Small Step By Step Marketing Habits For Jaw Dropping Results

Why Small Marketing Habits Daily Matter to Your Bottom Line

Your marketing habits is a strategy that’s practiced by many but perfected by few. In fact, a 2014 study found that only 9 percent of B2B marketers surveyed said that they were very effective at content marketing, while the majority of respondents (41 percent) said that they were only marginally effective. Yikes.

You’ve likely heard that taking small daily actions is the way to experience success in anything you want to do. This is very true for many aspects of life, including your business. The actions that get results are consistent, directly affect your income, and provide value to your audience. Doing the right things each day pays off in more than one way.

Don’t Make It Too Complicated

Making money is not complicated. Almost anyone can do it. Sadly, so many people make it complicated. Even though it’s nice having awesome technology to help you get things done, it’s not required. You don’t need special landing page software, or to worry about complicated algorithms to be successful.

Do Your Money-Making Activities First

Your business cannot exist if you don’t earn money. Therefore, make a list of activities you do in your business that can directly be credited with earning something. Making offers is the fastest way to make money.

Keeping Up with Your Data

The other daily activity that is important to do is to keep up with your data. If you have a CTA, it’s based on something you can measure – make sure you are measuring. If you don’t track and measure, you’re only working on the assumption, and that’s not going to work long term.

Always Be Marketing

You’ve probably heard this before, but you should spend more time marketing than doing anything else in your business. Of course, thankfully, you can outsource a lot of tasks to help you with your marketing. But there isn’t a day that goes by where you shouldn’t be marketing. That may consist of publishing a new article, a white paper, or running a membership drive.

Schedule Everything

To ensure that you do the things you need to do to grow your business and get smarter about marketing, it’s a good idea to use your calendar to schedule everything you are going to do. That way, when you go to work, you simply open your calendar and get started on those tasks. Consistency is the key to success.

This month I’m going to help you develop consistent action when it comes to marketing. This is going to help you grow your business, your income, and your bottom line. Believe it or not, you don’t have to do as much as you think you do to succeed. You simply need to work smarter, not harder.

The Importance of Tracking Sales Data

It may seem like a pain to have to monitor your sales data. This might be true if you’re already making money too because it’s hard even to consider changing things if what you are doing now seems to be working. But what if you could make it work better? When you track your sales data, you can improve even when you are already doing great. Tracking sales data ensures that great sales can be made even better.

The fact is, if you don’t track your sales data, you can’t determine what’s working and what isn’t. You may accidentally choose to stop doing something that is working in favor of something you assume works just because it’s your preference. By tracking and understanding the sales data that you generate, you’ll be able to tweak and modify your campaigns to get even more sales.

To get that information, you may want to track the following:

Sales During a Specific Time Period – There are times when you should track your sales during a specific period. For example, if you’re having a special sale or promotion, is it working? How do those sales during that campaign compare with regular sales during a similar time period?
Sales by Product or Service – Your sales should be tracked individually so that you can figure out what is selling and what is not selling. If you have product C that never sells but product B that sells great, you’ll want to spend more time promoting product B than C.
Sales by Lead Source – If you have affiliates, or you posted a guest post, or a social media link to a product and so forth, which lead source is doing a better job sending sales to your links? If you get tons of clicks every time something is promoted on LinkedIn but no buys, but fewer clicks when you post to Facebook but more buys, you’ll want to adjust your marketing.
Revenue Per Sale – This is an important sales number to know because it informs how much you can afford to spend on promoting that item. You may use the data to decide to add an upsell to a funnel that has lower-than-average revenue per sale.
Returning Customer Sales – Do you know what percentage of your customers buy from you again and again? This is an important figure because if you have a healthy business, you’ll have plenty of returning customer sales. It’s easier and cheaper to keep a happy customer than find a new one.
New Customer Sales – You’ll want to track how many new customers you get for a campaign compared to returning sales. This information can help you increase your lifetime earnings from new customers if you know how to get them to become returning customers.

Depending on the type of business you have, you may have more or fewer opportunities to collect sales data to study. Sales data can inform so many aspects of your marketing efforts in order to take your business to the next level.

What’s Working Right Now?

Once you start tracking and analyzing, to use the data, you must find out what is working right now. Whatever is really working now is the best place to focus on while you learn as much as you can about the small daily actions you can take to grow your business. In fact, all data collection is about one thing: Finding out what works so that you can do more of what works.

If you run Facebook Ads – What are your results so far? Are you getting a return on your investment? If you are, you can confidently do more of those. If you’re not, you should consider not doing any for a while until you know how to do them better or you can hire someone to help. Spend that time on something else that is working.
If you are building a community – Maybe you’re working on building a community on Facebook or another platform that enables you to build conversational groups. Is that working? If your goal is engagement, are you getting any? Are you making more sales via the work you do for that group? If not, you may want to stop devoting as much time to it or change how you’re doing it.
If you’re building a Pinterest strategy – What does the data tell you about your Pinterest activities. Are they getting you more leads, traffic, and sales? If not, what can you change? If so, how can you do more of it?
If you’re engaging in daily blogging – How is that working for you? Can you look at the traffic over time to find out if it’s increasing directly due to your blogging efforts? How about sales? If you’re building but not making sales, do you have CTAs on all your posts? What topics are generating the most engagement, sales, response, and so forth? Can you do more of those?
If you’re active on YouTube.com – If you have been uploading videos to YouTube for a while, how’s that going? Look at the data to determine if that’s helping you get more traffic, leads, and sales – or not. If it is, do more. If not, figure out where you’re missing the mark. What topic of video is doing best? Can you do more of those?
If you’re active in email marketing – Look at the data generated by your autoresponder service to find out which type of email is generating the most opens and then, of those that get opened, which type of email generates the most click-throughs and sales? Whatever is working can be repeated.

One thing to remember is that every single business is slightly different. If you sell physical products versus digital products, there are different ways that you’ll have to keep track of the data to find out what is working and what is not working. For now, find the things that are providing some measure of return on investment for you – that might mean building a following, getting more traffic, building your email list, or making sales.

Are You Split Testing Your Sales Pages?

When people start getting involved with online sales, one of the first things that they make for their product is a sales page. If you are making your own sales pages for your products (or hiring someone), it’s imperative to split test, or test one page against another, to find out what works the best. In fact, one study I read shares why split testing is the best way to stop wasting marketing dollars.

Split testing a sales page is pretty simple with the technology you have available to you today. You don’t even need special landing page software to do it, but there is no mistaking that it does help tremendously by automating some of that process.

What is split testing?

If you don’t know what split testing is, let me catch you up on this idea. A split test is simply testing two almost equal things against each other. So, for a sales page, you might create what you think is the best sales page but then duplicate it and change only one thing that you want to test to see which one works best. That might be changing the headline, the font, a color, an image, or something else. Regardless, it’s only one small thing.

How to split test?

You run your campaign like normal for a week or two using your system, whether that is something like Leadpages or Google AdSense tools, the concept is the same. You can also set up two pages to test on your site, duplicate an advertisement on Facebook, and promote each sales page equally on Facebook Ads to see which works best.

Getting Started

First, without even thinking about split testing, create your most amazing sales page. Create amazing headlines, consider the colors, fonts, and all factors of the sales page from what you know about your audience and your products or services.

Perfect It

After you believe you’ve perfected the page, you may want to find a checklist of items you can include in an effective sales page. Consider which ideas you have not included that you might want to change.

Duplicate It & Update It

Now duplicate the sales page so that it’s identical to the first one. Once you’ve decided what you want to change for the duplicate, go ahead and update it. Then you’ll want to load them both into your system so that you can run the split test.

It’s important to know what your goals are for your sales page. Obviously, since it’s a sales page, you want purchases that do not get returned. With that in mind, you can determine easily which sales page worked best. It’s the sales page that made the most sales. Don’t get mixed up by traffic and hits. The most sales wins this split test.

You can keep changing and testing one against another one if you want to make more changes or try out more changes that might boost sales. The great thing about testing your sales pages is that you will be making money during the test. It might even pay for itself.

Get in the Habit of Including Strong Calls to Action

Everything you publish, whether it’s a sales page, a social media post, or a blog post – it needs to include a strong call to action. Most people will not do anything other than like, or maybe share something they think is interesting, but they’re not going to click through or buy without a call to action. If you want to increase your profit margin automatically, all you need to do is include strong calls to action on anything you publish.

What is a CTA?

A call to action is simply something that tells your ideal audience what to do next. It’s the thing the customer must do in order to get the results they want. A CTA describes what you want the reader or view to do next.

What makes a CTA strong?

To craft a strong call to action, it needs to be designed well, carry the right message, be in the right place so they’ll see it, and it should be something you can test. For example, your CTA needs to be a real action that you can account for. A click, a comment, a like, a share, a purchase – are all trackable using technology. Your CTA needs to be something you can test.

Using Your CTAs

Where you put a CTA totally depends on what platform you’re using and whether it’s a sales page, a blog post, or a social media post or something else entirely. Plus, it matters who your audience is and what they’re expecting to experience. The fact is, if you’re going to publish anything, it needs a CTA. If you are having issues coming up with a CTA, it may be because your content has no reason for existing.

Practice

You’ll want to practice using CTAs so that you grow more accustomed to doing it automatically. Before you post that next article you read, or that cat on the toilet picture, consider what action you want your audience to take next first. Write several CTAs for the one action so that you can schedule it to go out more than once with different CTAs so that the content always looks fresh.

Test & Track

When you create a CTA, you’ll want to note it in a spreadsheet or other record-keeping system so that you can remember to go back and test and track. Did the CTA get people to take the action you wanted them to take? How many times did you promote it and where, and did your CTAs work in those places?

Don’t post even a blog post or a social media update without including a simple CTA. A simple one that you didn’t give much thought to is better than nothing at all. Of course, with practice, testing, and tracking, you’ll be able to improve beyond where you are today. As you see what works and what does not work, you’ll be able to make much better choices for your business that will lead to even more success.

WOW, that’s a lot of information for this week. So go out and create some draw-dropping results.

Small Step By Step Marketing Habits For Jaw Dropping Results