As a month for New Year resolutions and detox, now is as good a time as any to re-examine your marketing strategy and set some realistic objectives. To give you a head start, we’ve looked at some of the trends we expect to see in 2013 and how growing businesses can make the most of them. 
1. Address the second screen phenomenon
Traditionally, consumers have only focused on one form of media at any specific time. Today, it’s not uncommon to be watching the television while looking at your smartphone – a trend known as the second screen phenomenon. The smartphone could be used to supplement content from the television (checking reactions on Twitter or finding out information on an actor), or for a completely separate activity.
An interesting article from Fourth Source discusses how companies should design and optimise their products and marketing initiatives to respond to this phenomenon. For example, when using traditional marketing and advertising channels such as TV and outdoor advertising, it’s a good idea to combine and incorporate direct ways for customers to find out more online. Using QR codes or providing links to websites, twitter feeds or Facebook groups are all good tactics to encourage customers further along the sales process. However, businesses need to make sure that they are prepared for the potential influx in visitors to their website and that it’s mobile optimised. With multiple digital channels now emerging, you need to integrate them and provide a seamless experience for the customer.
2. Understand and use customer data
Your business may already have valuable customer data such as addresses, contact information, buying habits or even where they are located when making purchases. However, are you doing all you can to use this data to best effect?
There are several benefits to understanding customer data. It will allow you to: cross-sell opportunities at lower costs to loyal customers, improve customer satisfaction and retention, identify the best and most profitable clients and enhance company marketing and sales practices.
Once you have identified a bank of customer data it will be important to look for trends. For example, identify who is buying the most. Try breaking it down by demographics and map this against buying habits. There are comprehensive tools to gain these key insights which are gold dust to any campaign, allowing you to make improvements and draw upon successes for the future. Using data to better target email campaigns by making them more personal is also critical; one size does not fit all. You’ll see a big difference if you use data to group customers by certain characteristics such as age and purchase frequency and send tailored emails to each. We’ve found some useful tips on Marketing Donut which address how to collect, understand and act on customer data and there are also many tools available to support this.
3. Measure the success of your website and your social media campaigns
If they aren’t already, this year SMEs really need to be looking at the impact of their digital marketing campaigns to find out what is working and what isn’t and what channels customers are using most. You might be more concerned about throwing all your resources into doing marketing activity itself, but evaluation will indicate where you need to spend time and money to make your venture a success.
To do this, there are free tools available such as Google analytics which can help you understand the volume of traffic and the behaviour of users on your site. You should also be monitoring what people are saying about your brand on social media using tools such as Twilert or Facebook, along with searching regularly on Google and blogs, while responding and engaging with customers in an appropriate way.
Hopefully, this gives you some food for thought, but we welcome any further suggestions to add to this in our comment section below!
The post How To Maximise Your Small Business Marketing In 2013 appeared first on pbSmart™ Essentials.