There are lots of areas to spend “my marketing dollars”. The main question we face:
- How do I decide what to do?
- How do we choose what we are focusing on?
- What’s going to give us the best return?
Ultimately, the number 1 question is what is going to give us our biggest bang for our buck, the best return on our investment, that will drive revenue growth profitably.
The answer generally lies in the analysis of what is working best for you at the moment:
- What’s doing well for your business? Can we do more of it?
- What’s not working well? How do we fix it, or get rid of it?
The only way to do that is to have the right tracking and reporting in place: We call this ‘analytics’.
How do you know that for every dollar you spend, what the return is to your business? Ie what is the outcomes that we are receiving as a business:
- Revenue
- Leads
- Email subscriptions
- Fans on social
Going through this process, we’ll discover the “Life Time Value” of a client, which is by far the most important metric. Unfortunately, if you speak to most business owners they do not know what this figure is.
That’s your number one priority if you don’t know: Find out what each and every customer is worth to your business over their entire lives.
Let’s make sure we can get you that information.
For example; its revenue generated by a source, so I spent $10K on AdWords this month, how much revenue did I make from it?
Most business owners can tell you they got 10 leads out of it, but they can’t tell you they made $24K out of it, or not.
Technology and software today ensures that every business can now capture and analyse that information.
Then it becomes an analysis, improvement and optimisation process:
- Do more of what’s working well
- Fix/improve whats borderline
- Get rid off what’s not working (just stop doing it and invest money/resources into other channels)
And that’s how you focus.
When you speak to those so-called marketing experts that talk about eyeballs on your web site, is that “misleading”?
Misleading! Yes, it is misleading. It does not do anything. Eyeballs on a website are pointless unless those eyeballs do anything. This is all about ‘what are the outcomes to my business?’
The ultimate outcome is revenue to your business. Revenue to your business is all about the “Life Time Value” of a client and how do I get more of them…“what’s the marketing I need to do to get there?”
Eyeballs on your web site is part of the journey and you need to measure it, to see what’s working. But, if they are not the right eyeballs it is a waste of time, energy and effort.
What are the eyeballs that are going to give us greater “Life Time Value” customers?
Analytics!
Do we mean Google Analytics? No, analytics across all your marketing and sales, or ‘smarketing’ if you like. Google Analytics will tell you a component of it, but only a part, we need to see a complete picture
There is now some really cheap quick technology now that will integrate all your components so that your CRM and your POS system can provide you with the “Life Time Value” of a client by a particular marketing source. For example, Google Ads is generating this revenue, Facebook is generating this amount and so on. There are some models that run attribution, but ultimately within reason, you can now get a complete picture of your sales and marketing (smarketing).
The two-core elements when you talk about focus:
- What is working? Do more of it.
- What is not? Fix it or stop it.
Most people focus on doing more of the good, whereas you have to fix all the bad things as well. Otherwise, it is just blowing “my marketing dollars”.
So, if you can cut 10% of your costs, this goes straight to the bottom line!
What if I don’t know which bits are working? I’m doing this and doing that and something is working but I don’t know what it is? These are the biggest challenge’s faced by small businesses. They are too busy and don’t have the right analytics in place.
Realistically it should look like this; it’s Monday morning and you get a dashboard with your five-top metrics in marketing and sales. It should indicate whether you are on track or not. Every month you are getting graphs that tell you, you are making very good money on this, and this is blowing out that needs to be addressed.
This is all to do with your analytics.
