Two important steps to improving your marketing
As we wind down 2018, there is still time to create an action plan to improve your business and your marketing ROI.
Most of the clients we encounter are overwhelmed with the exercise of creating a full year or multi-year plan. It is important to have a roadmap for your business with long term goals, but we here are two steps you can take before the new year to ensure you don’t succumb to analysis paralysis.
This is not designed to be a comprehensive plan, but ensures you have some forward momentum on business improvement heading into 2019. These as small steps you can take that add value on their own with suggestions on what is a good long term goal you can move toward.
Determine your most expensive marketing tactic you are using. Don’t get hung up on this being exact figures. The first step is to gather information so you can have a general idea how much you are spending on each activity.
Sit down and write a list of your marketing expenses like media costs and software. You should also have a general idea of how much employee time is spent on these tactics too. For example: Do you have a full time sales person? or maybe you have someone who spends part of their time updating your website in addition to another role.
The long term goal for this step: Create automated marketing expense reporting from your accounting software, so you can review marketing spending, by tactic quarterly. Ideal reporting would include “working media” + “non-working” marketing costs like software, consultants or headcount.
Set up measurement tracking for your top 2 most expensive marketing activities. This does not require a fancy database or software tool, but it takes some thought and consistent action on your part. You need to understand the return on investment for your marketing expenditures. If you are starting from scratch, start simple and continue to adjust your reporting / tracking to improve as you go.
Some tracking is automated, like an email tool and some tracking is manual, like sales or fund development activity that is originated from a person. If you have a full time sales or fund development person, you need to proactively receive information on their outbound contact efforts and results. Those team members will have to track and record their activities to report.
A simple Google search can help you define what are important pieces of information you wish to capture with your marketing reporting as you continue to refine and improve your marketing measurement.
The long term goal for this step: To have automated results tracking in a single report. This will allow you to review each marketing activity area and the sales or revenue generated during at time-period. Monthly reviews of revenue generation performance will allow you to make timely decisions about reinvestment and understand what programs are driving positive results versus negative results.
Taking these 2 important steps will enable you to start thinking about how to best optimize your marketing investment and resources to drive revenue. If you are looking for assistance in defining your optimal marketing plan, get in touch with us.