Developing Your Marketing Strategy

In this post I’ll cover the three keys to an efficient effective marketing strategy.

1. How does your cost per customer for marketing compare to your profit per customer?

An efficient marketing campaign is one where the profit gleaned from the customers is higher than the cost of the marketing.

A very basic example using an Adwords campaign:

You set up a Google Adwords campaign that costs you £100. You send 100 customers to a sales page and five people buy your eBook that costs the buyer £30. You make £150 in sales which is a £50 profit. This is an efficient ad campaign.

If you’d run the same campaign and only sold three eBooks you would have made only £90. £10 less than you’d spent. This is an inefficient ad campaign.

Of course this is only a very basic example and doesn’t take into account repeat purchases from that customer. To get a more accurate figure you’d need to figure out the expected profit made from a customer over their lifetime, their lifetime value (LTV).

Also, your ‘cost’ won’t always relate to pounds and pence. Online marketing such as blogging and social media often costs very little or nothing but it does take time, and the cost of that time needs to be factored in to your costs. Knowing your own hourly rate (or the hourly rate of your staff) will help you work out whether your efforts are efficient or not.

2. Is your marketing strategy providing you with a constant flow of custom?

An effective marketing campaign is one that meets the business’ objectives. The objective of a marketing campaign is ultimately to provide your business with customers for its products and services. Remember these customers can be new or existing. Unfortunately existing customers can often be forgotten in many marketing strategies but ignore them and your bottom line will suffer. It is estimated that it costs six times the amount of money to attract a new customer than it does to persuade an existing one to make a repeat purchase.

Look after your existing customers and they will look after you!

3. Is your marketing strategy providing a fair value exchange?

Put yourself in your customers’ shoes for a moment. Does your marketing represent a fair value exchange for them? Of course when they exchange money for your product or service this is a fair value exchange but what are you giving them in return for their attention or their contact details? Marketers now have to be more sophisticated than ever, the value exchange can be a free product, humour, education, a discount or simply entertainment.

A successful campaign is one that sticks out from the crowd and offers a good value exchange in the eyes of the consumer.

Start tracking your marketing expediture and your return on investment (ROI). Drop campaigns that are inefficient. Launch more of the type of campaigns that work. Always track your results and adjust as required.