Marketing can be a very complicated but highly necessary part of running a successful business. If you have a background in marketing then you’re very fortunate that you can bring those skills to the table but if it’s not something you’ve mastered it can be a huge learning curve. The good news is that there is lots of useful guidance and information made available by business and marketing experts. Or alternatively, you can outsource your marketing to companies like eventige.

If you decided to go it alone then you should be thinking about how you can ensure that your marketing strategy is effective. One of the biggest mistakes that people make with marketing is investing huge amounts of time on an element of marketing that is already unlikely to work. If you haven’t got experience, then this is a very easy mistake to make. That is why it is important to keep yourself informed on marketing techniques and trends that other businesses have used to great effect.

The first aspect of ensuring you have a good marketing strategy is to become knowledgeable in the broad concepts of marketing. To do this, you can read articles published by experts like Forbes. By keeping up to date with the sales and marketing news they publish, you will get a good understanding of new trends as they emerge. Things change quickly in the marketing world, so setting up a marketing technique that was relevant and effective a few years ago may not be as effective now. So you need to keep an eye on what is happening across the marketing industry.

As an example, if you set up email marketing, then you should be researching the most effective way to create emails. Recent statistics show that by creating personalised content that is targeted by segmenting your email list, you will have a much higher success rate than if you sent out a general email to everybody on your list.

The second big factor in developing an effective marketing strategy is monitoring how effective yours is. You will probably have a pretty good idea of whether your emails or your social media activity is converting into customers but to identify what is specifically working well and what isn’t, you should be closely monitoring each campaign. Most email templates like MailChimp have good data analysis tools you can use. This should help you to make changes to the approach that you are using if it isn’t working particularly well.

Using data is really important so keep an eye on your website traffic and see which campaigns resulted in the most visitors and which ones produced the most conversions.

Another way to evaluate how good your strategy is, is to benchmark against similar companies. Pick a couple of your closest competitors and do some research on their marketing techniques. Check their websites and social media accounts to get an idea of how they are generating leads. You can use that information to your advantage and apply it to your own business.