Having a lack of transparency and visibility into your marketing spend and ROI has always been one of the top concerns and challenges for small businesses. We’ve seen the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic only intensify this concern over the past few weeks and that’s not going to change in the months to years ahead. When cash might be in low reserves, having the confidence that you’re not wasting any money is key while you work to adapt your business practices and processes to the new normal that’s emerging.
Let’s discuss why digitizing your small business can help you achieve greater visibility and create transparency of marketing spend and ROI.
4 Critical Challenges to Overcome When You Don’t Digitize Your Small Business
To help you understand the benefits, let’s first look at a few challenges your business has to overcome when it’s not digitized.
- Slow Response Time with New Leads: Prospective customers could experience slow response times and turn to one of your competitors instead
- Customer Concerns Go Ignored: Customer concerns could go ignored long enough to the point where they feel the only way to get your attention is to post a 1-star review of your business on Google.
- Poor Quality Leads: Your pipeline could be filled with low-quality leads, leading to an overworked and inefficient sales team.
- Wasting Money: You could be spending money on the wrong channels, costing you more capital whereas other channels drive better results and a higher ROI but you aren’t aware of it.
Suggested Reading:
- Top 11 Local Marketing Challenges for Small Businesses
- Find Out Where Your Leads and Customers Are Coming From
Digitizing Creates Transparency of Marketing Spend and ROI
By digitizing your business, you’re no longer reliant on physical deposits of information, like a notebook or ledger — which can be easily lost, destroyed, and by definition cannot physically be in two places at the same time.
However, digitizing your business for the sake of doing so is not enough. Not anymore. To improve productivity and create transparency of your marketing spend and ROI, you need to digitize strategically. That means finding the right set of tools and technologies to help your business adapt.
A shared Excel spreadsheet can be great a collaboration tool for keeping your pipeline updated with the latest activities and lead statuses for your sales team, but it’s not efficient. By taking it a step further and using an all-in-one local marketing software, you’re able to collaborate together and leverage A.I. and automation to get the data you need to make better decisions. By digitizing your business, you gain access to the data you need to make critical decisions as you grow your business, no matter where you are at any given time. With your entire online presence plugged into the platform, you are able to see the ROI of your activities whenever you want – whether you and your team are having a virtual meeting or as you’re on-the-go between projects.
A common trap many local businesses fall into is they utilize an individual tool for a very specific purpose – one tool for getting reviews, another tool for managing their website, and another tool for managing their search engine marketing. Digitizing your business in this way can drive up expenses and leave you lost trying to learn a dozen different tools. It’s far more cost-effective and worthwhile to find a tool that can handle all or most aspects of your online presence.
Suggested Reading:
- 5 Actionable Steps to Digitizing Your Business to Become More Productive
- 3 Surefire Local Features that Boost Transparency
Want to learn more?
The Surefire Local Marketing Platform was built to help your business adapt to the new normal. With an all-in-one local marketing platform, you have an operating system to run your marketing on and get the valuable insights you need to grow the business. When you’re able to take action from anywhere, there’s never a time where you aren’t able to instantly know whether or not your marketing activities are generating results.
That’s a degree of transparency few others in the marketing and technology space can match. Request a demo of the Surefire Local Marketing Platform and discover how you can achieve transparency of marketing spend and ROI for your business.
That’s the Surefire Local difference.
