3 Steps to Maximizing Your Marketing Dollars

Is your marketing budget tight, with little chance of increasing over the next year? Are you expected to do more with less? Are you challenged to prove return on investment to justify your activities? If this is the case, well, you’re not alone.

To help retailers compete with ever-shrinking marketing budgets, I've compiled a list of three crucial elements for online retail marketing campaigns to run successfully, with accurate tracking of the effectiveness of marketing dollars. It includes the following:

1. Create an integrated approach. A true integrated marketing campaign will have a cohesive, 360° plan that combines search engine optimization (SEO), paid search (PPC), usability, social media and analytics so that all areas are working together to achieve the same goals.

It's only through an integrated approach that you can gain efficiencies and share learnings across platforms. Top performing keywords from your PPC campaigns can be integrated into your SEO efforts, for example. These key terms are not only relevant to user searches, but they're the terms on which users are taking action. Thus it follows that you should be optimizing your website content with these same keywords to enhance and continue the conversion process.

Also, by leveraging multiple analytics platforms and configuring them to share data with one another, you can see the full purchase funnel from where potential customers start to when a sale is completed. Tie your analytics platform to your CRM tool to your social media monitoring tool, and so on.

With the correct tracking in place, you can begin to get visibility into which marketing efforts are working online and offline. More specifically, you can determine which keywords, content and marketing initiatives directly result in sales, helping you to focus your resources and priorities accordingly.

2. Act based on data. With all of the tools marketers have at their disposal today, it would be foolish of them to make any decisions that don't stem directly from the numbers themselves. If you're correctly tracking and monitoring your data, it will be possible for you to analyze the trends and seasonality of your business — which efforts are having a positive effect, what results you should be concerned about, which areas require your resources, and in what priority.

There are three important items of note when you're driving your business decisions this way:

• ensure you’re tracking correctly;
• invest in tools as necessary; and
• apply deep analysis to your data.

3. Test, test, test. From A/B and multivariate testing of your website architecture to ad copy testing within PPC campaigns, all approaches can be tested, monitored, changed or enhanced if necessary. Just ensure you've clearly stated your goals and established consistent criteria for determining the winner.

Marketers may think they know what’s right for their businesses, customers and websites, but the truth is each person within your company may have a slightly different opinion as to what's “right.” Testing takes the guesswork out of your strategy, allowing you to make definitive decisions that will yield the best results for your business.

Thad Kahlow is CEO of BusinessOnLine, an interactive marketing agency. Reach Thad at thad.kahlow@businessol.com.