee an immediate ROI—consistent with a view of marketing as an expense—you will never plant any of these long-term marketing seeds and therefore never begin to build the big and strong castle that is necessary for a sustainable competitive advantage.
Here Are Some Digital Marketing Trends We Recommend Investing In:
Marketing Strategy
The best place to start is at the beginning by investing in an expert-driven marketing strategy! Producing content only to push something out the door is not a marketing strategy. A slew of mediocre content stemming from a lack of commitment to your digital content marketing strategy will hurt your brand far more than creating no content at all. Custom content is the way of the future. However, most B2B content marketers do not have a written strategy. Take a step back and figure out why you are creating, not just how. You want to create content specifically designed to move people from “just browsing” to the point of the sales funnel where they become buying customers. To achieve this, you need a clear plan. You need to determine the audience you are reaching, your goals, when and where you can deliver content, and why it matters. Spend time and resources to craft a strategy and nail your KPIs.
Content Marketing
Content can be so much more than just blogs. It is about finding the medium(s) that your audience most enjoys and then creating that form of content: videos, photography, podcasts, infographics or print just to name only a few. Business blogs have a great ROI too. Tons of global companies have corporate, creative, or culture-focused blogs. Take this BLOG for example. You are reading it and are either a previous Capital Content client, a future client, or an entrepreneur educating yourself on the marketing process. Either way, there’s a potential of an ROI within this BLOG as it creates credibility for our agency. If you did not see any results from your content marketing, chances are you either pulled the plug too early or it wasn’t executed properly. It can take more than a year to see content marketing ROI, so it is essential that you stay consistent! Good content marketing will keep your website fresh in the eyes of search engines, showcase your expertise, and lend authenticity to your brand.
Having high-quality content to share with your audience is a vital piece of your marketing. Everything is becoming more visual and people are looking at your content to seek credibility.
Email and Marketing Automation
Not everyone is on social media, but everyone has an email address. Email marketing is arguably one of the strongest marketing tools you can utilize for your business. According to The Radicati Group, there are over 2.6 billion email users across the globe. 55% of company decision-makers prefer to communicate almost exclusively via email. Not to mention the ROI is higher than any other digital asset at a staggering 4,300%, according to the Direct Marketing Association. According to Salesforce Marketing Cloud, every dollar spent on email marketing offers an average return of $44.
Personalization is key to email marketing and volume is also an essential requirement. The best route to success with email is to build an extensive email list, segment it by interest, set it to send automatically with merge tags, and then take over with a personal touch at the optimal time.
The ROI of SEO and an Eye-Catching Website
First of all, every business needs a website. A website is your hub to direct all your marketing efforts. Check out our past blog about the power of having a good website. But just because you launch a website does not mean search engines (like Google) have to show it to people. You will need to meet search engines’ ever-changing requirements in areas such as security, quality, freshness, authority, speed, and user experience. It all comes down to including SEO in your digital marketing strategy. Two types of SEO that should get regular attention include technical SEO (related to your website as a whole) and on-page SEO (related to individual content). By staying on top of optimisation, here are the benefits you can expect:
- Improved position in search results
- Increased traffic to your website
- Better user experience for your customers
Investing your marketing spend towards a terrific website and SEO expert is vital in building your business.
The ROI of Social Media/ promotion and outreach
If a business decides not to invest in a digital marketing strategy, social media often takes the hit. It is not a part of your website, it can be challenging to keep up with, and it may seem like the least important part of the puzzle. However, social media and SEO are BFFs. While having social profiles with likes and follows does not impact your domain authority or position in search results, there are certain aspects of SEO that social media can affect:
- Social posts can boost your content’s reach, which helps direct people to your business.
- Social profiles tell your company story; most consumers prefer brands that share their values. People make a judgment of your business and/or product based on your social media accounts.
- Social media encourages engagement with customers which is very useful to foster relationships and get feedback.
- Search engines scrape online business profiles, including social, to understand what you do and where you are located—which is huge for local SEO.
As with content marketing, a strong ROI from social media comes from focusing on the social channels your audience uses most. It is not about being on every app or network; it is about being active, helpful, and engaging wherever your customers spend most of their time.
Achieving Thrive Mode
The marketing for successful businesses never stops. They look at marketing as an investment and not a line-item expense that can be cut in order to reduce the budget. Similar to how a gym membership is an investment in your health and a savings account is an investment in your financial future.
If you’re contemplating the best way to spend your marketing budget, we strongly recommend your online presence with video & photo content along with your website are up to date and executed to the best of their ability to reach your business’ fullest potential. If you’re hesitant about that next investment, remember, an investment is defined as spending money and/or capital to generate profitable gain and that’s exactly why we are here to help you.