Hiring a marketing agency can be exhausting. What should you look for? How much should it cost? What kind of results should you expect? These are all questions you have probably been looking for answer to throughout the whole process. In this three part series for National Small Business Week we will tackle each of these questions.
What Kind of Results Should You Expect?
The results that you should expect to see from your online marketing depend on the following:
• What your goals are
• What kind of marketing you’re doing
• What your budget is
• How competitive your industry is
• What else you’re doing as a company to support your marketing efforts
Therefore, results can vary greatly from business to business. So while it’s not possible to say ahead of time exactly what kind of success you’ll have across a given timeframe, here are a few things that you should consider when evaluating the results of your marketing efforts:
Establishing a Goal
Before beginning any marketing effort you need to have a clear sense of where you want to go – like looking up an address or plugging a destination into the GPS before putting the car in drive. Think about what you want to accomplish from a business perspective and make sure that it’s realistic. Then put pen to paper and clearly articulate your goal. It can be something very concrete like “Increase revenue 30% by year end” or something a little vaguer like “grow my hobby business enough to be able to quit my full-time job next year” or “Increase my number of leads month over month.” But either way, you need to know what you’re looking to get out of your marketing investment in order to properly be able to evaluate the results later on.
Budget Appropriately
This is not always true, but in general a higher budget is correlated with faster success because it means that you can engage in multiple marketing activities that will support and feed off of each other to get to your goal faster. So if your goal is set over a shorter period of time, you’re likely going to need a bigger budget than if you are looking for a return further down the line.
The Tortoise and the Hare
Different digital marketing approaches have different timeframes before you’ll start to see results. PPC will get you results faster but once you stop spending money on PPC ads the return ends immediately; whereas with SEO, it takes longer to see results, but the groundwork you lay will continue to pay off into the future even after you aren’t as involved in SEO-building efforts. This is why PPC and SEO are great when used together, because in addition to the benefit of being able to share keywords between the two, a lot of times PPC will start to pay off while you are still waiting for SEO to gain traction.
Pay Attention to Data and Adapt
All of marketing is unpredictable. We can speculate about how we think it might perform, but until we actually spend the resources needed to do it we don’t know exactly what will happen. This means that while you might set out with one goal in mind, you might end up with a different success altogether. Sometimes the data may be showing you that you need to try a different approach, and sometimes it may be showing you that what you’re already doing is working, but not in the way that you expected. Just rely on the data and adapt as you go.
With LionShark you can expect that we will always work hard to try to help you succeed online. Contact us today for more information!
Kate Pierce is the owner of LionShark Digital Marketing LLC, a West Michigan internet marketing company. Her areas of expertise include Paid Search, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Web Consulting for small businesses, Copywriting and Local Online Marketing. She lives in the Grand Rapids area with her husband and enjoys cooking, watching sports and spending time outdoors. Like a true digital marketing expert (i.e. geek), she loves talking about marketing theory and SEM trends… so don’t say you weren’t warned!
What Kind of Results Should You Expect?
The results that you should expect to see from your online marketing depend on the following:
• What your goals are
• What kind of marketing you’re doing
• What your budget is
• How competitive your industry is
• What else you’re doing as a company to support your marketing efforts
Therefore, results can vary greatly from business to business. So while it’s not possible to say ahead of time exactly what kind of success you’ll have across a given timeframe, here are a few things that you should consider when evaluating the results of your marketing efforts:
Establishing a Goal
Before beginning any marketing effort you need to have a clear sense of where you want to go – like looking up an address or plugging a destination into the GPS before putting the car in drive. Think about what you want to accomplish from a business perspective and make sure that it’s realistic. Then put pen to paper and clearly articulate your goal. It can be something very concrete like “Increase revenue 30% by year end” or something a little vaguer like “grow my hobby business enough to be able to quit my full-time job next year” or “Increase my number of leads month over month.” But either way, you need to know what you’re looking to get out of your marketing investment in order to properly be able to evaluate the results later on.
Budget Appropriately
This is not always true, but in general a higher budget is correlated with faster success because it means that you can engage in multiple marketing activities that will support and feed off of each other to get to your goal faster. So if your goal is set over a shorter period of time, you’re likely going to need a bigger budget than if you are looking for a return further down the line.
The Tortoise and the Hare
Different digital marketing approaches have different timeframes before you’ll start to see results. PPC will get you results faster but once you stop spending money on PPC ads the return ends immediately; whereas with SEO, it takes longer to see results, but the groundwork you lay will continue to pay off into the future even after you aren’t as involved in SEO-building efforts. This is why PPC and SEO are great when used together, because in addition to the benefit of being able to share keywords between the two, a lot of times PPC will start to pay off while you are still waiting for SEO to gain traction.
Pay Attention to Data and Adapt
All of marketing is unpredictable. We can speculate about how we think it might perform, but until we actually spend the resources needed to do it we don’t know exactly what will happen. This means that while you might set out with one goal in mind, you might end up with a different success altogether. Sometimes the data may be showing you that you need to try a different approach, and sometimes it may be showing you that what you’re already doing is working, but not in the way that you expected. Just rely on the data and adapt as you go.
With LionShark you can expect that we will always work hard to try to help you succeed online. Contact us today for more information!
Kate Pierce is the owner of LionShark Digital Marketing LLC, a West Michigan internet marketing company. Her areas of expertise include Paid Search, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Web Consulting for small businesses, Copywriting and Local Online Marketing. She lives in the Grand Rapids area with her husband and enjoys cooking, watching sports and spending time outdoors. Like a true digital marketing expert (i.e. geek), she loves talking about marketing theory and SEM trends… so don’t say you weren’t warned!
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