Planning Your Marketing Budget for 2017 - 2 Ways to Spend it Wisely

Like it or not, 2017 is coming! 

This is the time of year when I start getting calls from business owners and marketing leaders looking at their budgets realizing two things:

1. They have a marketing budget surplus
2. They came nowhere near hitting their marketing goals for THIS year

They had plans to spend more to grow more, but when initial investments in quick-growth strategy like PPC ads didn't pan out the way they should have, they were easy to abandon, so at least money wasn't being wasted.

The problem, however, is that now you're faced with the same dilemma as last year... You want to grow, you have the money, but you don't have a plan you feel confident in.

I can help you with that. Here are 2 things you can invest in TODAY, so that by this time next year you'll be looking at how to build on 12 months of progress instead of looking for new ways to recover.

Start by letting go of conventional thinking when it comes to marketing.

A lot of the complaints I receive from business owners and marketers is that past investments haven't gone well, so why should they now?

A couple of thoughts on that - first of all, we're not talking about reinventing the wheel, and there are no crazy, esoteric formulas to what we do. However, much like the iPhone reinvented the mobile technology industry, what I'm suggesting today did the exact same thing for digital marketing.

1: Your Website

I know you hate hearing this, but your website is broken. Okay, well, let me back it up first and ask you a few questions...

1. Are you satisfied with your website's monthly traffic?
2. Are you satisfied with the quality and volume of leads from your website?
3. Is your website helping you grow your client base?

If you answered "yes" or "I don't know" to any of those questions, it's broken. Sorry. 

But before you start down the rabbit hole of spending $50,000 on a website that may or may not improve those answers after a 6 - 12 month launch period, let me propose a different idea... Growth Driven Design.

Did you notice how I didn't even mention anything about the way it looks or feels or what features it has or how it "gets across your brand message?" That's because those things are impossible to measure, and really, they are quite the distraction to what we can ACTUALLY accomplish with a good website.

Back to Growth Driven Design - the methodology was invented by Hubspot Partner, Luke Summerfield, in an effort to fix the broken process of website design. The idea is to put the users first, not features, and using the agile scrum process, launch quickly and improve over time.

Instead of a monstrous launch that goes 200% over budget and 6 months past its due date, we launch quickly (2 months or less) with only the "must-haves," knowing that it's not going to be perfect, but that we will improve it over time. Data and direct user feedback dictate our priorities and strategy, not hunches and personal opinions.

(Learn more about Growth Driven Design)

2: Inbound Marketing

You've probably heard this term more than once in the last 12 months. Inbound marketing - but what is it, exactly?

Simply put, it's a marketing methodology that attracts visitors to your website, qualifies and converts the BEST traffic into leads through gated content offers, and nurtures them through email automation and sales integration.

Attract:

• SEO (more like this: What Does SEO Stand For?)
• Social media
• Blogging

Convert:

• Gated content offers
• Landing pages
• Calls to action

Close:

• Email sequences
• Sales alerts
• CRM integration
• Lead scoring

There is a formula, and if we know your end-game goals, we can help you come up with a plan that uses milestones to get you there.

For example, let's say your growth objective is 10% total sales YOY and your revenue is $10,000,000, that means we have a $1,000,000 gap to fill. Now, let's peel that back and determine how many customers you need to hit that number. We work mostly with B2B, so let's say each customer is worth $10,000 annually, that means we need 100 or about 9 new customers per month.

Okay, we can work up to that, because we know that with inbound, you can expect to convert between 2 and 5% of all website visitors into leads. We also know that we can convert 2 - 10% of your leads into customers, so from there we can build targets that we can work towards as marketers.

CONCLUSION:

Your website re-development doesn't have to be as painful as it has been in the past, and with GDD, you'll never have to revamp it again, because you never stop maintaining and improving! And your investment in digital marketing (inbound) can actually be great too. Not only will you get a transparent view of where your marketing investment is being applied, but you'll have tangible assets, AND a methodology that is built around real business objectives.

To learn more, schedule a free inbound marketing or Growth Driven Design assessment today!