An excellent marketing plan can get you to the moon in the business world. It seems easy, but it isn't.

Marketing is a very involved process, especially in the digital age. The old marketing avenues aren't as beneficial, and new ones have to be paid attention to. With that said, you can move mountains if you stick to simple formulas.

We're going to cover a few moves you can make to achieve a high level of marketing optimization. In other words, your efforts won't be in vain, you'll know what needs to be done, and you'll see great results.

Let's get started.

Steps for Marketing Optimization

Just like anything else, the term "business" can rarely cover what it intends to. So, if our marketing strategy doesn't hit the nail on the head for you and your business, we hope that there's at least something you can take from our guide.

Generally, though, most of the things we'll be talking about today can apply to your business. All businesses share common threads, and when you're marketing online, you're going to cover some of the same ground as most businesses out there.

We'll discuss some of the preparatory things to consider before you implement your marketing plan. It's important to have a clear idea of your goals and strategies before you begin so as to not waste time or money.

Take some notes, brainstorm our ideas in relation to yours, and get moving on your marketing optimization!

1. Determine Your Goal

This one can be broken down a little bit as well. Sure, your goal is to be successful. To make money and pay your employees.

What is the action that a customer has to take to get into your store, make a download on your site, or get attracted to a product that you're pushing? Where do they need to end up, and what do you have to do to get them there.

If your goal is to sell t-shirts, you should be thinking about the thing the user does right before they make a purchase. The customer in that position is theoretically your goal. Sure, everyone wants to get sales, but the idea of "selling the product" can often distract from what needs to happen in order for sales to occur. 2

2. How Much Do You Expect to Grow?

The growth you want to achieve is extremely important to the entire process of marketing. You need to know your growth goals before you hire someone to work on your marketing, make moves to market yourself, or anything else that involves the scale of your marketing efforts.

If you want to grow a great deal, you have to account for that in your budget and planning. This fact will affect the people you hire and the attitude that you have going into any marketing project.

Optimizing your marketing process requires that you do this thinking early on. If you have an extravagant expectation of your marketing team, you will be very disappointed when they don't meet it. The goal is to have a healthy expectation of how much growth you will see.

Doing this will help you with the budget, staffing, and the scale of each piece of the marketing process.

3. Find Your Target Audience

Pushing a marketing campaign that's based around your own interests and preferences will get you nowhere. You might think that your eye for advertising or sales is supreme, but you have to remember who will be buying your product.

Identify a specific demographic and take time to understand them. Who are the people that already buy your product, and who are the people you want to buy your product? These things will determine huge portions of your marketing campaign.

Doing demographic research allows you to see where you can most effectively place your dollar. You can look at your demographic and see where they're spending the most time online, for example.

Whether they're using Facebook or Instagram is important. What time of day they're most often using these sites is important as well. Honing in on your audience will definitely improve the results you see.

4. Don't Forget Your Day Ones

In many cases, the bulk of your sales are going to come from a small group of people in the long run. These are people that have been buying your product for a while and are supporting your company.

A marketing campaign could open you up to a huge demographic, one that would diminish your current customers to a small margin. With that said, that sort of growth is unlikely.

The point is, you don't want to sell out your old customers in search of entirely new ones. Doing this could have an extremely negative effect on your business and you'll be scrambling to make up for the losses.

Don't change your brand identity to fly in the faces of your current customers. To be honest, it would be very difficult to do that. If your product has a passionate, sensitive customer base, you should be on your toes a little bit.

For example, your Christian company should not start selling satan dolls because there might be money in it. That would offend nearly all of your customers.

5. Find What Your Customers Want

Not only is it important to find out who your customers are and where they spend their time, but it's also crucial to find out what they're looking for. Unless you're in a foundational product niche, your customers are going to change how they feel about the things they sell.

Groups don't change drastically in a moment, though, they change slowly over time. So, you can keep up with consumer preferences if you take the time to research what they're looking for online, purchasing in stores, and why they're doing these things.

Stay up on your customers' values and preferences and adjust your marketing efforts accordingly. It's essential that you do this, especially in a time where values are shifting a little more rapidly and one event can tarnish specific word use or references.

When something drastic happens on national news, you want to make sure that the language you use is in no way related to a horrible event, for example.

6. Find Your Draw

What makes you special? This is something you've probably harbored over a million times with your business partners.

Use the answer you get in your marketing and make it clear that you know your worth. Additionally, in the context of the marketing campaign, create smaller draws that might bring value to your efforts.

For example, offer discounts for future purchases or "one time only" offers, or something similar. Just try and make an attractive quality that's connected to the offer but separate from the product.

7. Use Search Engine Optimization

Digital marketing is dependent on it, and you should be using it. Search engine optimization is the way to get your site to a point where people are actually aware of it.

No one's going to see what your business is doing if your name doesn't come up in search engine results pages. Search engine optimization is the method of making your site look good for search engine algorithms.

It's a process that's extremely involved and very important. The folks at Falcon Digital Marketing (https://falcondigitalmarketing.com/) have some valuable input when it comes to optimization.

There is a lot you can do to optimize your site on your own, and it's important that you understand the value and process of SEO.

8. Use Social Media

We understand the frustration that social media can cause on a personal level. People are more distracted by their cell phones and less engaged in the real world. Additionally, the web is not a familiar place for many business owners.

Keep in mind, however, that people are using social media when their heads are in their phones. Those sites give you the opportunity to market your product in user feeds.

9. Pay Per Click Marketing

PPC marketing is a form of marketing used in social media and search engines. Because these platforms collect so much demographic data, they're able to pinpoint certain users and demographics to place your ads in front of.

Ads then become useful, as the platforms understand which products users will actually want to buy. Instead of an annoying commercial, your advertisement becomes a welcome piece of a user's social media experience.

10. Make Clear Plans

The final piece to remember is that your process should not be carried out from the hip. You should know when you're going to implement each of your plans, how much they will cost, and why you're doing them.

You should also have expectations on how much work each step in your marketing plan will do for you. Keep up with your plan, watch your metrics, and have faith in yourself to bring your business the growth it deserves.

New to Digital Marketing?

Marketing optimization is a process that requires a decent amount of web and search engine knowledge to carry out. We get that not everyone has time to learn up on social media marketing and search engine optimization.

Explore our site for more information on those subjects, though. Browse around and get a feel for what marketing entails in 2019.