5 Tips to Better Manage Your Marketing Expenses and Optimize Your Finances

Digital marketing is a fundamental process any growth-oriented company should invest in for expansion and to achieve various goals. Given the fact that digital marketing is significantly less expensive than traditional marketing, but at the same time much more effective, it only stands to reason that you should double down on your digital strategy in order to take your company forward in 2021 and beyond. That said, we can’t pretend that digital marketing does not require a notable financial investment.

For companies operating on a limited budget, digital marketing can quickly drain them of financial resources, especially if you invest in the wrong tactics at the wrong time. Some marketing strategies like content marketing are never wrong, but you could be implementing them in a way that makes your marketing department bleed money. To put a stop to this, you have to start managing your marketing expenses efficiently and effectively.

Let’s take a look at the five tips that will help you optimize your marketing expenses and run a much more cost-effective operation. 

Start with a list of your marketing expenses

First things first, in order to get a hold of your marketing expenses, you have to know exactly how much money you’re investing (or losing) on different marketing tactics, campaigns, and strategies. Your goal is to get a comprehensive overview of your marketing spending, but also to delve deep into each marketing tactic you employ to see how much money it’s wasting and how you can plug each financial leak. 

To start, simply make a list of all the marketing tactics and methods you’re currently implementing in your digital strategy. Each of these tactics should have a set of KPIs that you’re monitoring, and these will tell you whether these tactics are delivering the expected results. You can compare their performance with the amount of money you’re pouring into each tactic to see if it’s creating a positive ROI. 

For example, one of the easiest tactics to monitor is PPC, because you can directly monitor the conversions vs how much you’re spending on keeping the ad campaigns going. If people are clicking on your ads but are not converting, you’re losing money, and that’s telling you that you should either pull the campaign or optimize it for higher conversions.

Set clear and attainable marketing goals

Next, you should revise your current marketing goals, optimize them according to your findings, and work on setting new, more attainable goals in the process. The best way to do this is to implement the SMART approach and create marketing goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. 

For example, your goal might be to increase user engagement on your website, but it’s important to put in the SMART parameters to make it financially sensible. The smart model will help you prioritize your spending, but more importantly, allocate the right amount of financial resources to ensure you reach that goal without going over your budget.

Pay less for marketing with tax deductions

Optimizing your marketing expenses is not just about cutting costs or making better financial projections, it’s about managing your taxes, as well. Yes, taxes play a big role here, and being diligent with your tax planning and knowing how to deduct marketing expenses from your taxes can help you save a lot on expensive marketing and advertising strategies. A good example where this is a popular financial tactic would be a highly competitive market like Australia.

In the Land Down Under, business leaders almost always work with an experienced tax accountant in Sydney to figure out which advertising expenses are tax-deductible to reduce the amount of taxable income they report each year. This means that you’re paying less tax, and it allows you to better allocate your finances for marketing purposes.

Of course, no matter the market you’re operating in, you should work with reliable accountants to minimize your expenditure and optimize your tax spending for maximum financial savings. 

Build a comprehensive marketing budget

Managing taxes is an important part of budgeting in general, and you have to manage your budget carefully if you want your marketing campaigns to produce a positive ROI. Unfortunately, business leaders will oftentimes grossly overestimate or underestimate the financial requirements of certain marketing processes.

This leads to setbacks, budget breaches, and general inefficiency that leads to financial waste. Needless to say, this will prevent you from improving customer experience and converting leads into loyal brand advocates. Instead of wasting money, make sure to download a comprehensive marketing budget template, do your research, and start allocating the right amounts to each tactic and process. 

Monitor the right data and optimize expenses

Finally, understand that you can’t optimize or eliminate extraneous expenses if you don’t constantly monitor the performance of your campaigns and make adjustments as you go along. This is not a set-it-and-forget-it type of deal, and it’s important to stay on top of your spending, collect the relevant data, and keep optimizing your investments.

Make sure to use a centralized dashboard where you can oversee all your KPIs and goals, and monitor how much you’re spending on each marketing tactic vs how much you’re gaining in the short, mid, and long term. 

Over to you

Digital marketing is essential for business success, but it can only yield the desired results if you optimize your spending and allocate finances towards the right tactics and strategies. Be sure to use these tips to better manage your marketing expenses and keep your company financially stable no matter which marketing and advertising tactics you invest in 2021.

How to Use Bonuses to Increase Your Conversion Rate

Last year on Cyber Monday, customers spent $9.4 billion online. The Cyber 5 online sales, these are the five days across the Thanksgiving Weekend, accounted for $28.5 billion in sales. It’s a lot of money, so it shouldn’t be surprising that in the US, the top shopping days make up 45% of annual holiday sales.

The reason people go so crazy - shoppers want a bargain.

A flash sale is sure to draw in crowds of shoppers. Bonuses are just as effective. In this article, I’ll show you how to use bonuses to boost your sales. Let’s start with the very basics.

What are Bonuses & Why Should You Use Them

You see bonuses everywhere. When you go to the supermarket and see a bottle of hand lotion with a free smaller bottle from the same brand, you’re looking at a bonus. When you see your usual razor blades packaged with some aftershave at a heavily discounted price, you’re also looking at a bonus.

Bonuses are used all the time by digital marketers to help push undecided customers into making a purchase. Here’s an example from a sales page for a digital marketing product.

A study conducted by the University of Minnesota found that shoppers preferred getting bonus items over discounts. They determined that a 33% discount didn’t have the same resonance among customers as getting 50% more of a product and that offering, 50% more lotion, resulted in a 73% jump in sales. 

Bonuses work, they discovered, because most shoppers couldn’t be bothered to compute how much they were going to save. After all, not everyone can do fractions on the fly.

They also discovered people associate more value with the words “more” and “free” compared to “less.” In other words, they wanted to get more than what they paid for instead of paying less for the same thing. As you can see from the example above, the difference between a bonus and a sale comes down to positioning. Fundamentally, with a sale or a bonus, the offer is often the same.

Understanding the Customer Persona

I like to compare bonuses to making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It’s not going to be a sandwich if it doesn’t have a top slice of bread, a layer of peanut butter, a layer of jelly, and a bottom slice. I mean, I’m partial to open-faced sandwiches, but you get the picture.

Now, think of your promotion as the very same sandwich. Let’s say your main product is a timesheet app. The peanut butter and jelly layers are the main product that you’re selling. You can also think of the main product as just the peanut butter or the jelly, depending on which spread you like better. The bonuses you’re offering are the slices of bread. What can you offer as a bonus to entice customers to sign up for it?

More often than not, your bonuses should be related to your main product. Now, if you’re a hardcore PB&J sandwich fan, you’ll leave the Wonderbread on the shelf and get a couple of slices of pumpernickel bread, which in my opinion, is the only bread that makes a half-decent sandwich.

The bonuses you create should align with the pain points your customers face. To create effective bonuses, you need to understand your potential customers. A well-defined customer persona will help you identify those pain points and where you can add value.

Taking the timesheet app as an example, here are some possible bonuses for a potential customer.

Notice how the possible bonuses add value to a potential customer and address problems they are likely to face. I cannot reiterate this often enough: a good bonus must pair well with your main product.

How to Come Up with a Relevant Offer

Theoretically, you can offer anything in your product line as a bonus (or team up with another business). However, you should ask yourself, Does it make sense to offer it as a bonus?

Following our sandwich analogy earlier: does your bonus make your sandwich taste great, or will it go better with some other sandwich? I suppose some people add mustard to their PB&J. It’s not my thing, and I think a lot of people will agree with me. So let’s stick to what most people like, shall we?

The easiest thing to offer as a bonus is a free complimentary product or service. For example, if you are running an e-commerce store, you might decide to run a three for two offer. Or, the least expensive thing you purchase is free or comes at a discounted price. These types of offers can help either increase the amount a consumer spends or increase the conversion rate on their existing purchase.

Giving away a product for free has its downsides. If you give away a product that costs you money, that will reduce your profit margins. It might be worth it for the increased sales. It's also a good way to get rid of surplus stock. However, you'll need to make that decision on a case by case basis.

You can add a bonus that has a one-time cost of course. In some niches, PLR products offer you a way to get around this. Some marketplaces offer white label software, eBooks, website themes, and more that you can purchase and then giveaway with an offer. Alternatively, you could make a course, white paper, or information product to give away with an offer.

How to Sell Your Bonus

We’ve covered how to come up with a suitable bonus for an offer. Now, I want to discuss how to position your bonus. This is important. To really boost your sales, you need to sell your bonus, not just give it to them.

Earlier in this article, I showed you an example bonus product from a sales page for a digital software product. Here’s another example from that page.

There are a couple of things I want to highlight the way the bonus is positioned:

• There’s a monetary value attached to the offer (really important)

• A short description of the product, how it offers value, and how it relates to the product

• The bonus appears before the buy button

Giving the bonus a monetary value, and providing it before the buy button will help increase sales.

Of course, this assumes people are already on the sales page. If you were funneling people to an offer, say via a webinar or email campaign, you might create a landing page with bonuses that people would see before they arrive on the sales page.

Here’s an example of how you could stack bonuses together on a squeeze page.

You should add a video before the bonuses to provide context. This helps people make the link between the bonuses on offer, and the product they are thinking about purchasing.

Finally, you can add an element of pressure by offering a limited time bonus. This will create a sense of urgency to your offer, which will help boost sales.

Conclusion

Bonuses are a proven way to boost sales. In this guide, I showed you how to create a relevant offer with bonuses that would interest your audience. Your bonuses should always be something your audience will appreciate. Be careful not to fall into the trap of offering something totally unrelated to your main product. It should ideally be something that adds value to your product.

Finally, make sure to sell your bonus. Give your bonus a financial value, so they know what they are getting. You can even stack bonuses together until it gets to the point where you have a “no brainer offer.” When you have the perfect offer, your customers won’t be able to stop themselves from making a purchase.

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Strategic Ways to Improve your E-commerce Store’s Performance

Striving to become “the most customer-centric company on Earth,” Amazon has set the bar high for smaller e-commerce brands.

Today, shoppers expect online retail brands to provide exceptional customer service, create amazing content, and understand their specific needs and preferences. They are even ready to pay more for relevant deals and products.

So, apart from competitive prices, what techniques should you use to improve your e-commerce store’s performance?

Keep your Site Easily Navigable

Many customers will abandon your website if it is difficult to navigate through. To avoid that, ensure your visitors can find the right products and purchase them effortlessly.

Start by optimizing your navigation menu. Reduce the number of categories and subcategories. Instead of traditional drop-down menus, consider using hamburger navigation bars that will save you lots of space. They bring all your links to a single place and perform great both on desktop and mobile devices.

Apart from a navigation bar, add search boxes and filtering options that will help those customers find specific products and brands.

Add internal links to help customers explore new content.

Show breadcrumbs to help visitors understand where they are while browsing through your site

Provide Exceptional Customer Service

With so many brands in your industry, you need to give your customers a good reason to purchase from you. Before making buying decisions, customers will compare different online stores, their services, products, prices, etc.

Apart from amazing website design and top-quality products, seamless customer service will help you stand out in the competitive market. According to research, 1 in 3 customers would not purchase from you again after a negative experience with your brand, while over 90% of them would never come back after two negative experiences.

To provide exceptional customer support, offer real-time feedback across multiple channels. Provide live chat options. Once your customer support representatives clock off, let customers chat with your website or social media chatbot that provides relevant feedback 24/7. You should also have a detailed knowledge base and an FAQ section for users that prefer self-service.

Keep Communications Transparent

E-commerce logistics plays an important role in increasing customer satisfaction. If a customer sees a product on your website, adds it to the shopping cart, spends time filling out the form, and then sees that the product is temporarily out of stock, they will probably leave your site frustrated. The same applies to delivery services. The abovementioned study says that half of the customers believe that retailers are responsible for product delays, while 74% of them say that late deliveries harm brand perceptions.

That is why you need to keep your communications with customers transparent. Let customers track their package. Before purchasing from you, inform them about the estimated delivery date. Show how many items there are in your stock. Amazon does this for every product on its site. If there are any shipping problems, keep customers updated and provide refunds.

Sure, to do any of that, you will first need to optimize your manufacturing and inventory management processes. Keeping track of your materials, orders, inventory, and sales can be complex if you are still entering data manually into spreadsheets. This is where you could use cloud-based manufacturing software and centralize these activities under a single platform.

Personalize User Experiences

Surveys show that 62% of online customers expect to get personalized offers. For them, one-size-fits-all offers do not work anymore. There are numerous ways to tailor your e-commerce brand messaging to your customers’ specific needs:

• Track customers’ geolocation, browsing patterns, and historical purchases to offer more relevant products and services.

• Segment your emails. When a customer signs up for your newsletter list, ask them about what kind of products, promotions, and content they are interested in. Based on their preferences, segment customers into relevant groups and send the promotions they care about.

• Personalize user experiences on your website. Use AI chatbots to personalize interactions with customers and recommend relevant products. Sephora even lets users upload their photos to try out different makeup products and choose the right one.

Create Awesome Content

In the digital marketing landscape, content creation is critical. It lets you position yourself as an authoritative online resource, engage users, and deliver value to them.

Start by creating informative, unique, and data-backed articles. Produce infographics, whitepapers, comprehensive how-to guides, and tutorials to solve your customers’ problems and inform them about the latest industry trends.

Focus on visual content. Remember that your customers cannot see or feel your products. Take photos of products from multiple angles. Use 360-degree videos that will make your products even more appealing. Video content, such as unboxing videos or tutorials, is always great, as it evokes emotions in users, engages them, and inspires brand loyalty.

Finally, focus on user-generated content. Make testimonial videos and let your satisfied customers tell your story. Case studies will explain what problems your customers faced and how they solved them using your products.

Conclusions

Today’s e-commerce landscape has become increasingly customer-centric. Precisely because of that, you should optimize your website with your shoppers’ needs in mind. And, these tactics may serve as your solid starting point.

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How AI in Marketing Leading to Better Conversions

In this Digital Era in which we are living, People have unlimited access to information like brand value, products, and services. A conventional meaning of Artificial Intelligence (AI) might be the capacity of innovation to learn and associate with human procedures. To this definition, we include the exceptionally favorable position provided by the speed at which information can be analyzed and processed. Truth be told, AI is experiencing many procedures connected to innovation and digital marketing is one of them: Artificial Intelligence and digital marketing are shaping a relentless pair.

Role of Artificial Intelligence in Digital Marketing

Artificial intelligence permits numerous procedures to be a lot quicker and progressively proficient, through the improvement of programming and machines that associate with one another. That is the reason Artificial Intelligence and digital marketing go connected at the hip.

In digital marketing, and away from AI usefulness would be the capacity to investigate great many client information. From this data analysis, it turns out to be significantly more practical to foresee practices and improve the nature of the client experience.

How AI increases Conversation Rates?

Artificial intelligence permits numerous procedures to be a lot quicker and progressively proficient, through the improvement of programming and machines that associate with one another. That is the reason Artificial Intelligence and digital marketing go connected at the hip.

In digital marketing, and away from AI usefulness would be the capacity to investigate great many client information. From this analysis, it turns out to be significantly more practical to foresee practices and improve the nature of the client experience. Read how AI can help in your social media marketing in 2020

Analyzing clients

There are AI items that are extraordinarily intended to more readily get crowds. They can comprehend the interests of the crowd, just as to foresee their responses. These procedures are estimated rapidly, to such an extent that if a human brain needed to break down information than AI programming, it would invest unquestionably more energy in the activity. That is what it's everything about: Through information, which are the fingerprints left by individuals on the internet, AI-based programming can play out various exercises identified with that conduct. The test is for the marketing ventures to utilize that information so as to give clients what they need when they need it.

Content creation

In spite of the fact that AI tools will most likely be unable to make content, for example, sentiment pieces or a digital masterpiece, the facts demonstrate that they are at present fit for making information-based content that they can get to. Simulated intelligence-based software With access to certain data, you will have the option to compose a report and even a report. This has the upside of sparing time as well as fit for making content equipped for pulling in guests to sites. These kinds of activities are equipped for revealing investment funds in time as well as priceless money related assets. In the event that this doesn't persuade you, effectively enormous news offices around the globe are utilizing instruments of this sort to create content. As indicated by certain specialists, these contents don't contrast based on what is composed of an individual.

Smart Email marketing

Artificial intelligence is an innovation that imitates human intellectual capacities, for example, learning and thinking, for business purposes, including email marketing. Through artificial intelligence, advertisers can break down a lot of information and computerize procedures to make them progressively effective. In this way, they can actualize the data rapidly and for a huge scope and recognize what sort of emails to send, to whom, how frequently and when. With the help of Best Free Email Services , a combination of AI and Email marketing has become smarter, faster and secured.

Increases client engagement

Generally, email marketing experts needed to do manual tests to locate the correct blend of the subject, email bodies, and pictures for various crowds. This procedure was unwieldy and defenseless to human blunder.

Presently, artificial intelligence advances improve this procedure by rapidly producing content that gives the best chance and income results. This spares a great deal of time for the group and permits working with more blends of components, bringing about progressively powerful emails. You can also send free emails using Free SMTP Server Providers.

Reduces website error pages

Introduction to AI in marketing, also reduces errors which can be triggered on websites sometimes. And hence it reduces client engagement. Whenever a client experiences a web error e.g, Error 404 not found, The AI tries it to fix automatically to eliminate this common Web error or maybe divert it into some smarter way possible. Which doesn’t affect client engagement and conversion rates?

Introduction of chatbots

The chatbots are run on computer programming that takes part in discussions with individuals who utilize a blend of artificial intelligence, mechanized informing and rules dependent on language. While conventional talk applications are frequently overseen by one individual inside the association, overseen by an outsider client care supplier, or a mix of both, AI and chatbots go connected at the hip.

In the event that you browse or buy items or administrations on the web, odds are you've discovered a client support chatbot. You may not have seen, in light of the fact that they are intended to copy genuine associations with online client support delegates. Like conventional talk boxes, they frequently show up when you visit a site just because, and can be shut totally, limited, briefly shut, or limited, contingent upon automatic settings.

With regards to ways chatbots can improve client assistance for organizations, the conceivable outcomes are unfathomable. They empower clients to talk legitimately with the organization for speedy reactions, making it simple for the client and the organization to tackle straightforward client support issues.

Retargeting

With the help of Ai, it allows us to achieve a degree of accuracy never observed in retargeting efforts. For instance, a few clients may react better to an email sent an hour subsequent to leaving the store, while others may improve to have a day or two to consider it. Artificial intelligence makes it conceivable to fragment them fittingly to connect with them at the perfect time and offer them the offer they have to urge them to complete their buy.

AI predicts Purchasing models

Machine learning strategies include the utilization of calculations to "learn" from sets of authentic information, this information the AI can make prescient models. For instance, Customer Journey models dependent on foreseeing practices that depend on specific occasions, for example, client scores dependent on their likelihood of changing over.

Each tool that chips away at Artificial Intelligence has various qualities or qualities. Some are better for drawing in customers, while others are valuable for changing over or reconnecting past customers.

Generate reach to target audiences

Reaching Target audiences include the utilization of the resources or systems, for example, Search Engine Optimization, Inbound marketing, Content marketing, and other strategies that bring visitors to your site and start them on the purchaser's excursion through work processes that are produced and that, appropriately applied, can be utilized at this phase to draw in more guests and give the individuals who go to your site with an additionally captivating encounter.

Updated with the trend

Big data is a variable that you can gauge very well with AI and, right now, can perceive its preferences and distinguish what is starting to be a trend. Artificial intelligence starts to be a ground-breaking link in any digital marketing procedure.

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5 Ways a New Online Store Can Get Ahead in Marketing

For many budding entrepreneurs, establishing an online store is considered a no brainer.

The internet is a fantastic place, rife with business opportunities, offering low start-up costs and an instantaneous global reach.

However, a few years on from the digital revolution, the online landscape is looking a little saturated -- with big brands, media influencers, and other new stores all scrapping for attention -- maintaining a strong presence online is no mean feat.

While establishing a foothold may be harder than ever, with the right approach, climbing the ladder has never reaped higher rewards.

There remains no real distance separating you and your consumers, just a search engine and a click of a mouse. If you have a will to sell and a strong plan in place; your audience is there, waiting for you to make the right moves.

Here are 5 effective tactics that new online stores should take to get ahead in marketing:

Use Influencers

Social media has changed the way we perceive the world and is one of the single largest ways the internet has shaped modern culture. So, of course, tapping into this unending resource should be high up in the marketing strategy of any successful business.

Influencers, in particular, are a valuable commodity that helps bridge the gap between a store and its consumers. Current buying practices stem from a decision-making ecosystem, meaning, we are influenced by recommendations in a trusted community.

Remember, the influencer is the consumer’s friend, not a faceless company with an agenda.

A recommendation from an influencer is a powerful opportunity, as they are the figureheads of an existing community. Word travels to numerous others who want to share their same values (giving reliability and notoriety to your new store).

Working with an influencer will humanize your brand, making consumers more likely to approach you. Fortunately for new businesses, smaller influencers tend to be in the same scrap for attention, so working with each other can be an all-round beneficial practice.

Be an expert by creating a blog

Creating content is a key and effective marketing tool for a developing brand, especially if you know who and what to target.

Therefore, integrating a blog, that is aimed towards your particular niche is one of the best things a new store can do. As you are establishing yourself as a reliable source of information about the products or services you sell. 

To observe success through utilizing this strategy you’ll need to maintain a consistent level of output and obvious value in what you are writing.

Aim content at people you want to attract to your store, be sharp, snappy and palatable for online readers. People do not generally have the time to wade through long essays, best to stick to interesting, digestible snippets of information.

Be aware of SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to the actions taken to raise the position of a website in search engine rankings. This creates a higher rate of organic traffic regularly traveling through a site.

This, in many ways, is the core of any online marketing technique and is applicable to all businesses -- young or old, large or small. For an online store, this means that more people are naturally finding you online on a day to day basis.

Helpful tools such as Google Lighthouse can be used to aid your understanding of how well your website is performing. The more effective your SEO, the greater your overall marketing strategies will perform.

Explore every channel

As with all businesses it is important to take note and understand trends in the marketplace. Ecommerce is certainly not a predictable market, making it vital to cover every avenue.

For example, we are witnessing a huge swing to phone usage. It has been projected that in 2021, over 50% of e-commerce sales will be made on a handheld device. This illustrates that buying habits are developing rapidly alongside technology, to be successful a business must know how to keep up.

Social media is a fantastic way to start molding your channels into a functional multi-use platform, directly connecting you with the customer at the point of sale. Over time you will begin to pick the trends and tactics that work best for you.

For mobile shoppers, though, digital drives the customer experience. For this reason, using one platform to manage sales across all channels (store, marketplaces, and social) is a must. Exploring every channel and allowing potential customers to reach out on their terms channel will help new stores stand out in crowded markets.

Find brands to collaborate with

As discussed, the online world is full of competitors, but sometimes it can be incredibly effective to work with other companies.

Find a company that fits alongside your work, which does not directly compete or affiliate with existing competitors. 

Reaching out for cross-promotions extends your store's sphere of influence. Suppose your company sourced and sold pre-loved collectible sneakers, and you found another company that restored, cleaned and customized sneakers - this would provide easy and compatible opportunities for you to work together for mutual benefit.

For example, work together on Interbrand promotions and promote them on your social media pages. You could also write blogs on one another’s websites about each other’s expertise.

The possibilities of cross-promotion are endless, go get creative. Given the right brands, it can be a sure recipe for success.

Setting up a successful new online store is tricky business nowadays and can feel daunting to many professionals.

However, implementing these 5 strategies will give you and your new store the best chance to reap the huge rewards the e-commerce industry can offer.

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