In an age where more and more companies compete for an ever-dwindling attention span, your brand needs to seize a customer’s focus and not let go. Americans face exposure to advertising everywhere they turn. A Media Education Foundation report suggests that by watching television for three to four hours per day, a person will take in 40,000 commercials in the span of a single year. Given that kind of audience, what tools should a marketing team use to stand out from the crowd?
Monitoring and Tracking Metrics
You can put a million ads on the Internet and never get so much as a single sale if they do not properly target a demographic and appeal to a customer. One of the best ways to ensure your advertising effectiveness follows the competition is to use a tracking metric like AdBeat to get a comprehensive picture of the advertising your competitors are using on the Internet and then split up the individual copies to better determine success and failure. At $99 per month, this tool gives you a virtual private eye to be sure that your ads are keeping up with your competitors.
Know What Works on Your Side
How many different marketing strategies has your brand put in place? Instead of tracking each baseline statistic for pay-per-click, SEO, outlinking and affiliate sites on a massive Excel spreadsheet, use a comprehensive calculator to know where you get the best return on your expenditure. The Search Monitor identifies exactly what the Internet thinks of your brand, including its search ranking, click rate and popularity for linking. At $300 per month, it’s a pricey way to know what works, but there’s no better product on the market.
Point-of-Sales Solutions
Any marketing campaign starts with the raw numbers—what products work well and which ones need a shot in the arm. Keep track of sales, inventory and statistics with point-of-sale merchant services for mobile platforms. A point-of-sale system can turn your sales floor into a fluid organism instead of necessitating space and equipment for a purchase, while also tracking the numbers on your best-selling products and those that have not been moving as fast as you’d like. Better still, it keeps the information secure and easy to pull up.
Social Marketing
When it comes to your advertising plan, banking heavily on social media can give you the best bang for your buck if you happen to create viral content.
Know what the social sites and blogosphere think about your brand’s platform pages with Fanpage Karma, an algorithm that tracks the popularity of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter feeds for brands.
See when the best time of day for posting updates is and which updates have proven to be the most popular among your network of friends, followers and contacts.
photo credit: See-ming Lee | cc