5 Things Your Marketing Must Do, No Matter What Business You’re In

Marketing strategies and tactics can be very different, depending on industry, size or location. But there are five types of ROI your marketing must produce, no matter what type or size of business you run, and no matter where it is.

5 Types of ROI Your Marketing Must Produce, No Matter What Business You’re In

1. Your marketing must tell a story

Telling the story of your business in terms of your passion, inspiration, industry, history, evolution, problems overcome, staff, customer helped, your successes – these are the elements that set your business apart from all competitors. These are the reasons that people should choose to do business with you.

2. Your marketing must engage your target markets

Your marketing must be specifically designed to reach your ideal buyer types, members of your target markets and other types of buyers based on buyer profiles you have identified and researched. This will involve not only identifying the characteristics which reflect your typical customers and ideal buyer types, but will also necessitate that you find out where they are, how best to reach them and what types of marketing messages will be most compelling to them.

3. Your marketing must cultivate leads

Some businesses have very short buying cycles (the length of time between when an individual identifies a need or want they decide to fulfill, research their options, narrow their options and make a buying decision), while others have very long buying cycles. Typically the more important, expensive, long lasting or impactful the result of a purchasing decision will have, the longer the buying cycle.

Regardless of the length of your buying cycle or buying frequency, your marketing plan must address lead cultivation and incorporate tactics designed to move buyers to the point of deciding to purchase from your business, and not from competitors.

4. Your marketing must nurture customer relationships

Does your marketing do anything to turn customers into loyal customers and brand advocates? Bringing new business onto the books is great, but even though attracting new customers is a far more difficult and expensive endeavor than retaining and up-selling existing customers, customer acquisition is often the sole goal of most small business marketing activities.

Your small business can use email marketing, social media and other low-cost tools to strengthen relationships with existing customers. You may also find that extending special “insider” offers or hold closed-door events for your best customers creates loyalty and advocacy.

Word of mouth can become your best marketing, but only if you are using your marketing to turn customers into word-of-mouth brand ambassadors!

5. Your marketing must uncover ways to improve your business

Often we engage in marketing as a monologue, when it should be a dialogue. Leave room in your marketing plan for surveys, polls and other interactive engagements with customers and prospects so that you can learn how to improve and evolve your business, in order to strengthen it for the long haul.

Under-whelming marketing ROI means your marketing must change.

Even for businesses located in the same town and industry, marketing plans and tactics can be widely divergent depending on a variety of factors. In fact, we found a list of more than 131 different kinds of marketing that have been assigned to their own unique categories.

While some marketing tactics may be more effective for your small business than others when it comes to helping you increase sales, build your lead pipeline, garner customer loyalty and referrals and identify emerging trends, it’s still true that your marketing must be built to help you accomplish each and every one of these goals.

If your marketing is not accomplishing one or more of these five marketing must do’s, it might not be bringing your small business the new customers, brand advocates and followers you need to build a strong organization. You may be able to significantly and swiftly improve your marketing ROI by ensuring that your marketing strategies are working to meet all five of these goals.