5 No Cost Ways To Dramatically Improve Your Marketing

If you have some time available to improve your marketing, here are 5 things you can do in-house without spending a dime!

1 – Review Your Client Acquisition Sources

Do you know where your clients come from? The results might surprise you when you really break it down. My company recently went through this exercise and it created huge insights and led us to re-prioritize our marketing activities.

Here’s how we did it:

• We exported all of our client billing summaries from our bookkeeping software to an excel file
• We ordered the customer summaries according to revenue
• We added two columns for “acquisition sources” where we could fill in the marketing or other source that brought the client to us.
• We filled in these acquisition sources for our top 50 clients and then summarized revenues by source.

The reason we used two marketing sources is that our biggest single source is referrals, so we also wanted to add the initial acquisition source of the referrer to fully account for its value.

Going through this exercise led us to discover a very productive acquisition source we weren’t addressing through our marketing (we are now!).

What will you find?

2 – Review & Renew Your Customer Target

Most companies have identified who they are targeting and some even have in depth “personas” created. Reviewing these targets immediately after looking at your top client list when reviewing acquisition sources is a great idea.

Have you been making assumptions about your target? Should you mix it up a bit? Perhaps there’s a type of client who you haven’t been targeting but should be!

3 – Review Your Marketing Plan

With a renewed understanding of acquisition sources and targets, does your marketing plan make sense strategically? Simply put, do your planned activities match your best acquisition sources & targets?

In our case, going through this exercise lead us to put more emphasis on inbound marketing and stop some of our Social Media Marketing efforts entirely.

4 – Improve Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

While SEO can be a bit intimidating, most of it is based on hard work rather than technical brilliance. If you have time on your hands, you’ll definitely want to review your “Google Organic” traffic stats and trends in your Google Analytics account. You’ll also want to do a “self-audit” on your site and then get to work on making improvements.

Moz.com offers a great Beginners Guide to SEO.

For a simple guide to auditing your site and making some improvements, you can check out the recording of our recent DIY SEO Audit webinar.

5 – Conversion Optimization

At its simplest, conversion optimization simply means making sure that visitors to your website are presented with clear and persuasive opportunities to take the appropriate next step for the page they are on.

For instance, if someone is on your home page, are your top service areas presented clearly on the page so they can get to them in one click? Do you have the right “call to action” on each page? If you have a form for them to fill out, is it succinct and does it avoid asking for unnecessary info?

Conversion optimization is really about understanding your customer and making sure your website meets their needs, which can result in dramatically better results.

For an overview of how to optimize your site for better conversion, see our recent DIY Conversion Optimization webinar recording.