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The best marketing decisions I made in business

Marketing can be hard for any business. Here are a few marketing choices I made that helped my business a lot. 

The best marketing decisions I made in business

Wednesday July 26, 2017,

4 min Read

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Making the right decisions in your marketing strategy can transform your business. It will allow you to maximize profits, expand your reach and scale the business quickly. With that said, there are many key decisions that you can make for your marketing strategy. I personally like to focus on making the decisions that have a big impact on profits and sales. Based on that, here are some of the best strategic decisions that I recommend you execute.

Use Advanced Follow Up, Segmenting and Personalization Strategies

Hubspot reports that automating email prospecting can speed up your sales cycle. In other words, using email drip campaigns can help you generate more sales for your business. This is a campaign that delivers pre-written messages over time with the goal of turning prospects into customers. The emails should educate prospects, present product comparisons, demonstrate how your product works, reinforce sales with testimonials and make attractive promotional offers.

You can increase sales further by using list segmenting. By identifying different segments in your audience and putting them in unique email lists, you can deliver personalized content and promotions. For example, if you're targeting an audience interested in purchasing electric guitars, you can segment them based on playing experience and genre. Doing this would allow you to deliver beginner-oriented content to new players, recommend guitars based on their genre of choice, and more.

By using CRM systems, you can use customer data to personalize campaigns even further. You can deliver content and offers based on the customer information (location, sex, age, income), actions (links clicked, content they've read, emails opened) and buying behavior (past purchases, product views, average money spent, wish lists). This will allow you to maximize your customer value while lowering your customer acquisition costs.

Track Your Metrics and Invest in Conversion Rate Optimization

In order to make the right marketing decisions, you need to know your metrics. When I started out, I would track my site's overall traffic, conversion rates, and profits but I soon realized that knowing my numbers on a broad scale wasn't enough. I needed to track on a campaign level all the way down to the traffic source. For example, I started to track my traffic, costs, conversion rate and profits down to the keyword for my pay per click (PPC) advertising campaigns. I took the same fundamental concept and applied it to social media and email marketing with great results. This allowed me to figure out which sources of traffic were profitable, which campaigns needed improvements and which campaigns were losing me money.

You also need to invest in conversion rate optimization (CRO). According to SessionCam, only 52% of businesses that use landing pages attempt to improve conversions when the average ROI of investing into CRO tools and executing a CRO strategy is 223%. In order to increase your sales and profits, you need to constantly work to improve conversions across all areas. Start with your landing page and sales pages. Then, work on all the other contact points like your email subscription offers, email marketing campaigns, social media advertising, etc. Creating small lifts in conversion across multiple contact points will result in a significant boost in your profits.

Using Multiple Channels and Cross Channel Marketing

Consumers today use multiple channels to receive information and stay in touch with businesses. A study that showed that Two-thirds of all shoppers regularly use more than one channel to make purchases. These channels include everything from email, blogs, social media, online forums and mobile apps. In order to make sure you reach as much of your audience as possible, you need to use multiple channels in your marketing strategy.

And it's not just about using multiple channels. Using channels that complement each other create a synergistic effect. For example, some eCommerce sites are turning their sites into downloadable apps. Once they get their prospects and customers to download their online shopping app, they are able to send messages via push notifications and in-app messaging. Another example of cross channel marketing is to promote your social media channels to your email subscribers and your blog to your social media channels. This cross pollination strategy allows you to reach your audience whether they use email, RSS readers or social media to receive information.

These key marketing decisions have helped grow my business at a faster rate. If you apply these strategies, I'm confident that you'll see a dramatic transformation in the profitability and growth rate of your business as well.