By Pete Winter

8 Revenue Performance Management for Small Business (Part 2)

1. Harness the power of the web

Today, the internet is one of the most crucial promotional platforms for business owners. Getting your internet presence right for effective revenue performance management covers a range of areas:

Business web design: Having a well designed website goes far beyond cosmetic purposes. You need to be able to provide your web visitors with good navigation tools through intuitive site organisation.

SEO: Thorough keyword research that focuses in on highly specific concepts and search terms makes a world of difference. This includes using keywords conversationally throughout your site, but also carefully considering the keywords you use in your page titles and sub-headings.

Geo-targeting: Within this, if you have a local market, you should use geo-targeting (or geographical targeting) which allows you to show content that specifically matches your visitor’s geographical location. This could be special offers, news or articles.

Added SEO: Important additional SEO elements include link building, quality copywriting and regular site and page updates.

2. Take your business mobile

Mobile marketing is fast becoming an indispensable promotional tool and is a core element in revenue performance management. Though it is most popular for business-to-business marketing, it is also very effective in direct business-to-customer promotions as well.

The secret to truly productive use of mobile marketing is to develop a succinct message with a clear call to action on a trial-and-error basis.

Testing for results

The businesses that consistently gain real revenue and sales benefits from mobile marketing are the ones that experiment with various promotional messages and send out the message to lists of customers at different times to test which messages and which times generate the greatest response volumes. New inbound marketing technologies allow you to track and analyse customer behaviour in real time.

Once it has established this, a business can send out its marketing message to current and prospective customers using lists of contact information generated from previous sales and online queries.

3. Invest in transparency

Lead generation is essential to achieve revenue performance management that is truly effective. To do this, you’ll need to apply a range of transparency and measurement techniques. These include:

Traditional techniques: direct mail and telemarketing
Online techniques: web promotions, mass email marketing campaigns and others

No activity without analysis
Online lead generation should always go hand in hand with analysis – review and analyse your results and continually fine-tune your campaigns to keep on achieving increased success. With specialised software and technology through inbound marketing you can gain comprehensive metrics and analytics for each of your lead generation campaigns.

4. Go social for crowdsourcing and lead-to-customer conversions

Take your lead generation social for consistently effective results. That means applying the power of social media and crowdsourcing platforms with social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and FourSquare.

The real appeal of these platforms is they give your end user the choice power over whether or not they are marketed to – and called “channel- neutral marketing”. These approaches are proving to be extremely effective in terms of conversion rates. Why? Because your prospective customers are more likely to respond to ads that actually choose to view or interact with – rather than ads that they are forced to view or interact with. This is the real power of inbound marketing – it focuses on attracting rather than distracting your potential customers.

Crowdsourcing is equally powerful in this way. With crowdsourcing, you use online forums and internet communities as camouflaged marketing platforms, with the following advantages:

You can gather important data about consumer trends
You find out direct from you existing and potential customers about their wants and needs of their base of current and potential customer
You can gather feedback on your products and services they offer

The best thing about crowdsourcing? You find out all of the above without spending a penny on anything other than affordable web hosting.