Improve marketing strategy performance by following these easy-to-implement guides.

The practice of promoting products and services has been around for thousands of years, but this practice has changed significantly in the last few decades. Rather than depending on conventional channels like print, television, and billboards, advertisers are now promoting their solutions through social media, search engines, and other digital channels.

With the above in mind, developing a successful digital advertising strategy takes a significant amount of time and effort. Rather than making decisions solely based on the performance of previous campaigns, business owners and marketing managers need to consider a huge collection of variables in order to build a winning promotion plan.

In this article, we’ll go over 14 general tips to help you boost the performance of your advertising strategy. Note that we’ll focus on how to improve marketing from a digital perspective specifically and making sure that your online ads are performing at peak efficiency.

How Does Your Marketing Strategy Affect Your Overall Business?

Before going any further, let’s take a moment to discuss the importance of a digital marketing strategy and how it affects your advertising efforts.

A few decades ago, businesses could only build a good reputation through word of mouth, conventional ads, and in-store experiences. However, the widespread adoption of internet-capable mobile devices has allowed businesses to connect with their audiences through different channels, like social media.

This means that it’s easier than ever before for companies to promote their products, but also to take control of their reputation and create a great experience for customers even before they enter a store or make a purchase.

Having a digital advertising strategy in place gives you the blueprint you need to achieve these goals and ensure that your customers understand your brand fully, thus creating lasting relationships with your audience members. This, in turn, results in a better experience that can yield a higher number of online visitors, leads, and sales.

14 Tips to Help Improve Marketing Strategy Performance

Now that we’ve discussed the importance of having a digital marketing strategy in place, let’s take a look at a few tips to help you improve the marketing performance of your ads as a whole.

Unlike other forms of promotion, online advertising is a data-driven technique. Companies that already have content in place can analyze the performance of their current assets in order to figure out the best strategy. Businesses that are launching their first campaigns, on the other hand, can examine competitors in order to determine what approaches have the highest chances of success.

As a general rule of thumb, your advertising strategy will only be successful if you have clear goals in place. A list of clear objectives will help you achieve your long-term goals, especially if you set up smaller milestones that help measure your progress. If not, you may end up changing course and losing track of the objectives you set out to achieve in the first place.

In addition to the above, some of the steps you can take to improve the performance of your marketing campaign include:

1. Collect Data Via Customer Reviews, Testimonials, and Surveys

The collection of valuable data is crucial for the success of all digital marketing campaigns. Not only this but when the data is collected directly from the target audience, the accuracy and overall reliability of the information tend to increase exponentially.

For this reason, you should collect as much data as possible through customer reviews, testimonials, and surveys. While each one is different, all three of these can help you extract information from existing customers, enabling you to figure out what elements about your services or products should be promoted.

2. Study Your Audience

In addition to reviews and similar alternatives, you should also conduct thorough target audience research through all possible means. Google Trends is a great tool that helps you understand shifts in consumer preferences in your target areas, plus most keyword research tools give you a clear idea of how popular a particular phrase is.

Besides the technical elements, pay close attention to the language that entices your target audience to act. Having a marketing intelligence tool or a similar platform that allows you to unveil top competitor strategies will help you get the wording on your ads right from the get-go.

3. Localize Your Content

Your ads and overall content should speak to your target audience, but this won’t be enough to keep them engaged. To increase your chances of catching their attention, you need to localize your content based on the audience members you are targeting.

The easiest way to localize content is to include the name of the city or the location of the target. Not only this, but you should also have a local Google My Business profile and make sure that you appear on all relevant listings.

4. Identify the Most Important KPIs

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are the most important metrics that help you measure the success of your campaign. But, remember that all companies are different, so all business owners and marketing managers need to establish a unique list of KPIs designed for their organizations.

It’s easy to focus on KPIs that revolves around profits and leads, but remember that these won’t give you a wholesome picture in terms of user experience. Instead, your list of KPIs should consist of technical, financial, and user experience metrics that give you an accurate idea of your marketing campaign performance.

5. Conduct A/B Testing Regularly

One of the main differences between digital and conventional advertising campaigns is the ability to easily run A/B tests. A/B testing is the practice of comparing the performance of different variables in order to figure out which combination provides the best results.

For example, you can test the title, copy, image, and URL on a paid ad to find out which version will deliver the top performance.

6. Determine Which Marketing Techniques Have the Highest Chance of Success

This step may be challenging if this is your first marketing campaign, but you need to determine which techniques have the highest chances of helping you achieve your goals. You can usually deduce this by studying your customer base or target audience and finding out what channels your potential customers use the most.

7. Include the Entire Team When Making Marketing Decisions

It’s common for managers and C-level executives to make marketing decisions, but these individuals rarely have a big role in building internal campaigns or analyzing their results. Instead of making decisions and then passing down instructions, you should include as many stakeholders as possible.

In this context, stakeholders consist of any member of your team that interacts with customers or develops the content for these audience members. This list consists of sales agents, marketing specialists, technical staff members, customer support agents, content producers, and designers, just to name a few.

8. Determine Which Marketing Strategy Gaps Need to Be Filled

It’s common for businesses to assume that their marketing campaigns aren’t performing for technical reasons when the reality is that there are significant gaps in their strategies.

You should take the time and analyze leading competitors to determine what their marketing mix includes. Then, compare this to your own strategy and figure out what gaps need to be filled. You can apply this same concept at more granular levels to unveil what types of content you should produce as well as the topics you should be covering.

9. Focus on Your Strengths

Although you need to fill big gaps in your marketing strategy, remember to focus on the things you’re good at. For instance, if your current marketing department consists mostly of social media experts, try to funnel as many interactions as possible to this channel.

10. Set Realistic Targets

Having a list of personalized KPIs is essential, but you also have to set realistic objectives if you want to get the best results. If you choose to set the bar too high, you may end up setting yourself up for success and feeling disappointed, even if you managed to improve marketing performance (compared to your previous results). Remember, from the timeframe to the actual goals you set, always choose the option that makes the most sense for your business.

11. Develop Buyer Personas to Mold Your Content Around

Buyer personas are descriptions of your stereotypical customers, which allow you to develop engaging ads in a more efficient way. Keep in mind that your company can have as many buyer personas as you deem necessary, but you should only create one persona for each distinct buyer group. Look back at these descriptions when developing your content to make sure that your materials resonate with your audience.

12. Overcome Internal Obstacles

Modern marketers understand that advertising is a process that consists of different moving parts. But, as with machinery, more moving parts translate to a higher chance of experiencing technical difficulties. In the marketing realm, these difficulties manifest as internal barriers that can consist of anything from high bounce rates due to low loading speeds to glaring gaps in the follow-up or closing processes.

The solution is to identify these gaps as early as possible and develop a plan to eliminate them or mitigate them as much as possible.

13. Develop an Affiliate Program

An affiliate marketing program allows you to work with independent marketers (known as affiliates) in a performance-based model. In other words, you can work with promotion specialists and only pay when you receive the results you’re looking for.

Remember that you are in full control of your affiliate program, but it has to be attractive enough to entice top marketers and intrigue the audience members you want to attract. If you’re not sure where to start, our team of affiliate marketing experts can help you build a program and find the top marketers in your vertical.

14. Stay Organized and Track Your Progress

Despite the fact that this may seem obvious, it’s easy to lose track of all the digital marketing activities a company conducts. From social media ads to the affiliate programs you develop, you should have a team of in-house marketing managers that help you stay organized, track the performance of each channel, and select the best alternatives based on the results.

Want to Find Out More? Get in Touch with lemonads Today

Having a robust marketing strategy can transform your brand into a household name and help you drive an endless amount of traffic to your website. That said, you need to ensure that you have a robust marketing strategy in place and that your ads are firing on all cylinders.

If you want to learn more about how to improve marketing performance, develop an affiliate marketing program, or how this form of advertising works, contact us today and we’ll be glad to help.