Small Business Blog

Ok, if you’re a regular reader you might have noticed I stopped posting articles on the mimosaPLANET Small Business Blog over the last 4 weeks. Why? Well, I wanted more data for my own selfish reasons to do with time effectiveness of business/marketing strategies. Plus I also wanted to share with you the results of a second blogging frequency test. I mean, if you do a little digging you will find plenty of people that tell you 'the more you blog the more traffic you get'. You will also find plenty of advice stating that 'stopping is bad, because you break with consistency and reliability, thus lose trust. I 99% agree, but I also want to know - what are the real and measurable impacts on traffic and leads generated? Don’t you want to know more about time invested vs reward in regard to blogging for small business?

If you can lower client acquisition cost (the marketing cost per new client in your small business), you have a chance at finding an unlimited marketing budget. Why? Well, it’s all about turning marketing into an investment not an expense. Take a look at what I mean…

If you’re interested to learn what may happen if you stop blogging or if you don’t blog frequently, you might be interested to learn the results from my recent Blogging Frequency Test. Actually, it was more like a total No Online Marketing Activity Test; a 3 month hiatus which removed not just blogging daily from our marketing activities, but social media engagement & email marketing. No blogging, no twitter, no linkedin, no facebook, no email marketing. The online impacts and results are interesting. Let me explain.

When looking to improve your marketing return on investment, you can use an ever increasing range of software systems to help you measure just what is going on in your business. Software systems can be (and should be) a far better option over the manual paper based systems or Excel based systems when recording & reporting on marketing ROI. Below we examine some of the software options available to small businesses.

Now that we have discussed why measuring return on marketing investment is important we can focus on the ‘how to’. First, you must choose which method of recording and reporting to use. Second, you must setup the system. But remember, the benefits will only come from having regular review sessions of the reports you have setup, and most importantly taking effective actions from the information reviewed. So, let’s begin with the details for setting up paper and spreadsheet systems. We’ll look at using software systems in the next article.

I’m going to make an assumption; you’re after ROI (return on investment) when marketing your small business. You might think this is a pretty safe assumption to make however, it always interests me to learn just how many small business owners and marketers just do not know their marketing ROI. Why the heck not?

How to increase your marketing ROI by recording and reporting on quality information. Then selecting the best small business marketing techniques...