7 Effective Tactics for Creating a Marketing Dashboard for Small Businesses

Introduction

Small businesses require digital marketing more than larger ones – they need a way to track their brand awareness, marketing efforts, ROI spend etc. A small business must optimise its digital assets to ensure overall business success. While there is no magical marketing strategy or fit available for a small business, there is a way for small businesses to market themselves to achieve a strong customer retention rate smartly. 

As a local or small business, you need to have the correct information available to your audience. Most small businesses think that having a digital presence or investing in marketing is expensive; however, there are ways to optimise your marketing strategy. It’s essential to build a small business marketing dashboard to have a proper marketing strategy. 

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Here are seven effective tactics that your small business can use to build a marketing dashboard that can help it improve brand awareness, build a qualified lead pipeline, and increase conversion rates – 

Benefits of Small Business Marketing Dashboard

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1. Understand Your Audience

One of the biggest mistakes that most small businesses make is that they think they should try to attract a larger gamut of people. This strategy isn’t correct – even for a small business, it’s essential to profile customers. If you look at any large company, you will notice that they deal with an audience niche. As a small business, you will have an advantage. 

Understand the audience you want to cater to, and then deep dive into their problems, pain points, triggers etc. Find out how this audience arrives at a decision when making purchase-related decisions, and accordingly craft email campaigns that lead to conversions. 

2. Focus on Your Value

What’s the difference between your competitors and your business? Why should a customer come to you instead of going to your competitor? What is the one reason to compel a customer to purchase products from you? This is where your value proposition lies. Whether big or small, every business has a value proposition that differentiates it from its competitors in the same space. Your business can reach prospects and convince them to deal with your business. One of the easiest ways to develop your value proposition is by elaborating your USP in the market – focus on what you can provide your customers better than others in the industry to make a compelling argument.

3. Tunnel Vision Objectives

In digital marketing, you will notice that every business gets swayed in different directions. In other words, there is so much to take care of from a marketing perspective that there is no one-stop solution. However, as tempted as you may be to do it all in one go, you need to have singular goals and focused objectives. It will help you create a focused small business marketing dashboard for your business. 

A great way to do this is by identifying how you can make the most considerable impact. Ask yourself where the blind spots in your business are – why is your growth hindered? Figure out specific performance goals centred around your goals and objectives to achieve those singularly. Once achieved, move to the next goal. This approach will help you extract the benefits of marketing dashboards and streamline them so you can focus on improving specific business areas. 

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4. Capitalise Where You Can

Witnessing ROI is vital for every small business, especially as it scales. The more ROI you get, the more capital you have to invest in your marketing and build a more sustainable model. Instead of focusing on long-term plays like building on your SEO efficiency (something that takes time), focus on short-term plays like using Google Analytics, web analytics, or ads to assess your website. 

5. Focus on Customer Retention

Most businesses are aware that it takes a high acquisition cost to bring a customer on board – in fact, according to HBR, the cost of acquiring a new customer is 5x that of closing an existing customer. In other words, if you have customers, then don’t let them go. Focus your marketing spend on convincing existing customers to make more purchases than finding new customers. 

How can you do this? Identifying opportunities for upselling, repeat purchasing, cross-selling etc. Since your customers have previously purchased, they are aware of the brand and product and have built trust. Focus on providing customers with a great experience, so they find reasons to do business with you again. 

6. Use Promotional Tools

Wondering how much money your business will need to spend merely to get some tools handy to spread the word? Don’t worry! There are many free promotional tools available in the market today. Instead of focusing on purchasing tools to reach your audience, use free promotional tools as and where possible. Remember only to commit to a premium tool if it directly affects your operations and performance. Some practical marketing tools include CRM, SEO, advertising, automation, email drip campaigns, digital asset management, etc. 

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7. Focus on What Works

As a small business, you may have deployed various marketing strategies from time to time. If you have already experimented with some strategies and find that they have been fetching good returns, then pay good attention to the generated data. This information can help you understand what’s working for your business. The data then becomes crucial as you look at increasing outreach and scaling. Instead of focusing on unknown revenue models, it can be an excellent idea for your small business to focus on what’s been working for it and use the proven methods to generate revenue. 

Conclusion

Consider unique solutions to build a customized small business marketing dashboard. It will help you align your business goals in a more specific way.