Every business, regardless of the nature of the business, wants to track their ROI (Return on investment). “How much money did I spend” vs. “how much money did I earn back”. Sometimes spending hours or days to track this information and in the end still have inaccurate data. Well guess why? Because everything is done manually with no track record which makes it almost impossible to retract this crucial data.
WEBSITE
The obvious resource to help you track your success is starting off with a Website. A professional website is the most important tool for your business. This is where you tell your story, showcase your entire business and its the home link to all you online assists. What does that mean? Well anything you do online will absolutely direct consumers to your website in the end allowing you to track the number of website visits, interaction with the different pages on your website and if you run an e-commerce website, initiate a sale and result in a checkout.
BLOG
This one might not be very obvious. And many business decline or turn down the option of blogging. Seeing it a waste of time and bringing in nothing in-return! Wrong, wrong and wrong. A a blog is one of the most powerful online tools a small business should seriously consider using. And it’s one of the inexpensive resources. The magic of publishing a blog once a week creates wonders to your business. Blogs are written in a user friendly yet SEO friendly terminology. What does that do? Educate your consumers but yet even better it will help improve your website’s visibility online. Blogs work in two ways. Talk to the online search engine and say “hey, I’m here, pick me up to the top page ranks” and in another way, if built right can be a subscription tool to collect your consumers emails for further directed marketing. Voila, that is the track record for your ROI.
CONVERSION TOOLS
Let's talk more about collecting leads and driving revenue. What do we mean when we say conversion tools exactly? Well its a tool that a business uses to generate a lead.
Subscriptions
An obvious example would be an online subscription to your website where consumers contact information is collected for promotion purposes possibly converting from an audience to a direct consumer.
Testimonials
A not so obvious conversion tool is to “collect testimonies” on your website. Testimonials convert, the public want to hear good things about any product or service before they invest their time and money into it.
A conversion tool essentially helps or more like pushes a lead to convert. And what happens when a lead converts, its a return on your business investment.
Email Marketing
Streamline an email marketing strategy that does not bombard your audience but just enough to keep them engaged and informed. A tool like this will help you track “opens” and “click” rates. Allowing you to track what works and what doesn’t.
PPC Advertising
This is a great converting tool where you can optimize on your advertising dollars. However, ensure the pages you are advertising the clicks on are fully optimized with clear call to actions. Otherwise you have wasted your pay-per-click resources.
SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS
To many business, the idea of using social media to market their business is a joke. Or its just a fun platform for people to pass time on. Wrong! Social media is a more useful tool to a business than it is for just socializing. Social media if and only if it identifies your brand, your buyers persona, cohesive and consistent, will increase traffic to website visits, and your business overall. You get the chance to digitally show the general public what you do and you get to show it in a personal, fun, human-human interaction level.
The Secret to All this
To make all the above happen and increase your revenue and get and track that Return on investment you need to work a little hard. That is first and foremost “Identify” your brand.
“According to a study from Facebook, 77% of people are loyal to A brand”.
Your brand is what triggers feelings and emotions from the public. It’s the first impression of who you are and what you do. This includes your logo, if your logo is just not doing it, Change it, identity who your buyers and build a logo based on this. Yes the logo is not yours its designed with the public in mind, it’s not specifically what you like, although you can incorporate your passion to translate your message into it but focus on the general public they are the final investment in your logo design.
Well, there you have it. Invest in a strong digital presence to grow your ROI.
