Email marketing remains one of the most popular, consistent marketing platforms around. Entrepreneurs and businesses big and small depend on their email lists as a source for their leads. Yet many of these same businesses don’t update their email lists as often as they should. The problem that arises is that consumers on these lists don’t always stick to the same email addresses. After a time, the lists become outdated, and it’s impossible to be sure if your emails are actually reaching your audience.
In addition to maintaining an updated list, companies need to make sure their subscribers are people genuinely interested in their offers. Sending emails and newsletters to the wrong audience is a waste of time and money. Cleaning, pruning and enhancing an email list is therefore crucial for any modern business.
So how can an organization make sure its email list is both accurate and targets the right people? These seven experts from Ad Age Collective share their strategies for how to improve an email list and ensure it remains an effective form of marketing for your business.
1. Optimize your content to make it relevant.
My strategy is to optimize the digital content so that it is relevant to our target audience. Many consumers have a short amount of time, and they are less likely to open a marketing email if it seems to be blatant advertising or spam. Thus, every email should give the reader a reason to open it and to pass on word-of-mouth to other interested viewers. – Duran Inci, Optimum7
2. Focus on ongoing verification and consent.
Conduct ongoing verification of your list and make sure you have consent. I don’t know how many times someone has tried to sell me a list with my own name on it and my college address. – Lana McGilvray, Purpose Worldwide
3. Segment your list based on common features.
You can improve the email list you already have by segmenting it. This means grouping people based on similar characteristics. You can do this according to demographics, interests, purchase history and other relevant details. When you have a segmented list you can send an even more targeted email campaign, which is certain to see higher open rates and conversions. – Syed Balkhi, WPBeginner
4. Use industry-specific gated content.
My advice is to use industry-specific gated content. Let’s be honest, we want ideal customers in our email list. By providing gated content that is relevant to industries that your business is targeting, you’ll naturally gather quality people for your email list. Adding further self-qualifying questions can also allow you to segment the list further into prospects to follow up with, depending on how they identify. – Patrick Ward, Rootstrap
5. Make sure you respect their privacy.
Privacy has become more and more of a concern for consumers, so don’t waste their time or yours. Make sure that your consumer has opted in to your messaging with their initial interest, and then follow up with messages that are relevant, such as discounts or similar content. – Jessica Hawthorne-Castro, Hawthorne Advertising
6. Include fun articles in your email marketing.
In the service business, we’ve had great success engaging prospects by having more fun articles and references within our email marketing. Being human is still a good trait to carry into your marketing strategy — imagine that, right? Anything from cooking or baking recipes, personal picks for color choices on decorations and before-and-after photos has made an impact on open rates. – Rob Palowitz, PALO Creative
7. Attach audience acquisition to your strategy.
Attach audience acquisition to your content marketing strategy! Whenever you produce a valuable piece of content for your audience, include a call to action for the reader to sign up for an email list or newsletter, or to be alerted of future blogs, podcasts, etc. Not only do you have interested parties opting into your content this way, but you’ll also know what interested them. – Holly Fearing, Filene Research Institute
Every day, billions of people use the internet and smartphones. Because of this, digital marketing has become one of the most important aspects of an organization’s overall marketing strategy.
What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing can mean slightly different things to different people. For example, the tactics used by an e-commerce platform will be different from bricks and mortar businesses.
The most common types of activity encompassed within digital marketing include:
Content marketing
The shift towards content marketing has been significant over the last decade. Creating and distributing valuable content to your target audience to build awareness, trust, and inbound leads.
Content marketing can take the form of blogs, whitepapers, video content, case studies, infographics, and podcasts.
Social media marketing
There are a number of social media platforms used by brands in order to drive traffic and engagement. While much of the activity on social media can be classed as content marketing, the chance to listen and engage with an audience makes it a viable marketing channel in its own rite.
Social media continues to evolve as new platforms emerge. The most popular being Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, WeBo, and TikTok.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Gaining quality organic traffic through major search engines such as Google and Bing. Strategies can include optimizing websites, building backlinks, and SEO friendly content.
Search engine marketing (SEM)
The other side of the search engine coin to SEO. Search engine marketing refers to the paid activities used to increase search engine visibility and drive traffic through Google Adwords or Bing Ads.
Affiliate marketing
This particular form of marketing is becoming extremely popular. Affiliate marketing is when a person or company is paid a set commission for every sale or traffic they generate for another company. This particular form of marketing is popular with bloggers and solopreneurs, who can pivot content quickly in order to showcase affiliate links.
Every year Amazon pays out hundreds of millions of dollars in affiliate fees and is one of the most popular programs of its kind in the world.
Pay per click (PPC)
Similar to paid search, you pay a pre-set amount whenever someone clicks on your ad.
Email marketing
The granddaddy of digital marketing. Every year we hear that email marketing is dead, but it is still a staple of a solid digital marketing strategy. When it’s done properly, regular or automated email marketing is still a powerful tool, especially combined with personalized marketing techniques.
Instant messaging and bots
WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and WeChat have, between them, billions of users all around the world. That is an unmissable opportunity for brands looking to get their messages out there.
The use of bots, in particular on Facebook, is a great way of interacting with your audience in a scalable, on-brand way.
What does it mean to outsource digital marketing?
Outsourcing your digital marketing means that you are using a person, company, or companies to take care of those aspects of your overall marketing strategy. This could be for a number of reasons including a budget, lack of internal resources, or being too big or too small to be able to have the necessary resources in the house.
What does in-house digital marketing mean?
An in-house team will plan, execute, and report on all digital marketing activities using a team employed by the organization.
What are the benefits of outsourcing digital marketing
There are many reasons that you might want to outsource your digital marketing, including:
Budget – smaller businesses know that they need to implement some form of digital marketing to grow, but cannot afford to hire a team full time to do this. Instead, they will use third-party/parties to plan and implement digital marketing on their behalf. Types of outsourcing could include web design, social media, SEO, and so on.
Knowledge – because digital marketing companies make their money from just that, they need to keep their knowledge, skills, and technologies on the leading edge at all times. You can benefit from this continuing development without having to put yourself off your team through the recommended training or costs.
What are the cons of outsourcing digital marketing?
There are some potential downsides to turning over your digital marketing to a third party.
Less personal – by handing over your marketing strategy to someone else, you might find that your brand begins to develop in different ways in order to attract new audiences and customers. If you’ve been responsible for your brand and marketing to date, it can be difficult to let go.
Finding the right team can be difficult – while working with the right team can fundamentally change your business success for the better, choosing the wrong team can be damaging.
It takes time to find the right people. You need to work with those that you connect with and work hard for you. There are plenty of horror stories out there that put people off hiring an outside agency.
You need to commit to a strategy – in order to create a comprehensive digital marketing campaign, you need to commit to a budget, and strategy at the outset, as well as have. It is unfair for you to move the goalposts frequently. You’ll also need to sign something along the lines of a digital marketing proposal and it’d make sense to get acquainted with one prior to signing it.
You are one of a number of clients – your business may not be as important to them as you’d like it to be. That’s not to say that you won’t be treated professionally, but you cannot always expect to be a top priority.
What are the benefits of in-house digital marketing?
Dedicated to one client, you – there are no other clients vying for your marketing team’s attention, so you know that your company always takes top priority.
Quicker response times – if your marketing team works with others within your organization on various tasks, having a team on-site, dedicated to you can cut out a lot of red tapes. For example, if a certain department has an idea for a campaign or would like something promoted at short notice, you don’t have to try and negotiate with an outsourced team to try and bump your request to the top of the list.
Better brand knowledge – because the team is part of your organization, they live and breath your brand every day. This can then be translated seamlessly into your campaigns.
What are the cons of in-house digital marketing?
Costs – as covered earlier in the article, digital marketing encompasses a lot of different specialisms. Recruiting and training people in all of these areas can be very expensive. In addition to salaries, you also have to consider recruitment costs, benefits and ongoing training needs.
Skill levels – each area of digital marketing could be done by one person full time. But it is usually down to a few people who are expected to do everything. They often end up gravitating towards the areas they prefer, or never developing in-depth knowledge in a number of areas.
Potential to be overworked – if you hire a single person to do all of your digital marketing, as well as your traditional marketing tasks, you run the real risk of burning them out quickly.
Fewer contacts and special deals – digital marketing agencies can often have great contacts and deals in place with other sites or providers. In house teams often don’t have the time of the financial clout to do this.
Less strength in depth – if you are using an agency and someone is out sick, then there are usually other people who can take over the project at short notice. This usually isn’t the case with small in house teams. If someone in your team leaves, you are without any skill in certain areas until they are replaced.
Does it make sense to combine the two?
Many businesses find a good balance between in-house teams and outsourcing. It usually works best when there is an experienced marketing point person who can lead on the strategy development and then recruit and oversee the people or companies who will then actually implement the digital marketing campaigns.
This works well for a number of reasons. Having a single point of contact who has overall responsibility for digital marketing helps to streamline planning and decisions. Small in-house teams can also take care of some of the days to day digital marketing tasks that need doing and respond to in house requests quickly.
From a digital marketing agency perspective, it is always easier to deal with someone who knows what they are doing when it comes to leading a marketing function within a company and has realistic expectations.
For those companies who are deciding whether or not to recruit an in-house team, or outsource, this article provides some of the pros and cons of each course of action. Remember, what works for one company will not always work for another. It might make sense to outsource your digital marketing requirements at the beginning, then move towards a blended team as you scale up. Alternatively, if you are large enough to recruit a full digital marketing team, then you will have an entire department dedicated only to your organization.
Darya Jandossova Troncoso is a photographer, artist and writer working on her first novel and managing a digital marketing blog – MarketSplash. In her spare time, she enjoys spending time with her family, cooking, creating art and learning everything there is to know about digital marketing.
There are so many directions in which you can take your marketing strategy these days, it can make you dizzy.
SEO, PPC, email, social… the list goes on! Of course, most brands will choose a combination of several of these methods.
But I’m going to explain exactly why I think content marketing is better than PPC and why you should focus the majority of your efforts on your content strategy.
Quick Takeaways
When implemented properly, content marketing offers a higher ROI than PPC in the long-term.
PPC might bring traffic to your site but it won’t make it convert. Only content can do that for you.
Paid search and other types of advertising have their place but it’s essential to have a solid content strategy to back them up.
What Is PPC Marketing?
But first, let’s recap what exactly I’m talking about when I say “PPC”. PPC stands for “pay per click,” is also known as “paid search” and is technically a form of advertising. PPC ads show up on top of “organic search” results on your search engine.
When you launch a PPC marketing campaign, you’ll place ads on a search platform like Google or Bing (this is also known as paid search marketing), on a social network such as Facebook or Twitter, or on other ad platforms.
Rather than paying upfront to place your ad for a set amount of time, you’ll pay the ad platform when your ad is clicked.
In most cases, there are many more advertisers than there are ad spots. The platform decides which ads to show by using a bidding procedure. The advertiser that has bid the highest amount for a particular search query or audience will get the best ad placement. However, they’ll also pay more when someone clicks through to their site.
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a strategy that revolves around using content (blog posts, videos, podcasts, etc.) to attract relevant visitors to your website, raise awareness of your brand, and boost sales and conversions.
Rather than being sales-focused like an ad, in most cases, this content doesn’t directly pitch your products and services. Instead, you provide useful, entertaining, or inspiring content that improves the lives of your audience in some way.
Publishing a blog is one of the most common types of content marketing and one that’s easy for anyone to start, whether they’re an individual on a shoestring budget or a large enterprise.
1. Content Marketing Is Significantly Cheaper in the Long Term
When comparing different digital marketing strategies, PPC is right up there with some of the most expensive.
PPC can get you to the top of Google if you’re willing to pay for it. But you’ll have to keep paying to stay there.
These costs can add up quickly, especially in competitive industries where keywords can go for several dollars a click.
On the other hand, content marketing needs only a modest initial investment to get you started. If you’re really running on a tight budget, you can create content yourself with the only cost being your time.
With time and effort, high-quality content can reach the top of search engine results naturally. This means you can be getting those clicks for free instead of paying for each one. And you won’t lose your rankings until someone creates better or more relevant content than you.
The ROI of content marketing and PPC has too many variables to suggest an “average” for each method, even on a per industry basis. But whatever industry you’re in, while PPC may seem to offer a more attractive ROI initially, content marketing almost always offers a better ROI in the long-term.
Content marketing not only attracts more leads for your money, but it generates better quality leads too.
Lead quality is critical for optimizing ROI and increasing revenue. There’s no point in paying for leads (via any method) if they’re not converting.
One of the biggest complaints coming from sales teams is that the leads they get from marketing are low-quality ones. This situation can easily happen when sales and marketing aren’t in alignment and only care about their immediate targets. 55% of sales reps surveyed by Demand Gen said that what they want most from marketing is “better leads”.
Producing high-quality content is one of the most effective ways of attracting high-quality sales leads.
Just because you’re paying for leads, it doesn’t mean they’re great quality. A lot of the time leads from PPC are poor because they don’t know your brand or understand your product when they click your ad.
On the other hand, leads generated by content have already been introduced to your brand and educated on some level. And the longer they stick around and keep consuming your content, the better these leads become.
3. Content Marketing Generates Long-term Results
Content marketing campaigns must be planned on a much longer timescale than other marketing techniques. Some people consider this a negative, but being a slow burner offers huge benefits too.
Content marketing builds traffic and rankings that you own. This may happen very gradually, but once you start seeing the results you want, you’re not going to lose them overnight.
The time and money you invest in content marketing now will continue paying dividends well into the future. A single piece of content that might have cost you a couple of hundred dollars to produce could end up generating business and leads worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for years to come.
PPC, on the other hand, is most definitely a short-term strategy. You’ll see the results immediately but if you want to keep having success, you’ll need to keep going.
Anyone can buy clicks, but the value drops to zero once you stop.
4. Content Marketing Is a Simple Model That’s Hard to Mess Up
There’s a real art and science to successful PPC marketing. Not only do you have to know what keywords to bid on, but you also need to bid the right amount, optimize your ads for a high click-through rate, and craft your landing pages carefully to get the results you want.
PPC can be very effective when done well, but in most cases, you’ll have to invest a significant amount of cash before you can see results. If managed properly, PPC can be a good investment but you need a decent budget to get started.
For this reason, it’s sheer madness to attempt a PPC campaign unless you know what you’re doing. If you get lucky then you might see results, but more often than not, you’ll burn through a significant amount of money and have no results to show for it.
As PPC is so complicated, with many moving pieces, most brands using PPC marketing will either employ an in-house expert or outsource to a marketing agency specializing in PPC. Of course, this adds more expense to an already pricey marketing model.
Content marketing, on the other hand, is about as simple as you can get. While there’s certainly a lot to think about when you’re putting together a content marketing campaign, you can’t really get anything “wrong”.
In the worst-case scenario, you’ll publish some content that doesn’t really do anything for you. But all you’ll have lost is the time it took you to create that content or what you paid for it (and content marketing is very affordable compared to other types of marketing, remember).
I’ve seen organizations achieve impressive success with content marketing without following any real plan or tracking results, which just goes to show how simple it is. Those who regularly publish high-quality content and consistently deliver value will be rewarded for their efforts eventually, even if they don’t get all the fine details perfect.
5. People Trust Content More Than Ads
Google is constantly changing the way in which paid ads are displayed in the search results to try and make them blend in more seamlessly with the organic results. The reason for this is that most of the time, searchers don’t want to click on ads.
Most web users these days know that companies have paid to appear in the ads at the top of the search results, whereas web pages that are listed at the top of the organic results are there because they’ve earned it with a great reputation and high-quality information.
Research by Nielsen has found that 53% of consumers don’t trust ads listed in search engine results and 52% don’t trust ads on social media.
Trust in advertising, in general, has been gradually declining in recent years, with customers preferring to do their own research and more likely to follow recommendations from their peers than brand ads.
Content marketing isn’t advertising. It’s a great way to build trust rather than erode it.
5. You Can’t Succeed in PPC Without Also Investing in Content Marketing
So let’s say you do have the budget to inject into running a PPC campaign and you’re working with an agency that really knows what they’re doing.
You still won’t get the best results unless you also concentrate on creating really great content.
Just think about it – even if you’ve got a really well-written ad and your targeting is spot on, you still have to win over the users that click on the ad.
So that comes down to sales copy, right? Well, yes and no. It’s certainly important to have really well-crafted and optimized landing pages. But your success will be limited unless you’ve also thought about your content marketing strategy.
You might get some sales from users who’ve never heard of your company before and end up on your landing page. But you can greatly increase your chances if you’ve got a library of great content to back you up.
Great content gets shared and comes up frequently in search results. So, if you’ve been doing your job with content marketing well, there’s a good chance that the user who sees your ad and clicks through to your landing page might have seen one of your articles or videos while researching or on their social feeds. When they keep seeing great content from your brand, they’ll remember it and you’ve got a much better chance of making that sale.
While PPC might be great for attracting people to your funnel, you still have to get them through the funnel. And websites that have adopted content marketing convert at a rate that’s six times higher than those that haven’t.
PPC ads can convert well for users who are ready to buy. But for the rest? A report by Gleanster Research revealed that only 25% of your leads are ready to buy at any given time. So what do the other 75% want?
They want to find out more about your company and products or services. They maybe don’t even know yet that they have a need for your products and services. By publishing high-value informational content that addresses their challenges, you can ensure that they stick around for longer. You have a much better chance of making that sale when they’re finally ready to buy.
PPC can still be an effective part of your overall marketing strategy when planned carefully. But it must be used in combination with content marketing if you want to achieve the best results.
Content marketing is a low-cost marketing technique that offers an impressive ROI if you’re willing to stick with it for the long-term.
If you are ready to get more traffic to your site with quality content published consistently, check out our Content Builder Service.
Marketing automation can help a business make the most of their online marketing efforts. Today’s business owner is busy, and not every small business can afford an entire marketing department. Automation is designed to streamline the marketing process and provide a more hands-free experience.
With marketing automation, sales teams can focus more on nurturing customers and leads, and customer service people can follow up and make connections with new clients to help them find their way. From email campaigns to pop-up ads, business owners can automate just about every aspect of marketing.
With more than 10 years of experience in public relations, marketing, advertising and marketing automation solutions, and as the founder of Quarterly Global and various other marketing and advertising-focused enterprises, I believe this guide will help other business owners learn everything they need to know about marketing automation.
What is marketing automation?
Put simply, marketing automation is the process of putting various marketing tasks or efforts on an automated schedule or platform. Rather than implementing all marketing efforts manually, businesses can set schedules and deploy multiple tools to manage and monitor all marketing efforts. This can help make online marketing more straightforward and more efficient.
According to Salesforce, those who use automation can see conversion rates increase by 30% or more. Marketing automation can also help employees save time, increase productivity in sales by more than 14% and reduce marketing overhead by more than 12%.
And with scalable technology growing in availability, there are more solutions for small-business owners and entrepreneurs who don’t have a corporate budget or marketing department.
Working Smarter, Not Harder, With Automation
Marketing automation can make things easier for the business and its marketing department. Automation tools are available for landing pages, email marketing, lead management, analytics, social marketing, pop-up conversions and much more.
Through my company’s own automation strategies, I know there are a few common use-cases for automation you might consider, such as using automation to create dynamic content that is “smart” or “adaptive.” This type of strategy involves using content in ads, emails or websites that change based on user behavior or preferences. This creates a fully customized experience for the user on the spot.
A few other potential use cases for automation may include:
• Automating team collaborations: Some automation tools can aid in collaborative efforts by transmitting information in real-time, which helps departments communicate and keep everyone on the same page.
• Setting up automated nurturing: Not every user is ready to become an immediate customer. However, they might be prepared to learn more information, get a coupon or sign up for an email newsletter. Automated nurturing tools can help companies create a variety of conversions along the sales funnel based on a specific user’s behavior.
• Using email sequencing for follow-up: Creating a sequence that nurtures the lead and invites them to explore more can be especially helpful in a time when people are inundated by spam and junk newsletters.
• Automating list segmentation: Manual segmentation is possible, but it is time-consuming and can also result in errors, which is why some might choose to use automated tools for this task.
• Automating analytics: Business owners can’t measure the success of any marketing efforts without analytics and metrics. There are affordable and free resources online to measure campaigns that can help ensure reports are current and data is fresh.
Choosing The Right Tools For Your Business
Most marketing automation tools will offer some benefits to almost every business. However, some are typically going to be more useful or relevant than others. Here are some questions to ask yourself when searching for the best fit for your company:
• Is it a full-service automation platform? Business owners don’t necessarily have to choose this type of automation tool. However, if they intend to automate multiple marketing elements, it could be easier to have everything in one place.
• Does the automation software include the resources that are required? Although most will cover a variety of automated tasks, some limit their offerings. Review the tools and resources out there to find the ones that deliver precisely what your business needs.
• Am I receiving a one-time charge or a regular fee? Some automation tools can be free to use with limited access. Others might have a one-time use or purchase fee. Still, others may have a monthly or semi-annual fee involved.
• What challenges can I expect along the way? Be particular in analyzing whether the goals of the automation tool are the same as your business’s goals. For example, it wouldn’t make sense to implement an email campaign autoresponder if improvement in website sign-ups is what is desired. That would require automation of a pop-up campaign or another type of conversion optimization.
Conclusion
The numbers don’t lie: Those using marketing automation may see improvements in engagement, conversions, sales, productivity and other aspects of business operations, therefore creating a win-win situation for everyone involved. Automation can also increase a company’s return on investment and free up your sales team’s time so they can focus on nurturing relationships and working through the customer life cycle.
While there is a wide selection of solutions from which to choose, it’s important to ensure the solution you’re considering makes sense for your business. In doing so, organizations can adopt useful automation software and offer an engagement-focused approach to building and growing customer relationships.
When online marketing first began, it was relatively simple.
You ran some PPC ads, an email marketing campaign, and worked on your content marketing.
Today, however, it’s not just a case of creating these things and seeing how they do. You’ve got to successfully manage your social media marketing, social media advertising, PPC ads, email campaigns – if you’re not careful, it can feel like throwing spaghetti at the wall just to see what works.
Fortunately, data analysis and – more specifically – data blending can make your marketing decisions faster and easier to make, with more impact.
What is data blending?
Data blending is simply where you take data from multiple sources and combine them to give you one united dataset.
This is incredibly beneficial regardless of what data you’re looking at but can be even more so for online marketing.
Let’s take a closer look at the benefits of consolidating your marketing data with data blending.
The benefits of consolidating your marketing data
See results across multiple platforms
If you’re running PPC ads on various search engines and platforms, it’s going to take time to look at each individual ad or campaign and assess all the different metrics. It’s going to be even more difficult if you want to see your overall costs at a glance, your overall conversion rate, and more. This is where data blending steps in.
If you’re using a business analytics platform like Sisense you’ll be able to automatically generate data blended dashboards that will present anyone at any level with easy-to-analyse data. You don’t need to pay for data entry to unite your dashboards, and you don’t need to waste your marketing team’s valuable time. They can see what’s going right – or wrong – and make new decisions.
And for the sake of a visual example, a PPC blended view within Sisense would look something like this:
You can see everything about your PPC campaigns – your cost-per-click, conversion rate, and whether or not there is a problem in your funnel.
In the above example, we can see that the funnel is working perfectly, filtering down from impressions to won opportunities. If that funnel effect suddenly dropped off at leads created, you know you have a chink in your armour.
Create anyone-can-read reports
Reports and dashboards really aren’t worth the money if there are only a handful of people on your team that can read them. Especially if they’re not the people that need the data.
If your data essentially needs translating before it’s useful, it’s not doing anyone any good. Sisense reports can be read by just about anyone – if they understand the terms, they can understand the data. It’s crystal clear, which means the right decisions can be made fast.
Identify trends
Do you know that your Instagram ads almost never get clicks on a weekend? Is it like that for all your ads across the board? Using complex data, you can see which campaigns are most effective – or not – and when.
And to truly see such statistics and trends in action, refer to the visual below.
Save money and increase revenue
To build on my point above, knowing when your campaigns are most effective will help you save money and increase revenue. For example, if you are a B2B organization and you realize that you get almost no new leads over the weekend, you could dramatically decrease your spend over the weekend and save money.
Alternatively, if you identify that you get the most for your money on a Monday, you could increase your ad spend and thus increase revenue. It’s important to remember that your ROI depends on smart spending and marketing, not blanket marketing, so it’s worth using a data blending tool to ensure your marketing budget is being utilized effectively.
Hit KPIs or identify where you’re falling short
Your online marketing efforts are one of the biggest reasons why you will be meeting or falling short of KPIs, such as MQLs, sales revenue metrics, and more. Using one dashboard with a blended view will allow you to see if your online marketing is contributing to the problem.
If you have a sales team, you may find for example that your online marketing gets the leads, but they fail to convert once they’re talking to a member of the sales team.
Even if your sales process takes place entirely online, you’ll be able to see how each marketing activity contributes to your results – you may find your PPC ads aren’t converting, but your content marketing and email marketing are. You can then reassess, make changes, and see how things change for you.
As highlighted by Indeed, KPI metrics within business and marketing may include:
Dollars spent on marketing over a certain period
Online traffic (the number of visitors to the company website)
Organic online traffic (the number of visitors to the company website via search engines)
Web traffic (to determine how many visitors are new vs. returning)
Mobile traffic
Click-through rate (the ratio of web traffic that clicks on a particular ad)
The number of visits to a particular piece of content
And based on the needs of your business or client reporting, these KPI metrics can scale further in either direction.
Finding the right tools
Blended view analytics tools are the key to success in online marketing, but it can be difficult to decide which is the best fit for you.
Here are two tools you need to know about:
Sisense
If you’re looking for a tool to manage your complex data, optimize campaigns, and manage your multi-channel marketing efforts, you won’t find better.
Sisense allows everyone in your team to see vital data at a glance, whether or not they have an analytical background. You’ll be able to track the impact of each campaign in one place, see which campaigns and platforms are delivering, and which aren’t. You can then decide if you need to tweak the ad to better suit the audience, or scrap it and double your efforts on a platform that is converting well.
For a complete visual of the platform and it’s many different marketing dashboards (from digital to traditional), you can view them all in action here.
Google Data Studio
If you’re new to using blended dashboards and complex data and are a small business, Google Data Studio is a great place to start. While it is largely a platform that allows you to create reports, you can also use some blended views.
As with many Google tools, it is easy to use but it will throw you right in with no introduction, so you may have to spend some time Googling (ironically) how to get the most out of this tool.
To learn more about the many benefits of Google Data Studio and how to best use this solution, feel free to read over this helpful overview.
Wrapping up
If you’re a large organization, you’re not going to find a better tool than Sisense. Their solution is currently being used by businesses in nearly all industries to access the at-a-glance insight they can’t get from their complex data.
However, if you’re new to using insights or are a small business, Google Data Studio is one of the best tools to help you get started and understand what you want to see from your analytics tools.
No matter what solution you end up going with, it’s more important than ever to start using data blending in your business and marketing efforts.
Guest author: Zac Johnson is a world-renowned blogger and entrepreneur with nearly 20 years of experience in the online marketing space and has helped his readers generate millions of dollars online. He shares his story and guidance at ZacJohnson.com
Being in start-up mode can be exciting and crippling at the same time! On one hand, you may feel a sense of triumph over the challenges thrown at you. On the other hand, the inability to manage crises effectively can make you wonder how you’ll keep your dream venture afloat.
Scaling a start-up isn’t easy. Every entrepreneur aims at building a successful business; yet, the bitter fact is that start-ups often have to face hurdles that threaten their existence. The recent Global Startup Ecosystem Report reveals that only 1 in 12 are able to steer their venture towards success. So, a whopping majority of start-ups do not know what it takes to survive the odds of failing.
Crisis is inevitable!
Prevent a Small Business Crisis
What makes a start-up stand out from the rest is how they prepare for them. In this post, we have enlisted effective strategies to protect your venture in a crisis.
1. Keep a Check on Your Financials
According to recent data shared by Fundera, a whopping 82 percent of start-ups fail due to cash flow problems. Owing to heavy investments in product development, R&D, online marketing, and other business operations, expenses tend to be higher than the revenue during the early stages of start-up growth.
Here are a few tips to get hold of your start-up financials.
Have a Strategic Financial Plan in Place
A strategic financial business plan enlists your sources of income, business expenses, and future investments and keeps a check on your cash reserves. This plan will help you outline a clear business goal, spend your money wisely, and cushion you against the economic crisis.
Ask for Upfront Payments
Working with clients without money exchanging hands can put a strain on your cash flow, proving to be a huge financial headache in the future. Make sure you include the payment terms in your project agreement, converting your cash flow crunch into a cash flow surplus.
It may be tough to convince certain clients to pay before rendering services. Try setting up a customer-friendly payment system in which they can pay you a certain percentage of the pay-out as and when a checkpoint is achieved.
Secure Your Funding
Prepare for tough economic crises by securing your lending options. Firstly, stay updated on the changes in lending procedures and check whether or not your industry is affected by a crisis. Talk to your bank about your options and the amount you can borrow.
Moreover, maintain a healthy credit score to improve your financial worthiness.
Cut Down Costs
Look for ways to minimize overhead costs. For instance, allowing your employees to work from home or a shared workspace can reduce costs while improving business productivity.
Similarly, hire freelancers through platforms such as Upwork or Fiverr to gain access to a wider talent pool while reducing the cost of hiring a full-time employee.
2. Play to Your Strengths
In a crisis, it’s best to stick to what you do best. This isn’t a good time for experimenting with new products or services. So, work on perfecting your existing skills and offer solutions that meet customer needs.
Customers are the lifeblood of any business. If they stay loyal to your business, anything’s possible! Top-notch customer relationships can help your business stay afloat, regardless of the circumstances.
A start-up cannot afford to lose even a single customer. So, think of ways to add to customer delight. Deliver exceptional CX and add value beyond a purchase. This will encourage customers to be your loyal brand ambassadors.
Offering an after-sales incentive program or excellent after-sales service, for instance, can give your customers a reason to visit you again.
Stay Consistent on Your Brand Promise
As mentioned earlier, this isn’t the time to experiment. Stick with what you are known for. So, instead of looking for new markets, do what your brand promises while looking for innovative ways to manage customer issues and improve services.
Leverage the Power of Digital Marketing
Ensuring an up-to-date online presence is the sure-fire way to keep your venture afloat during tough times. Invest in digital marketing strategies and small business SEO to keep customers informed and engaged and boost your online reputation.
3. Know How to Tackle Security Concerns around IoT Devices
IoT has played a huge role in transforming start-up owners’ visions into tangible business models and products. The internet of things forms the basis for various applications and helps start-up deliver high-quality solutions, improve cost-effectiveness, optimize their operations, and improve customer service.
However, greater connectivity raises multiple security concerns as IoT devices are attractive attack vectors for cybercriminals. For instance, vulnerabilities in one device can make way for hackers and increase the number of possible points of attack.
Start-ups are the favourite targets for cybercriminals. A recent handbook titled ‘Cybersecurity for SMEs & Start-ups’ by CyberPeace Foundation (CPF) revealed that start-ups and SMEs are most vulnerable to such attacks. Further, home-based entrepreneurship, ongoing work-from-home policies, and increasing dependence on freelancers have exposed businesses to security risks like data breach and attacks on IoT devices.
All this makes it critical for businesses to plan and execute strategies to protect their network without breaking the bank. Here are a few security precautions to consider –
Map Your Attack Surfaces
Get an idea of all the IoT devices and services on the company network and work with your cybersecurity team to gauge the risks.
For instance, most company devices need not be accessible to the public. Make a list of such devices and put them behind a firewall. Similarly, gauge the need for continuing with outdated legacy systems that could be exploited by hackers. Also, have a robust system in place to update company software and apply security patches.
Improve Your Ability to Detect Unusual Activity
Equip your IoT security team to detect unusual activity on the company network, including traffic from any IoT devices installed. This will help you identify hackers infiltrating your system and eliminating threats if any.
Encourage Your Remote Team to Use Encrypted Messaging
Statistics shared by Flexjobs points out that remote working has increased by 44 percent over the past
5 years and more so since March 2020.
Though remote working is a great way to reduce overheads and mobilize your business plans, it’s important to be wary when exchanging sensitive data online. Use messaging apps and email service providers like Signal, Telegram Messenger, and Microsoft Outlook that have in-built encryption features, preventing any third-party from intercepting sensitive business information.
Further, remote employees often work from libraries, cafeterias, or other public places. This increases the security risks associated with connecting to public WiFi. Hence, it’s best to invest in a VPN service like Switcherry VPN to prevent hackers from intercepting data sent or received over public networks.
Encouraging your remote team to use Switcherry VPN, ExpressVPN or any of the other highly rated VPN platforms will mask their internet traffic. Thus, sensitive information will not be detected by hackers who are looking to exploit such vulnerabilities.
4. Have a Crisis Management Team in Place
Crises are often accompanied by controversies. The unexpected twists and turns, the rising anxiety, and the pressure to respond to the situation can trigger uncoordinated actions, leading to bad press and reputation damage.
Inaction is the worst response to any crisis. Plus, a disorganized response not just causes panic but also attracts reviews from a host of departments, including the legal, corporate affairs, and senior management.
Therefore, it’s wise to have a crisis management team of trusted and cognitively-diverse employees.
These employees should be experts at crafting a fitting communication and making rapid tactical decisions during this period. However, make sure you choose your spokesperson carefully. They should be fluent in the language and communication style necessary during the crisis.
Summing Up
Start-ups and small ventures are among the worst hit in a crisis, often forcing them to shut shop. But it doesn’t have to be that way!
The strategies shared above can help minimize the impact of these trying situations on your business. Use them to crisis-proof your venture and give it a fighting chance through these tough times.
Excuse the clichéd thinking, but a brand’s voice is the cover of its book. Any turn of phrase you’ve heard about first impressions applies to brand voice because it’s a consumer’s initial interaction with you. Voice is the hallmark of the brand-buyer relationship—as with any connection, it needs to be consistent.
The slogans used, the tone evoked, and the sentiment left with customers must be similar across the board. Consumers find it comforting to interact with their preferred brands on any channel—in stores or online—and know that the messaging won’t change. A consistent brand presentation is so valuable and appreciated by customers that it can spark a 33% uptick in revenue, according to a Lucidpress study.
A clear and focused brand message positions companies to rise above their competitors and appeal to potential investors, customers, and employees. Entrepreneurs who want to craft a cohesive and consistent brand voice from the outset can follow these three steps:
1. Look to your audience. Modern customers aren’t shy about sharing their opinions. They’ll tell you what works, they’ll certainly share what doesn’t work, and they’ll offer those insights in comments sections, on social platforms, or via product reviews.
Feedback loops are now continuous, so why not apply that to every facet of your brand identity, including voice? If you have different products or verticals, for instance, look at what messaging resonates with each segment.
It’s a tactic Tara Fusco, chief marketing officer of Kepler & Wilde, supports wholeheartedly.
“When building or adjusting brand voice, look to your audience for communication cues,” Fusco said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re in SaaS or some other kind of service; tailor your voice to what you’re offering, to the base you’re trying to engage, and to the kind of experience you’re trying to provide.”
A consistent voice is best when it aligns with current customer trends and needs. Look to your audience for cues on how to modify your tone and continue to engage your target base.
2. Keep stakeholders and employees n the know. If voice is the first interaction customers have with your brand, employees are the carriers. By that logic, it’s vital that everyone in the company—from top to bottom—buys into the brand’s messaging and conveys it correctly.
Yes, the brand’s messaging should ring true in all marketing material and every piece of product packaging. Still, it also needs to bleed into how employees and leaders speak about the company. Apply that tone to how the company reaches out internally to personnel and externally to customers or even potential employees.
For example, FedEx makes each of its employees take “The Purple Promise,” an oath that guarantees a top-flight experience for customers and frontline employees. In the words of FedEx CEO Fred Smith, the promise prepares everyone to “sell trust,” something that resonates with customers who want to see their private information protected and their precious belongings delivered safely.
Getting buy-in from stakeholders to attach this voice to their professional correspondence can further entrench the brand voice. Then, it becomes a more defined trademark of the brand’s overall presentation.
3. Humanize that voice via social. The reach of social media makes brands available to their customers at a moment’s notice. While that might seem daunting and overwhelming, it presents companies with an excellent opportunity to use social media as an approachable and relatable marketing arm.
On a Twitter or Instagram feed, brand voice can permeate every interaction, every hashtag, and every back-and-forth touchpoint with customers. Social almost serves as another kind of call center where brands can hear customer feedback and present the brand in a helpful and friendly light. Just look at Wendy’s. The fast-food eatery regularly uses its uniquely crafted social platform and voice to engage customers, playfully trade barbs with rival brands, and promote its menu.
Apply the same brand voice guidelines you use for website copy and in-person interactions to your social strategy. See these touchpoints as another way to establish customer rapport and emphasize with your audience that what they see is what they’ll get from your brand—no matter where you connect.
First impressions are hard to break. Apply this thinking to your brand voice crafting and emit a positive and consistent brand tone at every customer interaction. Get that buy-in from the start, and customers will reward your company with trust, repeat business, and continued viability.
I co-founded Wild Creations in 2007 and quickly built the startup toy company into one of the fastest-growing companies in the US. I have been a finalist for EY’s Entrepreneur of the Year twice and recognized with over 40 awards for innovative products. Recently, I was named one of the world’s top 100 business bloggers, and I am a regular contributor on entrepreneurship, management, and leadership to top business publications. I’m now the Head Coach at Power Coaching and Consulting, a rapidly growing global executive coaching and training firm in Washington, D.C. My second bestselling book, The Entrepreneurship Book of Actions, was published by McGraw-Hill and is in bookstores now.
If you haven’t noticed, the United States is a nation divided. With so much tension in society today, it’s only natural that your team will experience a dip in productivity.
As a leader, you can help your team regain its mojo and focus on the positive. Taking care of your employees should be your highest priority, but keeping your business running optimally will be a welcome and needed side effect.
To help your team stay motivated, use these leadership tips to spur productivity during these days of social turmoil:
1. Organize Team Activities
Teammates can lift each other up even during the most difficult times. Americans spend more time at work than almost anywhere else, so building strong bonds can help co-workers maintain productivity even amid social discord.
Seek out opportunities for your team members to interact. Start a book club to get co-workers of all persuasions talking to—not past—each other. Dan Rather’s What Unites Us or Arthur C. Brooks’ Love Your Enemies are bridge-building choices.
If your office has some outdoor space, get a firepit and hold socially distanced cocoa breaks. Your workers will head back to their desks with rosy cheeks and a happier demeanour.
2. Offer Spontaneous Encouragement
One of a manager’s chief responsibilities is keeping their team members motivated. Always be on the lookout for employees who need a little encouragement to get through the day. At the tail end of 2020, that list of people is probably a lot longer than it was last year.
Scripted encouragement doesn’t do much good because it lacks sincerity. The encouragement you provide should be authentic, specific and spontaneous.
Beginning each morning with an office-wide “Thanks for all you do” email will sound rote. Stopping by an individual’s desk to praise the proposal they made during yesterday’s check-in will sound genuinely appreciative. Surprising employees—in a good way—will give them the boost they need to push through the rest of their day.
3. Encourage Time Off
When the world feels like it’s collapsing around them, your employees will occasionally need a break. A day or two to focus on themselves can make all the difference. Don’t just tolerate your team members taking time off; encourage it.
If you notice an employee has been nose-to-the-grindstone non-stop, ask when they plan to take some time to decompress. If you can afford it, declare a team- or companywide Refresh Day. Getting a much-needed reprieve will allow employees to clock back in re-energized and ready to hit the ground running.
4. Enable Remote Work
Many companies experimented with remote work when Covid-19 struck. Consider maintaining it as an option long after the crisis passes. Not only does working at home gives employees peace of mind, but recent research has shown that their productivity doesn’t suffer—and may even improve.
Communication is key to making remote work effective. Project management tools can ensure that all employees know which tasks they need to complete to keep work moving along. Messaging platforms can help prevent project bottlenecks by getting team members quick answers.
5. Set Small, Attainable Goals
There’s a time for BHAGS (big, hairy, audacious goals), but these days of Covid-19 stress and social unease probably aren’t it. Looking too far into the future can be stressful and cause your team’s productivity to plummet.
Instead, set smaller, short-term goals that are easier to reach. Accomplishing these goals will provide the morale boost your team needs to maintain productivity.
Perhaps your marketing team sets a goal to increase marketing-qualified leads by 50% by the end of the quarter. With all the other things on their minds, this challenge may seem overwhelming. Increasing social media exposure by X posts per day or getting X webinar sign-ups per week are more manageable objectives that can move the team toward the same end goal.
6. Promote Healthy Habits
Productive workers practice self-care. During times of social turmoil, though, your employees may find it harder to take care of themselves. Sitting in front of the TV with a plate of nachos may seem more comforting than going for that post-work run.
Do your part to promote your employees’ well-being in the workplace and after hours. Provide healthy drinks and snacks in the break room, and bring in some soul-soothing greenery. Offer discounts on home exercise equipment or online yoga courses to encourage fitness at home. When your employees are healthy and well-rested, their productivity will naturally rise.
Finally, trying to stay productive at work while simultaneously managing a mental health crisis is a recipe for disaster. If a team member is experiencing mental health issues—not uncommon during these fraught times—offer counseling. Achieving a healthier headspace will help employees better focus when they’re on the clock.
7. Celebrate the Victories
Whether it’s a small work goal or a personal achievement, take the time to acknowledge every victory. Few things are as motivating—and uniting—as celebrating a win with the entire team. Feed off each other’s energy and use the motivation to move on to your next task.
In such uncertain and fractious times, it’s important to shine a spotlight on the positive things. Use an employee engagement tool like 15Five to encourage team members to recognize their co-workers’ contributions. Hold Friday afternoon shout-out sessions to highlight the week’s wins. Get everyone involved, and they’ll support each other toward that next milestone.
Leading a team through social turmoil will never be easy. However, taking these steps can keep your team motivated to continue working through the uncertainty that surrounds them.
Feature Image Credit: Young business professionals working on business project in office. Getty
John Hall is the co-founder and president of Calendar, a scheduling and time management app. He’s also the strategic adviser for Relevance, a company that helps brands differentiate themselves and lead their industry online. You can book him as a keynote speaker here and you can check out his best-selling book “Top of Mind.” Sign up for Calendar here.
Early Saturday morning, November 7, 2020 – “Biden Wins!” After days of agony waiting for final ballots to be counted, the race for the President of the United States is called, by one network, then another, then another, then all of them. Cheering and people rejoicing in New York City could be heard through open windows, as people breathed a sigh of collective relief. The thunderstorm is over; a ray of sunlight broke through. And a rainbow marks the beginning of better days ahead, as we rebuild kindness and decency towards every fellow human.
Tom Denford jokingly suggested in a tweet “Super excited to learn “5 things marketers can take from Biden’s victory” on Monday morning. I could not wait till Monday, so I wrote it today. Indeed marketers could learn some things from Biden’s victory, perhaps 5, perhaps more. Here are the five that come to my mind, having been in and observed marketing for 25 years. What follows is not political commentary, but commentary on marketing.
Slow, wins.
Everyone knows Aesop’s fable of the tortoise and the hare. And “slow and steady wins the race” is a phrase repeated regularly. This is particularly true for marketing, but sadly it has been particularly forgotten in the headlong rush into digital. Too many marketers try to buy success by showing more ads to more people more often. They push their agencies to buy ever more vast quantities of digital ads, at ever lower unit prices. This has led to a prolonged deterioration of actual business outcomes and marketing efficacy, a veritable “lost decade” of digital marketing.
The headlong plunge into digital and the unchecked spending in programmatic channels led to dramatic increases in the number of ads purchased, and a concomitant increase in ad fraud. The number of humans on earth didn’t suddenly multiply many times over; and their time spent online, on social, and on mobile didn’t multiply many times over either. But the number of digital ads did multiply, reaching into unfathomable territory – half a quadrillion ads per year. The vast majority of these ads were created out of thin air by bots, not by humans visiting sites, using social media, or using mobile apps. So while marketers are spending $350 billion every year on digital ads, their business outcomes don’t reflect the spending. And the marketing efficacy is lower and lower due to more and more fraudulent activity.
You can’t buy your way to “wins” quickly. Slow and steady does indeed win out, long term.
Right, wins.
When marketers are spending so many billions of dollars in digital, someone’s going to ask if it’s worth it. So the marketers that are doing the most spending (ahem, CPG companies with too much money to spend) look for ways to justify it. The metrics they and their media agencies conveniently chose were quantity metrics like number of ad impressions purchased, the average unit price, and the number of clicks, traffic to their sites, and click through rates. But just because these metrics were easy to measure doesn’t mean they were the right metrics to use to prove marketing value.
In fact, these vanity metrics, oops “quantity metrics,” were easy to think about, because more meant better. But if the marketer didn’t know about bots and fraud, they wouldn’t know that these are also the easiest metrics for bots to fake. Bots can generate more ad impressions, and drive higher click through rates, and create more traffic to advertisers’ websites all to make the campaigns appear to be performing better than they really are. Despite drastic increases in these quantity metrics, business outcomes remained flat to down. Some business outcomes may have gone up, but the rise was entirely unrelated to digital marketing activities (more people wanted to buy toilet paper for some reason, not because of advertising). And remember when P&G cut $200 million from digital ad spending and saw no change in business outcomes?
Having the right metrics in place, and using them, means you know when you are driving real outcomes, rather than just getting “more of” various vanity metrics.
Detailed, wins.
With the right metrics and analytics in place, it “pays” to be detailed oriented and actually check the details yourself. Too often, these duties are passed off to agency partners. While some agency partners have the right-skilled analytics folks to look at the data for you, most don’t have the desire to do more work than they are paid for. Sadly, if the client (the advertiser) appears to be happy with campaign performance and doesn’t ask for more details, why make the effort and show them analytics? So advertisers must look more closely at analytics for their own campaigns.
With detailed data, they can see if campaigns are actually performing — not the clicks and traffic stuff — but actually driving incremental business outcomes. If the campaigns are not, and if there is ad fraud observed, marketers can make tweaks themselves to optimize the campaigns while they are still running. It’s much like making small course corrections with tiny movements of the steering wheel when driving down the highway. You don’t make large turns. Having detailed analytics enables you to see whether there is any fraud impacting your campaigns — common send and your gut will tell you something needs to be further investigated. And it will tell you what is working or not working so you can make the small course corrections as you go.
Detail-oriented wins out over handing off your analytics and duties to someone else.
Good, wins.
While fraudsters “clean up well” and are the slickest of the slick salesmen, ad tech companies can only dupe clients into paying for their snake oil for so long. Sooner or later, when advertisers start looking at the right data in more detail, like we said above, they will realize the snake oil didn’t “cure the cancer” as it claimed. In fact, it WAS the cancer that was draining ad budgets — directly into the fraudsters’ pockets (as opposed to showing ads or doing better digital marketing). The fraudsters make a quick buck, sometimes gobs and gobs of it, “by hook or by crook.” They can fool enough advertisers enough of the time to take money off of them. And even when the are outed, they just change the name of the company or start another company and go back to doing what they do best. Yes, this has happened, A LOT, in ad tech. And we’re not even talking about the cases where fraud detection companies shake down clients and prospects — if you don’t pay us, we’ll lower your score, mark you as fraudulent, or remove you from lists.
In the long run, extortion, crime, and even petty theft, are not sustainable ways to do business. Doing good, and doing good business, are good for the long run, not to mention you sleep better at nights, not having to worry when you will be found out. Good, doing the right thing, is often harder and definitely takes more time and effort than stealing a quick buck. But good wins.
Trust, wins.
One you get good at doing good business for your clients, you also do good business for your business. You earn trust over time; you build real bridges with your clients, so they stick with you through good times and bad. They trust you to be stewards of their ad budgets, and to invest it wisely in marketing activities that drive real business outcomes for them, not vanity metrics reported on monthly spreadsheets.
Trust wins in the long term; and this brings us full circle to the first point – slow, wins. Trust is slow to build, but can be lost in an instant. If you invest in trust with your clients and partners, the pay off is over time; it’s not a lump sum pay-out, like one of the choices on a lottery ticket. Trust wins, and slow wins more. Earn it over time by building real relationships, even if short term metrics, and profits, are not as high.
Together, Everyone wins.
And finally, today, Democracy wins and decency wins. Hope and faith have hope again. Onward and upward for the United States of America, and for all citizens of humankind.
I am a digital marketer of 25 years. Now I help marketers audit their digital campaigns for ad fraud that isn’t caught by widely used ad verification services.
I have witnessed the entire arc of the evolution of digital marketing, since the mid-90’s. I taught classes in digital strategy at NYU’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies and Rutgers University’s Center for Management Development.
I have worked on the “client side” for American Express, and on the “agency side” as Group Chief Digital Officer of Omnicom’s Healthcare Consultancy Group and SVP Digital Strategy Lead at McCann Worldgroup/MRM Worldwide. I started my career in New York City with McKinsey & Company.
Sooner or later, most entrepreneurs have to face the reality that marketing is expensive. In the course of planning a new marketing campaign or trying to grow the business organically, you discover that to execute a strategy could cost thousands, or even tens of thousands of dollars, and to keep it going will cut into your bottom line.
Why is marketing so expensive? And is it really worth the cost?
What you’re paying for
Let’s start by explaining why marketing is so expensive. Generally, marketing costs account for things like:
Salaries and human labour. According to Glassdoor, the average marketing manager’s salary is $65,834 per year. Most marketing strategies require extensive planning and execution, requiring many people coordinating together. Many of these people are highly skilled and highly paid.
Limited resources. Some marketing campaigns depend on the use of finite resources, and at least some of these resources will be in high demand. For example, there are only so many billboards on the side of the highway; if a bidding war starts, it could drive up the price of advertising considerably.
Risk, failure, troubleshooting and support. Some marketers build in the cost of risk and failure; if their original efforts fail, they’ll need to double down and try again. We also need to consider costs for ongoing troubleshooting and support in addition to core marketing campaign costs.
Differences in price
It should also be obvious that different types of strategies will differ in price. Depending on your approach, marketing could end up being very cheap or ridiculously expensive, often based on variables that include:
Strategy choice. Some strategies are more expensive than others. TV ads are often expensive because of finite supply and high demand. By contrast, search engine optimization (SEO) is often less expensive because there are unlimited opportunities for development; that said, even SEO can be pricey under the right conditions.
Scale. Most marketing campaigns vary in scale; a small mom-and-pop business and a large corporation aren’t going to use the same tactics or the same number of resources. The larger your campaign is and the more people you’re trying to influence, the more you’re going to pay.
Freelance, in-house or agency. To execute a marketing campaign, you can do the work yourself, hire a freelancer, hire someone in-house or work with a professional agency. Each of these options has different costs, as well as different strengths and weaknesses. For example, working with a freelancer can help you save money, but it might be hard to find individuals who fit your needs, and they might not be reliable. An agency is more expensive, but it’s often worth the money because of its reliability.
Quality and experience. In marketing, you get what you pay for (at least most of the time). Individuals and agencies who have more experience and skill tend to charge more because of their abilities. Accordingly, in many cases, an expensive campaign is a good sign; it means you’re getting the quality work you need. Of course, there are exceptions, and it’s possible for high costs to be excessive.
The nature of ROI
One of the most important factors you’ll need to consider when budgeting for and planning your marketing campaign is your return on investment (ROI). In other words, how much value are you getting out of your campaign compared to what you’re putting into it?
In many cases, you won’t be able to concretely measure your ROI until you actually launch the campaign. However, you might be able to come up with a reasonable estimate that’s based on your past experience and the knowledge and experience of the professionals you’re working with.
Your ROI matters more than the absolute dollar amount you’re spending. For example, let’s say in campaign A, you spend $500 and generate $1,000 in revenue. But in campaign B, you spend $1,500 and generate $5,000 in revenue. Campaign B is objectively more expensive, but it also yields a much higher ROI, both proportionally and in total amount.
Because of this, you should never rule out the possibility of a campaign just because it’s expensive.
Operating with no marketing
We also need to consider the prospect of running a business without a marketing campaign. There are examples of businesses that have gotten successful without traditional marketing or advertising (including famous examples like AriZona Iced Tea). However, without marketing, you’ll be exclusively growing your business through word of mouth and reputation, which can take a long time and can be extremely unreliable. For most businesses, marketing and advertising are practically necessary for steady growth.
Is it worth it?
Is an expensive marketing campaign worth the seemingly excessive costs? The issue is far too complicated to reduce to a simple answer. However, in many cases, there are plenty of justifications for the high cost of marketing, and if you execute a reasonable campaign, you should be able to get a high ROI and more than make all your money back. Although some types of businesses can get away with little to no marketing, most companies will strongly benefit from a marketing investment — even if it looks costly on paper.
