Marketing is one of the only reliable ways to increase your brand visibility, brand reputation, and sales—often all at the same time. But while most companies attempt to market their business at some point, only some of those companies are successful.
What is it that separates successful marketing strategies from unsuccessful ones? Ultimately, we can reduce it to a handful of significant factors.
Defining Success
First, understand that different business owners and marketers define “success” in different ways. Before you can consider the relative success for your campaign, you have to know what success means to you. For some businesses, it’s a factor of total sales earned. For others, it’s more about building the visibility and reputation of your brand.
The most basic standard of measurement, and the one that works for the greatest number of campaigns is marketing ROI—your return on investment. Essentially, this is a measure of how much revenue your campaign is generating for you, compared to how much you’re spending on the campaign.
Factors to Consider
Campaigns that have a higher ROI than others typically rely on these factors for success:
- Knowledge and direction. As you might suspect, the most important factor is the level of knowledge and experience of the person responsible for overseeing the campaign. With a detailed enough online marketing guide, anyone can learn the basics of marketing and come up with a strategy, but only an experienced, knowledgeable director will be able to navigate the hurdles that inevitably come with that strategy’s execution. Most new companies overcome this obstacle by working with an external marketing agency.
- Cost efficiency. Your campaign’s success also depends on how much you’re spending. Startups with an exceptional budget and big corporations often hemorrhage money in an attempt to build brand recognition as quickly as possible. However, these machine-gun-style expenditures often fail to generate impressive results. Conversely, spending too little on a campaign can also interfere with your success; if you don’t spend enough, you may end up with low-quality materials, or unproductive marketing channels. Your goal should be to strive for efficiency, and a moderate budget.
- Medium selection. There are dozens of mediums you can use for your marketing campaign, including traditional forms like billboards and radio ads, inbound strategies like search engine marketing and content marketing, and social media marketing. Different mediums have different rates of success, and will largely depend on the demographics to whom you’re trying to appeal. Most have inherent strengths and weaknesses; for example, email marketing is known for its high ROI, but it’s most reliable for contacts who are already on your list. If you’re new to marketing, the best approach is to choose a blend of channels and mediums, which you can refine as you gather data on those mediums.
- Timing. Your timing also matters, both in terms of when your marketing and advertising is visible and how long it’s visible. For example, if you’re emailing your prospects, you’ll need to carefully consider the day of the week and time of day you send your message. If you’re writing and publicizing content, you’ll need to think about when you take the post live and how often you syndicate it. Some timing factors are objective, but others require a more nuanced approach—and occasionally boil down to luck.
- Persuasiveness. Much of marketing and advertising depends on persuasion; your ability to convince a target demographic to make a specific purchase, take an action like signing up for a newsletter, or adopting a new idea. There are many ways to do this, such as with logical arguments and facts, emotional appeals, or an appeal to your authority as a brand. Conveying these with written text, images, and videos in a skilled manner can make all your ads more effective.
- Adaptability. Marketing and advertising are a science, but it’s not always inherently predictable. If you want to be successful long-term, you need to pay close attention to how your campaigns are performing, then make changes to optimize for your most effective strategies. Measure and analyze how each channel and each new ad performs, then pay attention to the factors that seem to be most beneficial. Cut the strategies that don’t work, and enhance the ones that do; if you experiment enough and repeat this process enough, you’ll eventually end up with a masterful collection of campaigns.
Whatever your definition of “success” in online marketing is, these are the factors that will make or break your campaign. While some of them do require some marketing education and expertise, others are adoptable by anyone with even a precursory knowledge of marketing fundamentals. Keep learning new strategies and experimenting with new approaches, and eventually, your campaign will succeed.