For small businesses needing big results from Online Marketing

Whenever we run workshops or give talks to groups about the benefits of using the internet to market small business, there’s one question we invariably get asked.

“Will social media marketing work for my business?”

The short answer is you don’t know – until you try it!  In our experience, owners of small businesses are discovering all kinds of benefits from using social media marketing methods – and many different ways of using the social networks too.  It isn’t just about immediately getting more sales!

However, it would be foolish to keep using precious time and resources on activities that aren’t working and measuring results and effectiveness are a vital part of marketing.  Here are a few ways you can start measuring social media effectiveness:

Website visitors – You don’t only want to measure the number of visitors to your site with a tool like Google Analytics, you need to capture their details to be able to contact them again.  This is where having a sign-up box will help.

E-Commerce – It’s surprising the number of potential customers who don’t complete the purchase, even though they fully intended to buy.  Most Shopping Carts will let you know where and how many people jump ship, so you can correct and reduce the loss.

Blog – Providing interesting content will encourage readers to comment.  Also, make it easy for people to subscribe to the feed and offer more than one way for them to do this (either to a reader or by email).

Article Marketing – monthly reports will show you how many views each article got, the number of clicks on each link, and even which keywords people used to find the article!

Newsletters – Using a good provider (not Outlook!)  will enable you to see how many people received your mailing, how many opened it (although this isn’t completely accurate as some people have a preview window which automatically opens the message) and most importantly, the number of clicks back to your selected web pages.

Social Networks – Of course you want to know which networks are bringing the most visitors to your website or blog.  Using (currently) free tools like http://bit.ly/ and http://ow.ly/url/shorten-url (part of the Hootsuite Twitter client) mean you can easily track this.

I hope this has given you some ideas to try out in your social media marketing.  What else have you tried that can be measured and works well?  We’d love you to share by leaving your comments below!

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