Continuous marketing improvement is critical for business.
It’s a long-term strategy that focuses on your marketing tactics, how well they’re performing and how effective they are at bringing in additional revenue. To step up any marketing approach, marketers need to constantly innovate and connect with customers in better, higher-converting ways across all marketing channels.
For many businesses, the first step toward continuous improvement is the realization that more marketing or simply sticking to a marketing schedule is not enough to continuously improve.
The effort of actually doing marketing is table stakes. Continuously improving marketing is going beyond the minimum requirement and stepping toward elevating your business’s performance by building a reliable lead generation system.
Once that difference is realized, businesses should adopt the following methods for enhancing the performance of their marketing.
Three Methods For Continuous Marketing Improvement
1. Measure Leads And Revenue Increases
A key aspect of a reliable lead generation system is not only creating leads, but creating new deals for the sales team. In other words, the leads that are collected make their way through your sales process and turn into new business.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that every lead converts to new business. However, by scoring the leads that are generated, you’ll have a better grasp on how well your marketing is working.
Merely measuring leads might feel good enough, but if those opportunities aren’t converting to closed business then they aren’t actually driving performance.
One key point to remember is that not all marketing methods that generate the most leads are necessarily the methods that generate the most won opportunities. By scoring your leads and then tracking each lead back to its marketing origin, you’ll gain the critical intel you need to make wiser marketing choices moving forward.
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2. Test Audience, Medium And More
A marketing strategist knows how to execute marketing, measure it, and challenge its performance by constantly presenting new things to test. They’re neurotic about attempting to out-perform the current state of your marketing. It’s this passion for optimization that ultimately creates your reliable lead generation system.
When the average marketer or business owner spends money on a marketing campaign that doesn’t work, they often acknowledge that they don’t know if it was the timing, the medium or the message that didn’t work. However, they still cease the campaign.
By adopting a continuous improvement methodology, you’ll recognize that a smaller marketing spend is better so that you can conduct testing, measure performance and then continue the marketing program by making a larger investment in the combination that performed best thus far.
A continuous improvement mindset consciously knows that not all marketing tests will perform, but has the willingness and patience to try multiple combinations and identify what’s working well (and not so well).
3. Challenge Top Performance
When one adopts a continuous improvement methodology, one must realize that the testing and desire to outperform is never truly “done”.
There is always an edge to marketing performance, and by continuously improving marketing a business can get as close to that edge as possible.
One never knows if their marketing is performing the best it can because the market is always changing. And without constant testing, a marketer can’t know if he or she has achieved optimal performance at that given time.
In other words, if your marketing is doing better than it ever has, the continuous improvement mindset recognizes that it’s still possible to outperform the current rate of performance.
