Train Your Marketing Strategy Like You Train Your Employees

A great marketing campaign doesn't just happen. It takes time and effort to get it just right. If you're searching for the perfect balance between ad spend and conversion, experimentation is key. Make great things happen by combining the individual components that work best for you, and you can double and even triple your conversion rate. Here's how.

Know Your Audience

Who's buying what you're selling? Do you know the average age of your target consumer? Do you know if they're male or female? What are their interests? Are they work-at-home-moms or international CEOs? All of this is vital information that you need to have to market your products or services successfully, but how in the world do you come by this information?The answer lies in analytics. By using analytics, or the collection of data for assumptive purposes, you can learn a lot about the people who are buying your products. In a brick-and-mortar setting, this could be as simple as encouraging guests to fill out simple surveys to earn coupons toward purchases. Online, it's as easy as installing analytical software that tracks the sites your visitors are coming in from, the keywords they're using to find your landing page, and which pages of your website they're viewing, how long and which links they're clicking. Analytics can track where your viewers go after visiting your online address as well. Using this information, you can form educated opinions on their interests and buying habits.

Follow Your Consumers Home

Once you understand where your target audience lives online, you can follow them there and engage them with quality content that draws them in. Most of the time, this means spending ad money on social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram. These could be ads that run in their timelines or alongside the page as their scrolling. They could be live streams you post on your own social media page to give insight into your brand. This is where it's especially useful to know the specifics of the audience you're targeting. According to the Pew Research Center:

• 18- to 24-year-olds gravitate toward Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter, in that order.
• It's mostly women using Pinterest.
• College graduates and higher-income Americans are drawn to Linked In.
• The Latino demographic in the United States prefer WhatsApp.
• Older Americans, those over the age of 65, use less social media, but their platforms of choice are Facebook and YouTube.

Spy on Your Neighbors

It never hurts to do a little sleuthing to see what your most successful competitors are up to. What does their website look like? What colors do they use online? What sort of deals are they offering and what types of payment do they accept? Are you keeping up? Is your site mobile-friendly to display well on smartphones? Are you set up to accept non-traditional forms of payment such as Venmo, Google Wallet and Apple Pay? If not, your competitors may already have the one-up on you.

Master the Art of Newsletter Writing

You should never underestimate the power of a traditional email campaign either. Newsletters, when timely and engaging, are great tools for coaxing conversions. There are rules to follow when crafting a business newsletter, however. It may take time and more than one attempt to get it right.

• Be personal. Aim for engagement, not sales. You want consumers to look forward to seeing your newsletter in their inbox, so make reading it worth their while.
• Offer incentives for people to open your newsletter. This could include discount codes, press releases of exciting things to come, or fun, insider information to which the general public isn't privy.
• Remember to add your links. A newsletter is a tool for conversion. This means you must put in links to send readers where you want them to go. Maybe you're linking to your new line of summer merchandise. Or possibly, there's a landing page where they can book a consultation. Make it easy for readers to find and to click, and make sure the link takes them directly to the page you're promoting.