Marketing automation platforms revolutionize the way that businesses and agencies handle their advertising.

With the assistance of these smart tools, professionals can unburden themselves of the countless manual tasks that are necessary for managing and optimizing campaigns. AI assistants automatically compile audience data, guide performance, and oversee advertising budgets.

However, why use a marketing automation platform if your traditional strategies are already working?

Below, we’ll dive into what a B2C marketing automation platform is, the benefits of using one, and help you determine if it’s the right choice for your organization.

What is a Marketing Automation Platform?

A marketing automation platform is a collection of software that automatically manages and processes manual everyday marketing tasks.

This can include:

• Lead & sales pipeline management
• Email & SMS messaging
• PPC campaign analytics & optimization
• PPC campaign budget management
• Website analytics & optimization
• Product/service upselling
• Directory listing syndication
• Social posting & promotions
• Measuring ROI for all marketing channels

The software acts as a virtual assistant that can automatically oversee all of these processes, leaving you and your teammates with the ability to focus on more involved tasks that require hands-on attention.

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With that said, a marketing automation platform does not give your organization the freedom to be complacent or uninvolved. Though these smart, automated tools may be able to rapidly handle certain tasks, you still need an experienced agent to help your efforts to ensure that the gathered data is utilized effectively.

Why Use a Marketing Automation Platform?

The benefits of using a marketing automation platform are powerful enough to make them a no-brainer for any company or agency.

1. Optimized Workflow

The first major benefit that we touched upon above briefly is that this smart software will help your team improve their workflow. Users can quickly visualize the entire process of lead management, from lead acquisition to closing the sale.

Then, you can set up your custom automation based upon your company's unique needs to rapidly complete monotonous tasks. This saves the organization a tremendous amount of time and frees the talent up to focus on tasks more deserving of their attention.

2. Improved Accuracy and Mitigation of Human Error

Equally important, these AI assistants will provide far more consistent and accurate work than is possible with human efforts. Even the most careful individuals make mistakes and one unchecked error can upset the overall workflow.

Marketing automation tools collect data and manage key processes almost instantaneously, leaving you with the cold, hard data you need to guide your future marketing decisions.

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3. Real-Time Analytics & Behavior Tracking

The minute you publish an ad, web page, or some other form of content online, your marketing automation software will immediately begin tracking performance. Without any additional effort, you can track:

• Impressions
• Page visits
• Traffic sources
• Session duration
• Keyword rankings
• Form submissions
• Intersite navigation
• Cost-per-action
• Cost-per-lead

These metrics simply scratch the surface of what is possible depending on the software you're using. You can not only monitor your performance but can quickly glance at competitor analytics to see how your efforts stack up in comparison.

4. Automatic Bidding & Budget Management

Finally, marketing automation is essential for staying competitive when it comes to paid search or paid social campaigns. You can utilize your platform to automatically set your budget minimum and maximum limits as well as your desired daily spending.

The software will then seek out opportunities to utilize your budget effectively when reviewing current bidding costs. It can even automatically allocate funds to higher-performing ads or landing pages when A/B tests multiple creatives at the same time.

This is a significant boon as it ensures that your organization maximizes its available ad spend. You can easily avoid getting caught up in fruitless bidding wars and focus your budget on ad sets that are delivering a worthwhile ROI.

Let's consider an example.

A PPC campaign manager creates their initial ad set and landing page for lead discovery. The minute these assets go live, their automation platform (i.e. Google Ads, Facebook Ads) automatically begins to capture performance data.

The campaign manager also sets a maximum daily and lifetime budget they wish to use for the campaign. Thus, the automation platform also automatically tracks and manages bids in real-time to help your better-performing ads gain more exposure. All of these things happen around the clock without any additional input from the campaign manager.

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With all of this additional time, your campaign managers can easily oversee several client accounts simultaneously. They can also utilize their extra time to prepare new ad sets, landing pages, or offers based upon the performance data they're receiving from the active campaign. They can be more proactive and make decisions with reliable data as opposed to testing with guesswork.

Determining Which B2B or B2C Marketing Automation Platform to Use

With how significantly marketing automation can improve your efficiency and customer experience, our answer is clear.

Your organization needs a marketing automation platform if it wants to remain competitive and grow in an evolving digital landscape.

However, not every platform is the right fit for every business. You'll need to ask the right questions to ensure that your team gains the right tools for your offerings.

1. What Are Your Business Goals?

Every business has unique objectives that they wish to achieve with their marketing. Clearly defining these goals and the process to get there will help you identify the tools you can leverage to improve your strategy.

If you wish to improve lead generation on your website, you'll want to focus on tools that can provide clear analytics and custom goal tracking.

If you're struggling with your sales pipeline workflow, you'll want to investigate lead and pipeline management tools that can automatically define deal stages and move your lead through the process accordingly.

Defining this is important as not all marketing automation platforms offer the tools you need. Some position themselves as a comprehensive package, while others are highly specialized to serve organizations in key areas.

2. How Can We Measure Our Performance?

As we highlighted above, you can instantly measure the performance of any marketing channel with the right software. In addition to defining your goals, think about which aspects of the process you need assistance with measuring.

This can vary whether you're focusing your efforts on social media, email marketing, paid ads, etc. Think about the specific types of metrics that are success indicators for the channel and seek out software that can help capture data and make the overall process more efficient.

3. How Does the New Platform Mesh with Our Existing Tools?

Finally, you need to perform an analysis of how these tools can augment existing strategies. To keep the transition simple, you may want to look for software that simply improves existing processes.

However, if your analysis determines that your existing strategies are inefficient, you may need to consider a major change. You'll need to perform a cost-benefit analysis of what it will take to not only upgrade to the new platform, but the time it will take to retrain all of your employees to effectively utilize new automation tools.

You may also need to incur additional costs depending upon the available subscription plans to that platform and the account limits for each tier. Smaller businesses can typically take advantage of low-cost plans due to their smaller client base, but growing organizations may need to make a substantial investment to gain plans that effectively suit their needs.

Marketing Automation Platforms Are Essential for Your Organization

Your organization must mobilize and find the right platform for its specific needs. If you're still relying on traditional marketing management methods, you're moving at a snail's pace while all of your competitors are lapping you in the race.

Because marketing automation platforms offer universal benefits and features to all types of industries, you must make one the center of your tech stack. It can make your workflow more efficient whether you're content with your current success or positioning yourself for future growth.

Aside from the initial cost to transition, there are little to no arguments to make against using a marketing automation platform. These tools are long proven to be reliable, accurate, and will allow your talent to perform more effectively than ever before.

Though every marketing channel has its struggles, perhaps no other medium deals with the same bed rep as social media.

It's unfortunate as these platforms are powerful digital marketing tools. When leveraged correctly, it can generate engagement and conversions like no other.

The issue is that many brands don't take social media seriously, skimp out on the talent/costs, and perpetuate common misconceptions of social media.

If you want to conquer social media in 2022, it's time to dispel these 20 social media myths from your marketing vocabulary.

Social Media Myth 1 - My Target Audience Isn't on Social Media

While this can be true in some niche cases, the probability is highly unlikely.

According to Statista, there were 3.6 billion social media users around the globe in 2020. They project the user count to reach just under 4 billion in 2022 while reaching upwards of 4.41 billion by 2025.

If you're unsure of what this means, know that nearly half the world's population now uses social media in some capacity.

There are several unique platforms for those users to find a home online. While apps like Instagram and TikTok largely appeal to Gen Z and millennials, Facebook boasts a fairly wide array of demographics. Meanwhile, LinkedIn secured its place as the social media app for professionals and is consistently used to great effect for B2B advertisers.

The TLDR - segments of your audience are most assuredly on social media.

Social Media Myth 2 - Social Media is a Young Person's Game

This is another misconception of social media you can quickly dispel with basic research.

According to a Pew Research study, a significant percentage of users between the ages of 18 and 64 utilize at least one social media site regularly. The results are as follows:

• 18-29 years - 84%
• 30-49 years - 80%
• 50-64 years - 64%
• 65+ - 40%

The only age demographic that shows a noticeable dropoff is the senior citizen range. This makes sense as older adults are less likely to adapt to technological changes. Nonetheless, 40% is nothing to scoff at when it comes to potential leads.

Furthermore, young people below the desired age for advertising are the ones growing up with social media. It wasn't long ago that our current 30-year-olds (Millenials) were considered the young ones. Now, they're prime targets for consumer purchases.

By investing your brand into social media now, you position yourself for better results as the expected social media usage continues to grow in the coming years.

Social Media Myth 3 - Social Media Marketing is Free

It's free to create an account and free to post, but the free ride effectively ends there.

If you want to get the most out of social media, you need to invest in them the same as you would any other marketing channel.

As a baseline, you'll want to appoint a dedicated social media marketing manager to oversee your accounts throughout the week. This will account for daily post creation as well as everyday user engagement. You wouldn't run paid ads without an account manager, so you shouldn't treat social media as set it and forget it.ā

Since we mentioned the feature, you'll want to take advantage of paid promotions on social media to boost your campaigns. You can choose to boost or promote individual posts on the platform or use the promotion to gain more clicks on your landing page or sales funnel offer.

Social media can be free, but you can't expect to get much out of it if you aren't willing to invest.

Social Media Myth 4 - Social Media is a Job for an Intern That I Can Undercompensate

We wish this were a joke, but this is how companies all too often treat their social media accounts.

It's a major misconception that anyone can run social media marketing. All of the talents should go to big earners like paid search, while up-and-comers without experience can manage social posting.

And yet, these same companies perpetuate the myth that social media is not a worthwhile marketing investment.

The reality is that social media is one of the most dynamic marketing channels available. Your content plans can change at a moment's notice depending upon breaking news or events relevant to your brand. Because social media is conversational, you need a rep actively managing engagements and making the right calls on how to approach your posting.

If you need proof of how easy it is to make mistakes, just look at these painful blunders from famous brands. It happens more than you'd think.

Rather than risking unnecessary damage to your brand online, take the time to interview and hire a dedicated social media marketing expert. Allow them the opportunity and resources to show you firsthand how much social media marketing can impact your bottom line.

Social Media Myth 5 - Social Media is All About Negativity

If you find yourself agreeing with this point, there's a good chance you've been on platforms like Twitter or Reddit personally. We won't argue that the negative vocal minority tends to be loud, but that's not all there is to see.

Users regularly post about the exceptional experiences they have with brands. It takes little effort to @ā  a company and talk about a positive thing that happened. By engaging with these types of mentions, you can reinforce the positive effects by showing that your company is aware, thoughtful, and concerned about public opinion.

Furthermore, running away from social media isn't going to protect you from online negativity. Countless platforms from Yelp to Google Reviews actively seek to provide users with a way to share their experiences with other users. If you ignore those platforms and negative reviews, then your reputation remains that way forever.

Instead, you can have your team actively engage with those talking about you positively or negatively. Showing kindness and patience to customers or prospects can often quell negativity and allow your brand image to come out as more positive on the other side.

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The trick is to not take these users for granted. They're aware that you're a brand, so you shouldn't pretend to be something else.

Social Media Myth 6 - Likewise, Any Negative Feedback is Just from the Haters

Not only is this false, but it's also a fairly juvenile attitude to have toward existing or would-be customers.

Your average social media user may not voice their frustrations gracefully, but that does not make their complaints less legitimate. This is not your personal social media account, it's for your company. You should be able to disassociate from difficult comments and aim to extract useful information from the interaction.

It's unlikely for dissenting voices to appear for no reason. It could indicate poor customer service, a product or service error, or shipping issues. If you simply ignore negative feedback, the relevant teams will never hear about it and your brand never gets the opportunity to improve.

Finally, publicly acknowledging negative feedback isn't easy, but it shows gracefulness. Users don't stay angry long, and if your company is willing to take its lumps, it leaves a window of opportunity to win customers back in the long run.

Social Media Myth 7 - I Can't Share or Promote Brand Content

While it's true that social media is more about the conversation, there are zero reasons for you to avoid posting brand-related content.

The error comes from making a social media account and exclusively posting about your products, services, or offers. Anyone that spends time online already sees more advertisements than they can handle. When you flood your timeline with self-promotion, it just becomes more noise that's easy to avoid.

You wouldn't shove a company brochure into a person's face without first making conversation, so why treat social media differently?

Make the effort to engage with your audience and meet them on their level. If the opportunity reveals itself, you can then share brand-related content in a way that feels natural and applies to the person or group's actual needs or desires.

It's been said already, but it bears repeating: social media requires active attention and proactivity to get real results. As long as you dedicate yourself to a platform, you'll be surprised at how much you can get out of it.

Social Media Myth 8 - I Need to Go All-In on Every Platform

Not only is this statement false, we actively discourage it.

The social media platforms you should use are highly dependent on the following factors:

• Company type: B2C or B2B
• Target audience demographics
• Your budget
• Talent/resources
• Company voice / values

For example, B2B businesses tend to prioritize sites like LinkedIn as it attracts more employed professionals. You would want to emphasize social outreach to those types of individuals to get the best ROI possible from your social media efforts.

Likewise, B2C businesses can't go wrong with posting or advertising on sites like Facebook or Instagram. These sites feature users typically between the ages of 25-50 who have a lot of purchasing power.

Sites like Twitter typically exemplify a more casual, laid-back tone. While more professionalā  companies can still find success there, you may want to avoid it if you do not want to represent your brand casually.

Finally, it would be wise to research the average CPC (cost-per-click) for each platform. Facebook consistently possesses the lowest CPC, making it the most accessible to a wide variety of small businesses. Meanwhile, a site like YouTube has a higher cost-per-view and will be more resource-intensive to get the most out of it.

Companies should invest their marketing resources wisely when it comes to social media. As always, actively monitor your analytics, test new creatives, and don't be afraid to abandon certain platforms if they're not right for your brand.

Social Media Myth 9 - A General, Once-a-Day Post is Enough

While the rules are different for each website, this point will always be a myth.

We touched on this point under Myth 7. If you go into the process of creating all of your week's posts at once and scheduling them, don't expect to get much engagement. Your timeline will look cold and calculated because it is cold and calculated. This is the opposite of the dynamic, conversational approach that social is known for.

You need to be aware of best posting practices for each social media site that you utilize. For sites like Facebook or Twitter, you can help boost engagement by posting several times per day. However, this is contingent upon the type of content you post and whether or not it's worth sharing.

In some cases, it is recommended to post once per day as is the rule for a site like LinkedIn. However, this means you'll want to put thought and creativity into your post to get enough mileage to make it worth your time.

You'll also want to monitor times for peak activity on your platform and post accordingly. For most sites, posting first thing in the morning is a mistake. Users are on their way or at work and your content will get lost throughout the day. Alternatively, posting during lunch hours or on the weekends gives you the best chance for further engagement.

Social Media Myth 10 - My Employees, Friends, and Family Should Like My Posts

If you can count on people to give you easy likes, your numbers go up. If your numbers go up, then it will attract even more engagement, right?

This is true in a broad sense, but this approach effectively never works. Algorithms are intelligent and will understand the source of engagement. Not only will this small number of clicks not make you more discoverable, but it will also make your analytics unclean. It will only get harder to determine the effectiveness of strategies.

It can also make it more difficult for your content to get discovered by new audiences. Because your posts are not getting an opportunity to be discovered organically, it can teach the algorithm to avoid showing your posts to new potential groups.

If you want to utilize social media marketing, then do it the honest way. If a post is a dud, learn from it with analytics and testing, and do better with the next one.

Social Media Myth 11 - I Must Use as Many Hashtags as Possible

Don't you love #marketingposts that are #cool, #clever, and #funny? #marketing #social

If you want to post correctly, and to avoid harming everyone's eyes, stop using hashtags for things other than their intended purpose.

A hashtag is a platform-wide tool that serves to qualify and categorize the thousands of posts that go out every minute. If a user searches for a specific hashtag, they can quickly locate content directly related to that hashtag.

So, when you flood your posts with unnecessary hashtags, you are actively making everyone else's user experience worse. Furthermore, using hashtags on nonsensical words or phrases provides no benefit and makes the post look messy and amateurish.

An alternative way to utilize hashtags is to help promote and solidify a campaign. One of the most famous and successful hashtag campaigns was Coca-Cola's #ShareACoke campaign. You can see countless more examples of superb hashtag use thanks to Adspresso here.

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Social Media Myth 12 - More Followers = Success

If you're experienced with other marketing channels, your gut should already tell you that this is false.

For example, if you boost your website visitor count from 100 to 1,000, but see no noticeable increase in conversion, would you consider that a success?

The analytics could potentially tell more, but this example seems to indicate that those new clicks were not from qualified visitors. The same premise applies when it comes to your social media following.

In other words:

• Company A has 1,000 followers and receives 500 purchases as a result
• Company B has 5,000 followers and receives 500 purchases as a result

Though Company B has a much higher follower count, company A has a significantly higher engagement and conversion rate. This means they're spending time engaging with highly-qualified individuals as opposed to audiences that will likely never convert.

When it comes to digital marketing, quality almost always wins out over quantity. Keep this in mind when preparing your social media marketing strategy.

Social Media Myth 13 - You Can't Measure Social Media Performance

For starters, every social media platform offers built-in analytics that can highlight:

• Views
• Impressions
• Cost-per-view
• Cost-per-impression
• Potential reach
• Growth rate
• Virality rate

This only scratches the surface. The analytics available to you increases exponentially when you begin to experiment with paid social.

You can then track any activity that happens off of social media by using platforms like Google Analytics. This tool allows you to set up custom goals so that you can easily identify every time a user navigates to your website or landing page from a social media website. You can further qualify your goals to see which of those new visitors then go on to make a purchase, subscribe, and so on.

Those that perpetuate the myth that you cannot measure social media performance typically do not have well-defined goals. Without understanding what you're there for, you'll be hard-pressed to know which metrics to view and what to do with them.

Revisit the drawing board and determine what your overall goal is with your social media accounts currently. There exists a wealth of marketing tools that make it simple to track social media activity and how many conversions you're earning as a result of your presence on that platform.

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Social Media Myth 14 - I Can Just Crosspost Everywhere to Keep it Simple

Social media cross-posting tools like Sprout Social, Loomly, and Hootsuite often lead people to this conclusion. However, doing so with every post ignores what we've learned so far in this article.

Every social media platform has a different audience and a different way you should approach engagement. While it's typically safe to post similarly on Facebook and Instagram, you would want a unique, better-optimized post for a site like LinkedIn.

When you write a single post to publish on 10 different platforms, you're not truly considering the audience on any of them. The more general and vague you are with your posting, the less likely you are to establish any sort of meaningful connections.

With that said, this isn't a diss on the aforementioned tools. There are times when it is appropriate to crosspost when it comes to important company updates that concern consumers. However, using these options to simply be lazy will come back to bite you when your social media marketing efforts amount to very little.

Social Media Myth 15 - I'll Start Getting Engagement in a Week or Two

If you work as a digital marketer, you're likely all too aware of the unrealistic expectations companies have when it comes to social media.

You create your account, optimize it, and start posting every day. The expectation is that this work will immediately be rewarded with likes, follows, and shares just within a couple of weeks.

Unless you're a legendary social media marketer in disguise, we can assure you that this is not going to happen. As with all forms of content marketing, it takes time to build up a repertoire of content worth following to see.

Many of your initial engagements typically won't come organically, either. Your social media manager will actively reach out to potential audiences or like-minded individuals in the industry. When you create natural, pleasant exchanges with established presences, you give your content a better opportunity to get shared and noticed.

None of this is possible without effort and time. Every brand puts their time into social media to get where they are, and you shouldn't expect yours to cut the line without exceptional effort.

Social Media Myth 16 - Social Media Only Works for B2C

While it's true that some platforms are preferred for B2C targeting, social media can be used in similar ways for B2B transactions.

Though you will tailor your content to speak to ranking professionals within companies, those same people are still active online. Furthermore, when you locate potential leads on sites like LinkedIn, you already have valuable data such as their company, position, and some insight as to how your products or services can help them.

Even if the individual you engage with is not your end target, they can be the gateway you need to bring your brand before a company. As you use social media to build a relationship with members of that company, you position yourself to be a strong contender for their business.

In short, social media marketing works quite similarly with B2B as it does with B2C. It's still all about connecting with the right individuals where they happen to spend time online. Social media can be one of the most effective marketing tools of all as B2B-focused platforms naturally qualify the types of individuals you want to connect with.

Social Media Myth 17 - I Can't Create Enough Content

Unique content creation can be tough if you're currently engaged with:

• Blogs
• Paid ads
• Landing pages
• Sales funnels

Adding several social media profiles to the mix can leave your content writers stumped as to what will make for ideal social media content today.

The truth is that not all of your marketing content needs to be unique 100% of the time. Creating high-quality content and utilizing it for one purpose should be considered a waste of resources.

Instead, revisit a high-performing blog or page and think of how you can repurpose that content for the social media format. Perhaps a new, hot blog contains some engagement metrics that make for a compelling infographic to share on Facebook. With a bit of love and elbow grease, you suddenly have excellent content for social media posting.

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Instead of thinking about how you can plan for more content, consider strategies to help your content teams synergize for the best possible ROI.

Social Media Myth 18 - New Trends Like TikTok, Reels, or Shorts are Just a Gimmick

Sometimes a hot new feature burns out as quickly as it's introduced. In other cases, like the aforementioned examples, those features are here to stay.

Even those who embrace social media can quickly find themselves falling back into the initial trap of believing a new tool is not for them or won't apply to their audience.

However, the brands that are finding the greatest success on social media are the ones who quickly embrace and adapt to new trends rather than ignore them. Remember, it's never about your personal bias, but about engaging with audiences in the way that they choose to speak on social media.

Embracing these types of silly, fun new trends can also provide a necessary burst of inspiration for your social media team.

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So, instead of writing yet another cold, text post, consider making a fun Instagram Reel that you can share with your followers. They will take notice and your metrics will thank you for it in time.

Social Media Myth 19 - Social Media Will Deliver Results to Anyone with the Right Strategy

Now that we've spent the entire article highlighting what you're doing wrong, it's time to acknowledge the reality.

Social media is not always the way to go for every brand. Even those who dedicate the time, energy, and resources can struggle to generate any worthwhile engagement.

While we do believe that with enough consistent effort, anyone can succeed, not everyone has the budget or ability to get there. It's in these times that your team will need to make the tough call and choose to devote those resources to marketing channels that provide a better ROI.

However, you shouldn't take this as a sign that social media does not work. Instead, consider postponing social activities indefinitely while you focus on growing your brand elsewhere. When your company is better positioned to approach social media once again, you may find your team in a new place with a refreshed mindset that can give them a leg up in the social media game.

Social Media Myth 20 - All of My Established Strategies Will Work Forever

No matter how well a strategy is working for you now, never rest on your laurels. Digital marketing, itself, is a dynamic industry that will never stop evolving.

Social media is an already dynamic channel that can make creating a reliable strategy for your brand even more tumultuous.

If you choose to be in social media marketing for the long haul, do your best to establish a short memory. Celebrate your victories quickly and be ready to embrace the newest trends and techniques as they come. The more agile you are, the faster you can adapt, and the further you can get ahead of the competition.

Start Doing Social Media Marketing Correctly

Now that we've successfully dispelled the most common misconceptions of social media, it's time to adjust your approach.

Social media marketing can not only be beneficial to your bottom line, it creates a great opportunity to establish fun relationships directly with your audience.

Social media is a place for all ages and will continue to grow even more commonplace in the years to come. Use your analytical tools to observe the latest patterns, investigate which platforms are better for your brand, and treat each of your accounts with the care they deserve.

Marketing analytics tools continue to change the way we advertise businesses.

Before digital marketing, brands and agencies were spending far more on their advertising campaigns in exchange for very little feedback. Smaller businesses with less budget to work with could not benefit from the additional exposure to help business growth.

With the advent of digital marketing tools and techniques, brands can now approach a level playing field. Even a small, local company can reliably drive business growth with the help of marketing analytics tools.

Here are four ways that analytics can help your business grow successfully.

1. Marketing Analytics Tools Improve Your ROI with Direct Feedback

Free-to-use platforms such as Google Analytics have effectively taken all of the guesswork out of digital advertising. Even paid ad platforms like Google Ads or Facebook Ads support all of your work with constant analytical feedback.

Whether you're choosing the right image for an ad, working on the perfect headline, or writing copy for your home page, marketing analytics tools can help you improve.

These digital advertising platforms allow you to keep track of vital metrics including page visits, bounce rate, average session duration, click-through rate, and much more. You can even leverage marketing heat maps to see where on the page users tend to look and which areas they're skipping.

Even when you are unable to precisely pinpoint an issue, your analytics will provide enough feedback to help you construct a better marketing product. You can and should A/B test several versions of an ad or website page to see which performs better with your target audience. You'll be able to actively study what visitors enjoy and what they don't want to see from your brand.

Provided that you actively monitor and engage with your analytics, improvements to your ROI are virtually assured. Even if your early campaigns do not boast huge sales numbers, the feedback you're purchasing is a sound investment in your business's future growth.

2. The Ability to Create Personalized Advertisements

One drawback to the accessibility of digital marketing is that audiences are inundated with advertisements daily. If you simply hit publish on a generic ad and landing page for your campaign, you shouldn't expect to see many conversions.

However, one of the many benefits of analytics tools is the ability to discern more vital information from your target audience. As you gather enough data, you can begin to segment your target audience into specific groups. This allows your company to create highly-personalized advertisements to increase your CTR and CVR.

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This is vital as each individual in your target audience is at a different stage of the buyer's journey. Some may be uneasy at the idea of spending cash and simply want to gather information. Meanwhile, others may be on the verge of checkout, but abandon the process for some undefined reason. You wouldn't approach these two individuals with the same sales tactics in real life, so your marketing should also reflect this.

With marketing analytics tools, you can create content to help consumers make smart purchasing decisions. You can meet undecided buyers at their level and send follow-up emails personalized with their name and email. Your company can also publish email marketing lists that are exclusive to recurring customers.

When the customer feels a personal connection with your brand, there's a far greater chance of achieving a conversion. The more conversions you obtain, the more data you have to drive future marketing decisions, which drive business growth to new levels.

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3. Marketing Analytics Make It Easier to Find New Leads

As a customer moves from the discovery stage to the buying stage, your brand can gather a wealth of information. When you obtain a satisfying number of customers, you'll have enough of a sample size to draw meaningful conclusions about your marketing as well as your customer interests.

With this analytical data, you can utilize digital marketing platforms to rapidly discover and connect with new leads. In the paid ads world, this is sometimes referred to as targeting lookalike audiences.ā

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These new potential leads share similar attributes to previous or existing customers. Because your marketing analytics already helped you curate an effective strategy, you can reuse similar techniques to reach new customers with little additional effort. Your previous investment is rewarded by allowing you to spend less on new customer acquisition.

Typically, it can cost as much as five times more to obtain new customers than it is to retain existing ones. However, your business cannot grow without expanding its customer base. By utilizing your marketing analytics tools, you can achieve this growth while keeping your expenses low.

4. Achieve Growth by Keeping Tabs on Competitors

Your analytics not only provide personal company insights but can help you see the latest activities from your closest competitors online. Your marketing analytics tools will help you with this in a variety of ways.

First, you can look at competitor websites that rank higher than yours for the same targeted keywords. This helps you focus your vision on the specific sites and web pages that are utilizing more effective copy, graphics, or techniques.

You can use this study to take note of what you can change or implement within your website or advertisements. Alternatively, you can rule out specific keyword targets that are victims of a bidding war and seek new routes for obtaining qualified traffic. Oftentimes, the strategy is not to simply burn your budget by outbidding the competition, but by capitalizing on unique angles that suit your business and differentiate you from other results.

Companies can also utilize their marketing analytics to see the exact number of clicks and average estimated ROI competitors are getting for the same keywords. This will assist in gaining a better understanding of marketing costs so that you can modify your strategy according to your budget.

As a final note, know that all of your competitors are already taking advantage of marketing analytics tools for these same reasons. You must adapt to new technologies and expand your knowledge if you want your brand to survive and remain competitive for the years to come.

Business Growth is Achievable for Any Brand with Marketing Analytics

The benefits of marketing analytical tools cannot be ignored. Not only are the insights imperative for creating effective ads, but they also make digital marketing far more cost-effective than any traditional advertising method.

With these marketing analytics tools, you never waste your budget simply for the hopes of potential exposure. The constant feedback loop will serve as your blueprint of what to do and what to avoid when creating your new web pages, paid ad campaigns, or even social media posts. Everything a visitor does or does not do is recorded for your observation.

However, while these digital marketing platforms do the heavy lifting of collecting the data, you still need to remain active. With a capable digital marketing manager at the helm, you can turn your investment in analytics into your key for dependable business growth.

If you're looking to breakthrough in the digital marketing world, you need a solid digital agency business plan.

There are no secret tricks, shortcuts, or techniques to help you accomplish this. It's going to require a team effort, hours of forethought, and an agile mindset to do it right. If you aren't prepared to get your hands dirty with research and cold, hard numbers, you should rethink your plans to start a business.

If that hasn't scared you away, then it's time to get to work. While we can't do the work for you, we can provide you with a marketing agency business plan template to follow. Take these broader strokesĀ and carefully consider how each category applies to you and your future team.

Step 1 - Define the Business

When creating your digital agency business plan, you need to ask the core questions. When it comes to the business itself, you should be considering:

• What is the business?
• Who is it for?
• Why does the business exist?
• Where will you market and sell your services?
• How will you make all of this happen?

When it comes to defining your new digital marketing agency, you want to focus on the who, what, and why of the matter.

Making money is not a sufficient reason as this is the primary purpose of all businesses. Making a profit is not enough of a motivator to guarantee that your agency will succeed.

The services offered by a business are also not what defines a business and what helps it succeed. There are thousands of digital marketing agencies available. In an industry where location is ultimately irrelevant, you need to offer your customers something more than paid ads, content, and SEO.

A digital marketing agency exists to solve the unique problems that businesses face when striving for growth and customer connection. Your primary business goal should be aligned to help your target audience solve the specific problems they face that may or may not be unique to other potential audiences.

To help gain a better understanding of what your new digital agency business is and why it exists, you’ll need to perform the following:

• Name the business
• Create a mission statement (why does the business exist and who are we helping)
• List your company’s defining values and motivators

With a better visualization of your company’s goals and values, you’ll then have a framework to start building. To achieve your vision, you’ll need to consider the individuals you’ll need to partner with and hire to make it all possible.

• Define the management hierarchy and their titles/responsibilities
• Company structure for future employees
• Expected salary/benefit structure for each employee hired

When it comes to your employees, you shouldn’t plan for just the initial hire. The talent you’ll want to acquire is already active in the industry and will be looking for competitive compensation packages that scale with their time invested.

You don’t want to start your new digital agency out with a high turnover rate, so you should plan out scaling compensation over years 1-3 using Paystub Hero. Not only will this give you an accurate view of your payroll expenses, but it will help you with the hiring and onboarding process.

Step 2 - Define the Customer

Like any business, your digital agency can't survive without a steady flow of new clients and customers. However, you'll benefit more from targeting a specific, ideal customer that happens to benefit most from your business specifically. The more refined your planned targeting is, the easier time you will have landing new sales when the time comes.

Thankfully, we already started this process by defining your digital agency’s reason for existing in step one. You should already have a specific audience in mind, whether this happens to be:

• Individual persons / self-employed individuals
• Small businesses
• Other marketing / SaaS companies
• Corporations

Your ideal client doesn't have to be confined to any of these suggested categories. However, you can already begin to understand how our business plan will change depending on whom we intend to primarily serve.

Not only should the company service platform be designed for that customer, but it will define our sales and marketing efforts in future steps.

Bonus - Define Who You DON'T Want as a Customer

A strong digital agency business plan will also benefit from defining those who will not benefit from your offerings.

Of course, you need not list the obvious. Your digital agency will provide little to no assistance to the average working consumer.

Instead, you need to eliminate audiences early that may be tangentially related to your offerings. For example, DashClicks exists to serve other digital marketing agencies, SaaS companies, hosts, coaches, and directories. While small businesses can benefit from digital marketing services, they are not our primary clientele based upon our decided business plan.

This allows us to better engineer our offerings package as well as our digital advertising and sales efforts. With a clear vision of our ideal customer, all of our business efforts trend in that direction. We avoid wasting time, effort, and expenses on leads that aren't truly aligned with what we have to provide.

Do the same with your business plan. Know who you want to do business with and whom you want to avoid.

Step 3 - Define the Services

While you've likely generated an idea of what your digital agency's services will look like, it's time to nail down definitions.

For this step of your marketing agency business plan, you’ll want to address the following:

• What are the core service offerings?
• What type of talent will you need to hire to sell these services?
• What will it cost for your company to provide these services?
• What can/should you charge for these services?
• When can your business expect to turn a profit?

Going through each potential service step-by-step should naturally help you curate your company's unique offerings. If your cost-benefit analysis determines that service will cost more than you can expect to earn, you may need to eliminate it from your platform. Alternatively, you can choose to postpone that offering for now and revisit the matter a year from now.

Each service your agency provides should be critical in helping your target client solve the problems they face in business. This may also help you realize services you need to include that you have not already considered.

You may choose to position your agency to specialize in specific services or to offer a comprehensive, complete package. Agencies around the globe find success with either strategy. As long as your services align with your company's mission statement and work to satisfy your desired client, you will be golden.

Step 4 - Defining the Sales Process

Thus far in our digital agency business plan, we have:

• Defined our new digital agency
• Identified our ideal customer
• Curated a cost-effective service platform that serves our audience

With these factors, we have nearly realized a legitimate digital marketing agency. We now need to consider how the team will approach selling the brand to audiences and acquiring new customers to reach our monetary goals.

For starters, your business plan should clearly define the strategies you intend to use to approach both new leads and established clients.

While it's true that each customer will have unique qualities, laying out a defined approach or pitch will provide a higher success rate and help employees stick to the company vision.

Because not all new leads typically buy right out of the gate, you'll also want to lay out your strategy for nurturing prospects.

Remember, you're not writing out a guarantee nor is your suggested process set in stone. Nevertheless, you'll need a proof of concept regarding how you intend to obtain new clients if you want to sell your digital agency to others.

Something that can help you define your sales approach is conducting a detailed competitor analysis.

Scout out other digital agencies that will be your direct competitors and determine what strategies they use to attract and secure new clients. Find ways to incorporate tried-and-true techniques into your plan, but do so in a way that adheres to your vision.

Clearly Define Your 1-, 2-, and 3-Year Sales Goals

With your sales strategy defined, you'll now want to create a predictive sales forecast for your digital agency. Every new business is unique, so you'll want to work together with your partners to create realistically achievable sales goals for years 1-3.

It's expected and virtually a guarantee that profits will be low during startup. That's why it's important to project sales growth over time with supporting data.

When outlining your business plan, you should be able to estimate target sales revenue goals as well as a profit margin that slowly increases with time. You must be able to prove to yourself and investors that your brand will be able to operate, market, and sell services in a way that spawns steady, predictable business growth.

Step 5 - Your Marketing Plan

Another major business expense will be your digital agency marketing efforts. Every business has an expected cost-per-acquisition (CPA) and you'll want to define yours now.

You’ll get a better idea of how much it costs to market your brand once you decide which channels you aim to utilize. Because you’re in the digital marketing business, you should be aware of your available options:

• Paid ads
• Paid search
• Organic search (SEO)
• Social media
• Content marketing
• Email

However, you may want to consider additional forms of advertising including print advertising. You may also wish to create your Affiliate marketing program, providing incentives to existing clients in exchange for marketing assistance.

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The marketing section of your business plan should not only include a cost-benefit analysis but should fully detail anticipated strategies for each channel. Not only will this serve as your proof of concept, but will serve as the instructional guidelines your employees need to execute and achieve your marketing goals.

Step 6 - Financial Analysis and Summary

Throughout our entire digital agency business plan, we've set out to define our business, our services, our customers, our sales strategy, and our marketing approach.

With all of this accumulated data, we can create a full-fledged financial analysis of:

• Cost to startup
• Cost to operate
• Payroll
• Equipment
• Programs/Services
• Office expenses
• Taxes
• Cost to acquire new customers
• Cost to retain existing customers

All of this data can help us determine the digital agency’s expected yearly gross revenue, and, therefore, the expected gross and net profit. As briefly mentioned before, you’ll want to set numerous short-term and long-term goals for each category.

Consider setting goals for expected customer acquisitions and revenue for each quarter and each year. This will help to guide business behavior and alert you to potential problems with your business plan if you fail to achieve said goals. Failure to reach expectations can either be an indication of internal issues or that your set goals are unrealistic with the existing market.

Either way, you'll be able to make smart, data-driven changes as long as you have goals that allow you to respond quickly.

Your Business Plan Can and Will Change!

The final thing you should take away from this digital agency business plan template is that none of your writing should be fixed. A rigid, inflexible mindset is almost guaranteed to spell a quick doom for your new startup.

Your desired audience may not be your best choice. Your service package may require changes to net more revenue. Your overall business goals may change as you acquire more experience with new partners, employees, and clients. Even uncontrollable global or economic factors can suddenly shift the way you do business forever.

What makes a successful business is not nailing it on the first try. Rather, it's the ability to intelligently plan for the future, anticipate problems, and remain proactive to changing landscapes as opposed to being reactive. Regardless of what happens, your company should always fall back to its core values and remember that its objective is to serve others and help them solve their issues.

If your website isn't generating a steady stream of new leads, it's not doing its job effectively.

While it's true that web pages can serve primarily to educate, it's a waste to not use that great content to convert users into paying customers. However, optimizing your site for lead generation is going to require synergy in your marketing strategies to get the best possible results.

Below, we'll teach you how to set up a lead generation site that delivers results. Here are our top ten recommended strategies that show how to build a lead generation website the right way.

1. Optimize Your UX (Desktop and Mobile)

Our list starts with a focus on the user experience. We can debate over which website elements are most important, but users will not have the patience to deal with a slow, clunky, and/or ugly website. They can always find a competitor website with better UX in a matter of seconds.

But, what exactly is the user experience?

The user experience refers to any aspects of the website that serve to make the user's visit and attempts to interact more enjoyable. Factors that contribute to the UX include page design, content quality, content presentation, loading speeds, ease of navigation, and interactivity.

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Take loading speed for example. It's a fairly well-known fact that longer loading times drastically increase bounce rate. According to Pingdom, the average load time you should aim for is roughly two seconds. As the time increases from two to five seconds, your bounce rate can increase by nearly 40%.

Other factors can and will cause users to leave. If a user has difficulty discerning how to get sections of the site, if the text is illegible due to design choices, or if videos and images fail to load, you undermine all of the hard work that went into building your site.

The user has zero obligation to stick around, and you certainly won't generate a lead if your website's UX isn't worth experiencing. A bad UX will likely make any of these upcoming strategies irrelevant in your lead gen efforts.

2. Learn the Best SEO Practices

Like your UX, optimizing your new lead generation website with best SEO practices is the best way to build a strong foundation.

SEO, which stands for search engine optimization, refers to any actions taken on the website's front or back end to boost discoverability in search engine results pages. Incorporating SEO in your marketing strategy is essential for ensuring that new users visit your website regularly outside of clicks from paid ad campaigns.

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Before we think about how we can encourage new visitors to become leads, we need to get people in the door. While search ads with Google or social media ads on Facebook can land you website clicks, investing in SEO will help you build organic visits with time, ultimately lowering your total advertising costs.

Having quality website SEO also helps Google match your website content to more qualified users. While traffic gains are admirable, they can often account for little more than vanity. When a website's SEO is just so-so, you can often get clicks from users that ultimately are not a good match when your goal is lead generation.

The more optimized your SEO, the better Google's search crawler can understand the purpose of your page's content. When Google can do its job well, you get the benefit of receiving visits from the type of users you want to focus on converting.

SEO can be a complex topic and covers a wide breadth of areas. You'll want to learn improved keyword targeting strategies, how to check keyword rankings, image and video optimization, script compression, meta tags, and content marketing, for starters. All of these will help your website run faster and rank higher for a variety of search terms.

3. Add a Strong CTA to Your Home Page

This is where direct lead generation optimizations begin.

If you want a user to convert, you need to provide an incentive for them to do so. We often refer to these as "call-to-actions," or "CTAs." These are direct calls to the reader that motivate them to perform a specific action that you've designated as a goal.

When it comes to lead generation, this commonly applies to filling out a form. The user will provide their name and contact details, thus becoming a new lead in your marketing campaign efforts.

However, no one is going to fill out a form simply because you asked nicely. While no money is being exchanged yet, this is still a business transaction. As such, you need to provide a relevant, worthwhile incentive to the user in exchange for their lead information. It doesn't need to be an expensive or outrageous offer, but something small can be enough to win them over.

Examples of strong CTAs might include free consultations, free quotes, a first-timer's discount, or even a complimentary eBook. You want to tailor that incentive to be directly relevant to why the user arrived at your home page in the first place.

As an example, let's consider a roofing company. They can offer prospective customers a free inspection and report in exchange for basic details like a phone number and email. Chances are, someone arriving at your site is already looking for something like this, and providing that CTA immediately creates a high chance for a conversion.

A CTA like this has power as it offers something of value to the customer for free. They also have the motivation to sign up even if they're not quite at the buying stage of the buyer's journey.

Craft a strong CTA that you want to live on your home page and make sure it's one of the first things in the visitor's viewport when they arrive.

4. Add Forms to Other High-Traffic Website Areas

High-traffic website pages are also prime real estate for CTAs and forms.

Many website owners make the mistake of simply adding a 'Contact Us' page to their site and calling it a day. However, you're going to virtually zero direct clicks to that page. That means that a visitor has to go through an additional step and fill out a form to contact you.

Instead, you should consider which pages users are clicking to make their entry into your domain. Specific types of pages, such as a service description page, serve as a better location to implement additional forms.

Consider a user that is specifically searching for a home plumbing service. They click on a company's residential service page to inquire more about the service and prices. This is arguably an even better opportunity to claim a lead conversion than on your home page.

This is because you already know where the visitor's interest lies. With this information, you can curate a highly-specific CTA with your form to encourage even more lead conversions. You don't necessarily need the user to stay on the website longer or click on additional pages.

Use your website's Google Analytics to identify where new visitors are coming from and which web pages they are accessing. Then, make sure to tighten the copy on that page to encourage users to sign up for free estimates, consultations, etc. based upon the topic of the page.

5. Create and Optimize Landing Pages

This strategy piggy-backs off of the previous tip and effectively serves as the bread and butter of any lead-generation website.

While your base website pages can benefit from submission forms, there are limitations to what you can do. Those core pages can help to drive conversions, but their primary purpose is generally to educate visitors about the business and the services offered on an everyday basis.

Making too many changes to these pages and dressing the copy up with flagrant advertising will ultimately hurt your SEO and page rankings.

Instead, we can use the proven strategy of creating and optimizing landing pages with a highly-specific offer in mind. This new page exists for the sole purpose of lead generation and allows you to gain all of the benefits without the potential drawbacks.

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You can sweeten the offer on your landing pages by offering something of immediate value to the visitor. These can include discounts, eBook downloads, exclusive content, or promotional vouchers.

Finally, you can utilize Google Analytics and/or your CMS of choice to A/B test various versions of your landing page. This will guide you to make the necessary adjustments for the best lead-gen results.

6. Don't Overlook the “Thank You” Page

The companion to the landing page is the “Thank You” page. This is where you redirect users after completing their form signup to confirm their submission.

However, most companies tend to leave this page barebones.

What you should be doing is using this page as an opportunity to drive additional engagement. Many users will not even see your “thank you” page, but the ones who do have expressed interest that you should capitalize on with additional CTAs.

For starters, you should make every effort to provide the user with their signup incentive immediately. Instead of entering, “We’ll send your free eBook soon,” you should simply provide a button or link for immediate download. The longer you can keep the user engaged, the more they're thinking about your brand.

Similar upgrades to your second page could include:

• Links to schedule appointments/calls on your Google Calendar/Calendly
• Link to your main website or a relevant product/service page
• Links to follow your company on social media
• Links/downloads to any additional resources relevant to the offer

7. Develop a Blog for Your Website

Blogging is a staple of SEO and is essential for lead generation website best practices.

When creating content for a page, you target specific keywords that demonstrate a strong search volume from your target audience. Because your page is SEO-optimized for that keyword, there's a strong chance that it will rank high in SERPs, providing a gateway for users to access your site.

Blogs exist, in part, for this purpose.

Every new blog article you publish creates a brand-new page on your website. This page targets new keywords, and, therefore, creates new methods for visitors to discover your website.

A well-developed blog continues to provide results over time. When your articles are well-researched, trustworthy, and receive notable traffic, the authority of your entire domain improves. This makes Google more likely to rank your pages, which means more opportunities to convert new leads.

Blogs particularly help lead-generation strategies as the content is highly-targeted. While your base website covers a wider subject (your industry), blog articles bring in users searching for that specific topic. There's a greater likelihood that new visitors clicking on your blog are highly interested, which presents a greater opportunity for conversion.

The blog itself creates an incentive to convert. Visitors that like your content can sign up to receive notifications when new content is published. Therefore, you've already boosted your number of leads just by helping your website's SEO.

You can further boost your blogging efforts by suggesting products or services whenever relevant within the context of the topic. Just be sure to stay true to the purpose of the article and avoid being intrusive with self-advertisement.

8. Nurture with an Email Marketing List

We briefly touched on email lists above as blogs can be one incentive for users to sign up.

However, there are various things you can do with your email marketing lists such as sending out exclusive offers, discounts, or alternative content that can't be found on your website. All of these provide visitors with an ongoing incentive to subscribe as opposed to a one-time offer.

Furthermore, the email marketing list works for you beyond the initial lead conversion. Equally important is nurturing those leads for the long-term so that you gain more value per acquired lead.

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A commonly repeated idea in business is that it costs as much as five times more to acquire new customers than it is to retain existing ones. This means that to build a truly exceptional lead-generation website, you need to implement strategies that nurture your leads after they sign up to maximize your potential profits and keep expenses low.

9. Put the Call Out for Follows on Social Media

Social media often gets overlooked as it typically does not provide the initial, endorphin-pumping ROIs that a paid ad campaign would, for example.

There are two problems with this.

The first is a misunderstanding of what your company's social media accounts should be used for when it comes to digital marketing. Similar to blogs, your objective is to regularly send out engaging, relevant content to your followers.

Unfortunately, most brands put in the bare minimum effort and deliver cold, lifeless posts that do not motivate them to engage.

The second issue is that it does not acknowledge the visitor's mindset, which is crucial for acquiring new leads.

The truth is that many would-be interested leads simply don't care about the content brands post on their website. These users spend most of their online time on social media. If that demographic happens to align with your target buyer persona, then you must meet your audience where they spend their time.

Regarding your lead-generation website, you can help your social media by simply providing CTAs to follow your brand on other accounts. Make it easy for visitors to consume the type of content they want to see rather than limiting your offerings to what's on the page.

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Staying active on social media can help you quickly reach new audiences and provide unique platforms for you to share your offers and content. You can also link back to content on your website to increase your traffic and further drive your lead conversions.

10. Build a Chatbot

Finally, you can help drive engagement on your website by creating a customized chatbot. These automated helpers can speak to users about the content they are reading and help them find solutions faster. This massively improves your UX, which is key to lead generation.

Chatbots can provide users with a sense of self-dependence. While you're actively helping them find information, they feel like they are in control of making educated decisions as a consumer. When a visitor feels good about their experience, they're much more agreeable to signing up, subscribing, or even making a purchase.

You can easily build your very own chatbot by using platforms such as ManyChat or Chatbot. Not only can it improve your lead-gen website, but it can also help cut down on the number of support requests your customer service team receives.

Set Up Your Lead Generation Website the Right Way

Every business needs to make a profit, but it all starts with a steady stream of qualified leads. While some strategies might bring quicker results than others, it takes synergy among multiple digital marketing channels to get the best possible results.

Ensure that your website is worth visiting. Make sure that it runs well, provides attractive offers, and educates the visitor with high-quality content that establishes you as an industry authority.

Take advantage of the free tools available to you such as Google Analytics to test your content and develop landing pages that convert.

Finally, provide alternative options for visitors to engage with your brand such as chatbots, social media feeds, and email marketing lists. The more personalized your messages, the more likely you are to improve your conversion rate.

When we discuss marketing strategies, sales performance, and other business strategies, there's always one underlying motivation - profit margin.

It doesn't matter how stellar your performance is, if the business is not making money, there is no business. Though we typically discuss techniques that ultimately contribute to increasing your profits, sometimes you need to focus on the basics.

Today, you're going to learn how to increase profit margins for your small business quickly. These basic changes should increase your cash flow and allow you to do more with your brand down the line.

How to Increase Profit Margins in Small Business?

Pandemic has taught us many things, including the value you drive from minimalism. So, apart from the crucial metrics like sales performance, it's time to discuss a few intelligent strategies that will cut wasteful practices and increase your profit margins with a high degree of certainty.

Strategy 1 - Get Rid of Unnecessary Operating Expenses

If there's been one benefit for businesses over the last two years during the global crisis, it's an increased focus on the essentials. More companies are eliminating unnecessary overhead by getting rid of the fancy offices, excess equipment, and superfluous expenses.

However, getting rid of the office isn’t necessarily a strategy that every business can utilize. Nevertheless, every business typically ends up with unnecessary spending through one of the following ways:

• Overstaffing for certain roles or tasks within the business
• Paying for unnecessary services / paying for higher subscription plan tiers than necessary
• Extending business hours beyond what’s worthwhile
• Poor efficiency in shipping and receiving
• Poor strategies & time management

As you can see, your business can quickly rack up its cost of daily operation in numerous ways. If you’re serious about increasing your profit margin, then it’s time to get very critical when it comes to the company’s strategies.

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Implement a plan to observe the daily tasks performed by employees. If you have any persons on your team that are not essential, then you have the tough task of relieving that employee of their duties. In some cases, it can be more affordable to assign more tasks to an essential employee with the promise of increased compensation and a title change. However, only do this if it does not harm overall productivity and company efficiency.

If your business is open for 12 hours a day, but typically only sees worthwhile business during 10 of those, consider cutting your hours to avoid paying operating costs beyond what's necessary. Alternatively, you can close the business to the public for the remaining time and allow employees to focus on internal tasks if it helps you to better achieve your goals.

Finally, you must maximize your efficiency when it comes to your shipping department. The longer it takes you to ship an order out of your warehouse after a purchase, the more you're spending on overhead costs. Keep your business agile, improve your workflow, and trim the fat wherever possible. Effective e-commerce order management can streamline your operations, reduce unnecessary costs, and directly contribute to your profit margins.

Strategy 2 - Better Forecast Customer Demand

This strategy bleeds into what we discussed above in regards to shipping and receiving. If your company consistently finds itself with more product on hand than what's being ordered, you need to revise your forecasting strategy.

Not only are you paying for more product than you are selling, but you are also paying overhead costs to store that excess product until it's ordered. If you work in a business that deals with fresh goods and expiration dates, you're losing money to product you'll never be able to sell in time.

This can be a tricky issue to solve as you also don't want to be a brand that's continuously out of stock of in-demand products. A way to solve this is to provide customers with alternative ways to order products such as direct home delivery with free shipping. Customers then have a way of spending their cash with your brand and securing the product, walking away satisfied.

Ultimately, this all comes down to continuously refining your production process. You want to minimize the time between production and sale to be as minimal of a period as possible. It's also okay to keep some surplus inventory on hand for emergencies but avoid overspending as much as possible.

Strategy 3 - Cut Low-Margin Products or Services

Continuing on the topic of inventory management, we also recommend that company's cut any low-margin products or services from their offerings entirely.

It's a natural thing for companies to want to offer their customers a large and competitive selection of offerings. However, if you're not getting a worthwhile ROI when producing and supplying certain goods, then it's ultimately not worth the expense.

You will be better suited to utilize that effort and spending to further market and produce your best-selling goods or services. For small businesses, you will often find better success in specializing in a few offerings as opposed to being average in many things. You might lose a small number of customers in the process, but the math shows that the expense reduction is worth more than the minimal number of sales gained otherwise.

Strategy 4 - Cross-Selling and Upselling

Cross-selling and upselling are staples for increasing profit margins for good reason.

Cross-selling is the practice of selling additional products or services that have a direct relation to the product or service the customer is already purchasing. For example, if a customer is already in the process of buying a computer, you could attempt to cross-sell keyboards, mice, monitors, mousepads, and much more.

Upselling, on the other hand, is the practice of convincing a customer to purchase a more expensive, premium version of a product or service they're already set on buying.

While both focus on different aspects of sales, both strategies are meant to capitalize on individuals that have already tipped over to become buyers in the sales process. Consider two different customers at polar opposite ends of the buying process:

Customer A is simply learning about computers and prices available from various brands. He/she is likely looking for the best product and the best value.Your brand still needs to market to them and convince them to make a single purchase from you. If you suddenly ask them to pay more without initially persuading them, you're simply likely to make them turn away.

‍Customer B has already chosen your brand and added their brand-new PC to their cart. They already have their credit card in hand and are clicking through the checkout process.If you were to show them a slightly upgraded version of the PC or suggest some affordable, add-on products, they'd be more inclined to buy. To someone spending $100, spending $10 more often seems insignificant.

This is all a part of segmenting your target audience and marketing to them appropriately. Not only is upselling or cross-selling to the wrong person a fruitless effort, but you'll also end up spending more of your marketing budget than is worthwhile. However, if you target the right customers with additional offers, there's a great chance you can sell more with minimal effort.

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Strategy 5 - Increase Your Prices

This is the strategy that typically scares company owners away, but it can often be a necessity.

Let's face it. When a business raises the price of its products or services, it's an inevitability that it will lose some customers that get priced out. It's even scarier if your closest competitors continue to sell at lower prices despite rising overhead costs for everyone.

However, a pricing change can also spell success if you do your research.

First, if you already have a strong customer base, a slight price hike is going to be unlikely to scare them away. Any price increase is disappointing, but communicating your reasoning for the change effectively can help quell any strife. Your hard work in nurturing and taking care of your best clients will be rewarded here.

“Some price optimizations were successful and others weren’t. But the ones that we communicated well were always value-driven.” – Yamini Rangan, Chief Executive Officer, HubSpot

If this isn't enough, consider any low-cost additions or upgrades you can add to your products or services to sweeten the value without adding much of an additional expense. If customers can correlate a price rise to more/better products or services, they'll generally be more agreeable to pay.

Finally, you can pivot your brand marketing to focus on highlighting the quality of your offerings. No matter your industry, there are always brands that can maintain a loyal following with the understanding that they are paying a premium price to engage with your brand.

Of course, price increases should ultimately be avoided if your research shows that the effect of the potential client loss outweighs the potential profit margin increase. Exercise caution with this strategy, but know that many brands continue to implement it to great effect.

What is a Healthy Profit Margin for My Business?

If you were to try and get a general answer for any business, you're likely to hear around 10%. However, this is not exactly helpful as typical profit margins vary greatly depending on your industry.

Thankfully, the NYU Stern School of Business provides us with the latest average profit margins in the United States as of January 2022 here. As you can see, gross margins can fluctuate by the tens, placing a much greater focus on the success of businesses in the same field as yours.

The general rule is that a sub-10% profit margin is low, with 10 being the average, and above 20 is exceptionally high. More importantly, the sign of a successful business is to see a steady increase in your profit margins each year that you stay in operation.

Conclusion - Boosting Profit Margins is a Constant Analytical Effort

All of the above strategies are regularly utilized by businesses every year to increase their earnings. Some of these tips are great rules to operate by for any business including cutting unnecessary expenses, accurately forecasting demands, and upselling customers when possible.

Further improvements to your margin will take closer analysis and testing to ensure the best results. While cutting unnecessary staff can help in the short term, you might also hurt performance or productivity if you find your company too short-staffed.

Finally, increasing company prices can bring in more revenue, but do so with caution. Create a careful strategy to support your price hikes as to not alienate the customers that allow you to stay in business. With the right data to back up your decisions and the right strategy to support them, you can add small percentages to your profit margins in several areas over time.