How to get smart with your marketing

Now more than ever there are a huge number of different ways to market your business. In this blog post I'm going to discuss a few ideas that can give you a real insight into the effectiveness of your marketing and will allow you to invest in the methods that are working and review the ones that aren't.

Knowledge is power

Thanks to the progress that has been made online in recent years, there are now a great selection of tools available that can give insight into a company's marketing activities. Whether you're communicating with your audience via printed material, email or online marketing, there are now some great tricks that can be used to measure how well your marketing is working and even to deliver personalised messages when your customers respond.

Email Marketing

Whether it's a newsletter, case study, special offer or announcement, email marketing is a great way for a company to get a message out to its audience in a powerful and cost effective way. One of the advantages of email marketing is that it can give you a huge amount of information about the reaction to your marketing. This could be something as simple as the percentage of people that opened your email, all the way through to which people clicked on a certain link or forwarded your email to a friend. Used intelligently, this means you can place a number of messages and links within your marketing and gauge your audiences interest in each item by monitoring the number of clicks.

Trackable Links

Using free services such as bit.ly, it's now possible to create links that can record how many times they are clicked. This can give companies a real insight into which items of their marketing are being read, and more importantly, which are being acted upon. As an example of how this could be used, let's imagine that a company is placing an advertisement in two magazines. Using this technique, they could create a different link for each magazine, enabling them to see which advert creates more clicks to their website.

QR Codes

The growing use of QR Codes (or Quick Response Code to use its full name) gives even more opportunities for companies to get smart with their marketing. QR codes mean that rather than a customer having to remember a website address, or to type the web address into their smartphone, they can now simply scan the code and be taken straight to the website. This comes into its own when used in conjunction with trackable links, as it means users have the convenience of simply scanning the code, and companies have the benefit of knowing which QR codes have been scanned and how many times that's taken place.

Tailored landing pages

The icing on the cake here is when companies create tailored landing pages. Using specified links, a customer can be taken to a dedicated page on the companies website, meaning they have the opportunity to give a personalised message, focus on a particularly relevant product or aspect of their service and even give special offers tailored to the audience.

Given the fact that these amazing (and free) technologies are now available, the old saying about not knowing which half of your marketing is wasted needn't be true any longer. Using a combination of the techniques outlined above, companies can now get really smart about their marketing, enabling them to focus their efforts on methods that really work.

We'd love to hear your feedback on the techniques mentioned above. Do you have experience of some great marketing? Have you been flattered by marketing messages or web pages tailored just to you? If so, why not share your experience using the comments form below.