Results Matter

Nothing’s Wasted: Position Yourself to Learn from Your Successes and Your Failures

By Courtney S. Dade, CEO, Chief Strategist, CSD Marketing and Consulting, LLC

Digital marketing is the be-all end-all of advertising these days. If you are a small business and you are not marketing your services or products online, you aren’t really marketing at all. After all, that is where all the eyes are.

But proper digital marketing is not about just throwing splashy graphics and cute turns of phrase out on the information highway. It’s about getting results. If you are marketing your products and you have no idea whether your marketing materials are being viewed and read, you are wasting your time and your very precious resources.

But small businesses often lack the know-how to acquire and record the results of their marketing efforts.

That’s where CSD Marketing comes in. We can provide to you cost-effective programs which can alert you to the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, either through click-to-open records or time spent per website visitor. And with those results, you can determine the best way to proceed with new marketing materials. The success of your early efforts will allow you to build a more successful marketing campaign for your next effort.

When resources are limited

Obviously, you want to spend your limited resources wisely. But you also want to be able to determine if you are, in fact, spending your limited resources wisely.

Developing a marketing plan takes time, and time is money. At some point, company leadership must make a determination as to how best to proceed with marketing efforts.

Once you determine your best marketing path, approve the marketing materials, and agree on all of the terminology and content you are going to present in digital form, you take the big step and pronounce that it is go-time. You send the material. You post to social media sites. You add the content to your website. And you wait for the results.

And it is in that waiting that you begin the process of wasting your limited resources, because you have not provided yourself with the tools to determine how well your content and message is being received.

The magic of digital marketing is all in the outcome. No matter how you want to measure the success of your marketing efforts (by clicks, by opens, by sales), you can’t know the level of your success if you have not created a measuring stick to apply to the results.

A conversation with us at CSD Marketing will provide the details for developing a program that can properly and precisely measure the success of your marketing efforts. Think of it as a reassurance that you are spending your limited resources wisely. Without a way to measure the success of your marketing posts and content, you are just whistling in the wind. Perhaps your message gets heard; perhaps not. You will not know for sure.

Finish what you start

At CSD Marketing, our motto is “nothing wasted” and it is our goal to ensure that nothing your company does in an effort to market your services and products is wasted. The only way to do that is to be able to create a program that provides actual measurables – numbers that you can bring to the table with your marketing staff to show what has worked and what has not.

You can create such a system yourself, but doing so effectively again takes time (including the time necessary to learn how to create a system), and time is still money. One conversation with CSD can let you know whether the do-it-yourself approach is the most reliable way to spend your time and resources, or whether you are better off working with professionals who measure marketing efforts for a living.

Because we at CSD Marketing focus solely on supporting start-ups and small-to-medium size businesses, our success is dependent on your success. That is why we take a holistic approach to our work together, with a discussion of your present and future needs. With those parameters set, we can devise a plan that is cost-effective to you, provides you with the information you seek about how your marketing plan is working, and can discuss with you ways to make your marketing plan more effective.

All with an eye toward the result you seek – marketing success without wasting any of your limited resources.