Marketing is the word of the day. It can really make or break your business, and poor marketing accounts for around 14% of all business failures. Luckily, with the right team and the right tools at your disposal, marketing can be the reason for your business’s success! Let’s talk about the importance of marketing management for your business!
What Is Marketing Management?
Marketing management is simple enough. It’s who oversees your marketing campaigns. If you’re just starting a business, that might just be you. If you have some staff, there’s probably at least one of them that could be considered a marketing manager. Either way, marketing is a huge part of a business, and it’s not only time-consuming but precise. Everything has to be accurate and done correctly in order to maximize your efforts, and that’s just impossible for somebody running a business to pour all their efforts into. Small businesses are supposed to put around 7-8% of their revenue toward marketing, and if you’re doing it all yourself, that could be 50% of your time. How are you supposed to manage social media, monitor and improve the conversion rates of your ads, operating a blog, optimize your website, and handle all of the traditional marketing tactics as well?
What Services Do Marketing Managers Offer?
In a nutshell? Just about everything your company needs in terms of marketing. The right marketing managers can handle whatever you throw at them, and they’ll also be able to let you know what you’re missing out on!
Website
Proper web development is so important that it can’t be understated. If you have a simple, DIY website, you need an upgrade fast. Not only does it look more professional, but this is the heart of your online digital presence, as everything else you do will revolve around it. Your social media should link to it, your email marketing relies on your website, your SEO depends almost entirely on it, and your ad campaigns direct you here
First of all, we’ll be talking about SEO in a minute, but your website is crucial to this. Google ranks your website based on a lot of factors, including page speed, navigation, and mobile-friendliness. Don’t underestimate the value of these, as this alone should convince you to upgrade your website.
Secondly, and maybe most importantly, your website is important for customer satisfaction. If that seems out of place, it isn’t. This leads to higher conversion rates on your ad campaigns and customer retention. Remember, getting customers is half the battle in marketing, keeping them is the other. You can keep bringing in new customers until you run out of them, so don’t underestimate the value of retention.
Third, your landing page on your ads and social media profiles has a direct impact on sales. Customers want to see a professional website that’s easy to use, but they also want to see something. Believe it or not, the average consumer only waits 3 seconds for a page to load before leaving it. This can make or break your SEO, your ads, and your entire business.
Social Media
Managing your social media is critical to your business’s success these days. Almost everybody uses one platform or another, and if you don’t, you’re missing out on a lot of great opportunities.
On here, you can run promotions, interact directly with your customers, post updates, post discounts, and build brand awareness! Also, people who see their favourite brands interacting with their consumer base on social media tend to prefer those brands for obvious reasons. People are used to “bot” accounts, so when a company has a real, human feel to it, it earns respect from its consumers.
However, there are tricks to social media. You need to post relevant content at the right times, interact in certain ways, follow specific guidelines, and appear as genuine as possible. It’s no wonder why “Social Media Manager” is a full-time job at so many companies.
SEO
You may think advertisements are the big one on this list, but SEO may actually be more important. How could that be?
Well, SEO is your primary driver of organic traffic. That’s traffic that was searched for organically, rather than being placed in front of you in the form of an ad. This is so important for making sales because people who are actively seeking out your product, services, or relevant information are far more likely to buy from you.
Getting to the top few spots on a Google search is like striking oil or a gold mine in your backyard. The majority of the traffic on every single page goes to the top 3 organic results, so take this seriously. Luckily, if you’re running a local business, your competition isn’t as steep.
An eCommerce store will have to compete with every other eCommerce store that operates in their country, including the enormous elephant in the room, Amazon. However, a local bakery will only have to compete with other local bakeries. Either way, you just need to post top content to your website.
Start A Blog
Remember how we said that your website was the primary factor in your SEO strategy? That’s because of your blog. If your blog doesn’t exist, start it now. That’s the best way to improve your SEO.
Every post you make gives you a chance to rank at the top of a Google search and make sales just by posting relevant information to your company. Sticking with the baker example, if you run a bakery, you could have articles like: “Best Brownies in Newport, RI”, “Why Beach Town Bakeries Are the Best”, or “How To Make The Perfect Chocolate Cake”.
The more that you have, the better your chances are. All it takes is one to get the ball rolling, you just need to know how to write a blog.
Backlinks
If you know two things about SEO, they should be keywords and backlinks. Keywords are what you use throughout your website and blog posts for Google to recognize you on each search, and backlinks are the foundation for Google’s trust in your blog as a source.
Backlinks are links from other websites to yours. Think about how often The New York Times gets linked to. They post a story, and if it’s big enough, hundreds or thousands of blogs, and dozens of other news outlets will link to them as a source for the story when they try to get the word out. Because of this, you could write a much better article than them about the same topic and they’ll still show up ahead of you in a search because they have that foundation. It’s hard to build backlinks from the start, but it’s one of the most important marketing resources available.
Advertisements
While we said that SEO is arguably more important than advertisements, don’t think for a second that they’re obsolete. SEO is important for gaining organic traffic, yes. However, not all traffic is organic, and you don’t need all of your traffic to be that way.
Advertisements still play a huge role in the business world, and there are more and more ads to choose from every day, it seems. You have the giants like Google and Facebook, but there are just so many options and so many types of content.
Search Ads
Want the top spot on Google but don’t want to compete with the top dogs in SEO? Search ads will help you skip the line. These are the ones you see before the organic results on a Google search that say “AD” on them.
Google has recently changed the format so that search ads don’t just have a blue background to stand out. Now they just say “AD”, making it less likely for people to skip over them for the first organic result. These definitely have their place in a marketing mix.
Video Ads
These are excellent for certain types of businesses but they can get deceivingly pricy. 10 to 30 cents per view doesn’t sound too bad until you realize that’s per view and not per click. Nobody is obligated to interact with these ads and many will be annoyed that it interrupted their game or their video. However, these have their place. If you offer a service that needs the video format to really show off, then this is your bread and butter. If your product is a mobile game, a picture won’t cut it. The only problem with this is drawing attention and standing out. Luckily, with this format, you do draw attention. You interrupt what people are doing and show them what you’re offering for 5 to 30 seconds. If you can make the right pitch, these ads are invaluable.
Display Ads
A picture and some text. That’s all you get to pitch to the world that they should buy your product. However, they’re still so affordable and effective.
Display ads are the ones you see when you’re scrolling through a news article, or at the top of a homepage, or on the side of a blog. These are the ones you probably think of when you think of online advertisements because we see so many of them! They’re a really affordable way to get started, and they’re very useful if you use them wisely. The only issue is that we see an average of 5000 ads a day, so making it stand out does pose a challenge. However, with the right market research and marketing team, that won’t be a problem!
What Do Marketing Managers Offer That I Can’t Do?
Okay, so you know that the right marketing managers can help with your social media, your website content, and more so you can focus on running your business. However, there are plenty of things they can do for you that you can’t do on your own.
Market Knowledge
The right marketing firm will provide accurate market knowledge for your business’s marketing needs. This includes Google insights, the best ad content, and expert insights into your target audience through extensive marketing research. Their experience and expertise in the marketing field will prove invaluable to your company’s performance marketing. You may be the best at crunching numbers and leading your team of staff, so putting these tasks into the hands of experts is the right way to go.
Marketing Strategy
They will also provide you with a clear set of marketing strategies for your digital and field marketing needs. They will examine your business, see what needs improvement, and work based on your company’s specific needs to develop the most beneficial plan. A strategy includes the platforms, content, target, timing, and budget. They’ll work with that your company has to ensure that you’re getting what you paid for, and they’ll run all the numbers with you beforehand and along the way.
Time
If you’re running a small business, you simply don’t have the time to focus on all the nitty-gritty details of your ad campaigns, SEO, and social media. There’s so much that needs to be done to bring in new customers and retain your existing ones, and if you spend all of your time on it, you’ll be neglecting something else in the business.
Peace of Mind
Let’s be honest, when you’re doing everything yourself, you have your fingers crossed under the desk that you aren’t wasting money. A pay-per-view ad that doesn’t get any clicks is a total drain, and a pay-per-click ad that has low conversions could cost you a fortune if you don’t stop it in time. Let’s be honest, when you’re doing everything yourself, you have your fingers crossed under the desk that you aren’t wasting money. A pay-per-view ad that doesn’t get any clicks is a total drain, and a pay-per-click ad that has low conversions could cost you a fortune if you don’t stop it in time.
What Else Can You Do?
If you’re interested in hiring the right marketing management company, you should do it. They’ll work with your budget and marketing objectives to get you the best outcomes for the right price. Stay up to date with our latest marketing news and reach out for help with your marketing strategy!
