As the competitive landscape for small businesses continues to be challenging, it has become increasingly important for small business owners to regularly examine their marketing efforts to evaluate what is working and what is not.

With the proliferation of marketing opportunities across the web, reviews on social media properties including Facebook, Twitter and Yelp, and hundreds of offerings to measure how effectively your business is communicating its message, it’s easy for a small business owner to feel overwhelmed and under water. Below are several best practices that will help you streamline your small business online marketing and advertising efforts so you can spend more time focusing on your core business.

Know your online reputation

With the advent of citizen journalism and the popularity of sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Yelp, where people can essentially post their opinions in an unmonitored forum, it is increasingly important for small business owners to monitor customer feedback so that they can adjust strategies accordingly.

Maximize your visibility online

As a small business, you’ll want to ensure you are maximizing your visibility online so that you can effectively compete with other businesses, especially those who are larger and likely have more resources than you do. To do this, you’ll want to consider email marketing, as well as search engine and directory listings, which will increase the number of potential consumers who will be exposed to information about your business. Constant Contact and Orange Soda are both examples of companies that can assist in the execution and monitoring of both email and search engine marketing efforts.

Evaluate the effectiveness of your campaigns

You can spend massive amount of money on marketing campaigns, but if you’re not able to measure the ROI of these campaigns, you’re missing out on a key part of the process – analyzing data and understanding how to translate the analytics into actionable insights. While some might argue that it is easy enough to do your own marketing without employing third-party resources, this is less true when it comes to analytics. This is one of the areas where it is highly recommended that you look to a third-party tool to help make sense of your campaign results. Adobe is one such company that can help analyze site traffic and understand key website performance metrics.

In order to efficiently and effectively monitor and assess your business online, it is important to have a comprehensive view of how your business is being portrayed across the web, how effective your campaigns are in reaching your target audiences, and stay abreast of new tools to help streamline what can often be a burdensome process. By using select third party resources to collect relevant information for your business, you’ll be able to create campaigns that provide a stronger ROI and propel your business forward.