Everybody starts somewhere. Whether you are a booming business or a startup at some point you want to consolidate what you had been doing online. Not everyone starts on the right foot… Ah! Many businesses desperately spend their top dollars just to get enough customers and then they are stuck! (Not sure where to spend or just don’t have enough income to continue)
Whatever your case is if you missed on having a proper digital marketing plan I don’t blame you. When businesses start they operate in a chaotic environment. They do everything possible to land in leads and grow their businesses. It’s only after they start looking at the books they realize a need for tighter control on where their marketing budget is going…
Businesses often realize it after they set “scaling up” as their priority.
A business that is focused on scaling up needs couple of fundamentals in place… It doesn’t matter if you run offline or digital marketing you should have the following in full grasp
Cost per lead: This is the cost that you incur bringing in single lead or prospect. A potential customer warming up to the idea of using your product or service.
Cost per sale: This is the total cost that you incur to bring in a single sale.
With this ready, you have a baseline that you can possibly work on in improving both offline and online.
Any new marketing system that you test will have acceptance possibly when it breaks these two of your controls. Off-course there are other factors involved and many times the cost of online leads and sales may differ greatly from offline.
But its certain that you need these numbers on your fingertips if you are serious about scaling up.
Now you may ask what if I am an established business but don’t have that number or I am just starting?
Well, If you are an established business would suggest arriving at the costs as follows:
Cost per lead = Total Spend on Marketing or Advertising/Number of leads.
Cost per sale = Total spends on marketing or advertising/Number of sales.
I will come to a business starting fresh in a moment…before that, there are some challenges you will face.
A lot of businesses do varied offline advertising in a generic manner and have no way to zero in on what marketing effort brought what lead. You can change this with a bit of modification to your advertising/sales methods and convert them into a direct response ad or track them in a specific manner with help of references or tracking numbers. (More on that some other time)
But before you jump into “complete transparency” on your marketing budget it would be worthwhile to calculate your costs based on collective offline methods so that at least you have a number to look at when it comes to costs in terms of offline leads or sales.
On the digital side of marketing, this is comparatively easier as you can not just track your advertising methods but even go at the individual campaign levels.
O.K that was for a business looking at rationalizing there existing marketing efforts.
For someone who is starting fresh the thing about tracking/references to offline marketing or having a direct response copy is still applicable but it shall be easier to implement as you are aware of the challenges businesses would face. (For not having them in place)
On the side of digital marketing if you are starting fresh the data generated running campaigns over first few months will start giving you valuable pointers on your cost per lead and sale.
Hope that clarifies a way to track your expenses on Marketing both offline and online. If you are looking for any help in implementing a system to track your offline sales or putting up a digital marketing plan… look no further! I offer businesses 30 minutes free consult and you can claim it by clicking right HERE.