JDR Group's 'Digital Prosperity' Blog

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As a business owner, you’re surely doing your best to keep up to date with any technologies that can boost your sales. But sometimes it may feel like you’re navigating a never-ending maze of unfamiliar names, acronyms, and products. In your research, you may have come across CRM and marketing automation software, which can be an invaluable tool helping you achieve business growth goals.

Facebook advertising can be a powerful lead generation tool for both consumer-focussed AND B2B companies. However, with more than two billion people actively using the platform, it's vital to target the correct members if you want to get results.

No matter how successful a company is, most eventually find themselves in a familiar paradox: you need to improve marketing results, but don’t have the resources, technology or know-how to do so. Marketing software can help, but with plenty of platforms to choose from, it pays to get it right. HubSpot markets itself on being able to deliver value for a wide range of industries, but is this really true? Let’s take a look.

JDR featured on BBC Radio Derby last night, joining radio host Steve Jordan to discuss the latest news from Prince Harry and Meghan Markle – the couple joined Instagram, and hit 1 million subscribers only 6 hours later!

As modern marketing involves a wide range of highly specialised skills (design, copywriting, SEO, coding, data analysis, etc), many organisations turn to marketing agencies to help them increase leads and build value from existing customers. Marketing agency fees vary depending on the scope and their specialism/experience but can be a significant investment for a business. Is the investment worth it in terms of ROI? Let’s examine the pros and cons of working with an agency.

Websites are not like fine wines – they don’t age gracefully. If your website is more than a few years old and you haven’t had it updated, the likelihood is it will look tired and out-of-date at best and lacking in functionality at worst. Older websites often need a complete redesign rather than tweaking around the edges, and this can be a considerable investment.

Leads are the life-blood of any successful business. Generating leads will help you to make sales and pull in more revenue. One of the key things that your website should do is to help find leads which you can then follow up on. However, some businesses can struggle with this - while there can be a variety of reasons for this, it could be that your website itself that is the big problem. You might get lots of traffic, but just aren't seeing it convert into genuine leads.

While it can be tempting to answer in the affirmative, the picture from old western movies of the snake oil salesman comes to mind. He would offer a cure-all elixir, but be far away down the trail before those gullible buyers appreciated they had a bottle of flavored water! Claims such as: 'We can double your results' or 'increase ROI by XX%' should see business owners heading for the hills! When necessary changes are being made, it's best to beware of those who guarantee instant success.

Would you like to see the return on your marketing investment? Or evaluate how good your sales team are at upselling existing customers? Or even understand how loyal your customers are?

Creating the right marketing strategy for your business can be difficult, especially if you have had little experience in this area before. While there is a lot of information online, much of it is conflicting and may not be relevant to your business. However, one of the most versatile and easily actionable strategies is the use of Facebook messenger bots. Our experts at JDR know how useful they can be and have created this short guide for you.