One Ridiculously Easy Way to Boost Your Marketing Prowess

If you are running a business and you want it to succeed, let's face the facts: it's essential to promote it. No matter how great your business idea is, you won't be able to grow if nobody knows about what you do. That's why setting aside money for marketing is so important companies today. Allocating money towards marketing allows you to take advantage of a myriad of strategies and platforms, which both get word about your company out to the public - and convince people to become interested sales leads.

Budgeting for Marketing

You only have so much money when it comes to running a business, so how do you know how much of that money should be used for marketing? In a recent survey by Deloitte LLP, the American Marketing Association and the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, studies showed that on average, companies now spend 7.5 percent of their total revenue on marketing (down from 8.5 percent in 2012). Tech companies tend to spend a little more on marketing than the average company -- 13.8 percent. Using such a large percentage of revenue for marketing makes sense, since marketing has proven to be a driver of more revenue. The study showed that marketing was the leading cause of revenue growth at more than 38.4 percent of companies, especially when a large percentage of the budget was devoted to the undertaking.

Why Your Marketing Budget Should Include Digital Advertising

So marketing has been shown to drive revenue, but how do you know what avenues of marketing you should focus on? One important strategy that should be incorporated into your marketing plan is digital advertising.

There are countless ways that people choose to market digitally today. There are inbound digital marketing strategies, like content marketing and social media, which involve creating useful content and disseminating it to the world and ultimately convincing people that you are trustworthy and valuable. There are also outbound digital marketing strategies like pop-up advertising and banners or paid search ads, which show information about your company when people look for related content on search engines.

A well-planned and well executed digital marketing plan can have a big payoff for your company. Here's why:

• Digital Advertising Widens Your Audience. Let's face it -- nearly everyone is spending time online these days. In fact, there are currently nearly 3.6 billion Internet users globally, which means if you advertise online, you have the opportunity to get your company out in front of a lot of people. By placing ads where people spend time, you are upping the chances they get seen.

• Digital Advertising Increases ROI. A study on online advertising by Nielsen revealed that brands can experience a return of three dollars for every one dollar spent on digital advertising. This means that it's a great way to stretch your marketing budget and increase revenue because of your spending.

• Digital Advertising Helps Your Brand's Reputation. Not only does spending money on online ads increase revenue for your company, it also helps shape and grow your brand's image. A study by Nielsen showed that more than one-third of people trust the information they see in online ads (video ads, banners, etc.) and nearly 40 percent of people trust the ads they see in search engines. So, by choosing to allocate dollars in your budget to brand's ads online, you can help build trust in consumers.

Boost Your Advertising Game in Minutes

If you're ready to dominate online advertising, you're in luck. By clicking here, you can take our short, five-minute survey. Then, we'll give you some recommendations that can help you take your digital marketing game to the next level.

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What is Digital Marketing?

You probably think you don't know what we do.  

It is a common lament for partners, parents, and friends of people who do marketing: they just don't understand or can't explain our work.  

This feeling about marketing prevails not because it is actually a strange, formless discipline, but because marketing is so fundamental to the lives of institutions that it feels kind of odd to try to explain what it is and why people do it.

Here is what Brooklyn Strategic means when we say we do marketing:

We help companies and organizations define their missions, and identify the people they need to reach.  Then, we reach those people with beautiful campaigns.

For BStrat, those beautiful campaigns are made of:

1. A Marketing Plan. We facilitate creative working sessions: strategic retreats, best held outside your office. The end product: your new marketing plan, contained in a comprehensive document laying out a step-by-step plan we've developed together.

2. Content. Video, scripts, podcasts, gorgeous images, print design, copy, long-form writing.

3. Advertising. AdWords, digital display, print, outdoor, social media, native advertising.

4. Websites. Timeline development, wireframes, design, development, launch strategy, ongoing support and monitoring.

5. Accountability. Regular reporting on the value of the campaign, ongoing creative engagement.

I started Brooklyn Strategic one year ago, after two decades in digital communications.  In that year we have taken on some or all of these campaign components for organizations like The Energy Storage Association, Allergan, The Campaign for Black Male Achievement, The New York Academy of Sciences, and Deutsch Family Brands, to name just a few.

A few weeks ago, my colleague Patrick Fleury gave me the perfect hardbound notebook -- a monogrammed little number from Shinola (you should get one).  

I'll close with the sketch I made in that notebook today as I chatted with Patrick and prepped this post for you.

So my question now is this:  do you know what we do?  Comments welcome.

Thanks for your time, and welcome to Brooklyn Strategic.  Let's find your audience.