To spend money on Marketing or not?
There is no doubt that the business climate in Dublin is tough at the moment. A lot of people are telling me that they are cutting costs to the bone, delaying payments and generally trying to be a lean as possible. As a marketing guy you probably expect me to say “Increase spending on every type of marketing”
Well I hate waste as much as anybody so I won’t say that. I think you should look very carefully at your marketing budget and figure out where your new business comes from. Is there a match? I’m a great believer in the 80/20 rule.
Sometimes businesses spend money on marketing for historical reasons, well there is no room for that anymore. Lots of Advertising people talk about brand awareness but any Advertising that brings in 100s of queries that doesn’t result in a sale are worse than useless. Those queries just get in the way.
Each cent should bring a reward and the best way to measure that is by looking at sales. Compare your sales figures to your marketing campaigns and map the peaks AND the troughs. If your sales cycle is fairly long then the least you should measure is “Qualified Leads”.
Lots of businesses did very well in the boom years without any real marketing systems. The result is that many do not have a way of tracking what impact marketing campaigns have. But times have changed, good leads are harder to find and without good information it is impossible to make valid decisions about what works and what doesn’t.
The good news is you can implement a system for tracking leads quickly and easily. Once you have the system in place you see that you now have a list of unconverted prospects which can be a very useful side effect. You can develop a system in-house or you can out-source, it doesn’t really matter how you do it, just do it!
Once you have that system in place then you can spend each cent in a way that maximises its return to you.
So should you spend money on marketing? My answer: Spend money where you get the biggest result.
For help and assistance with this or for any of your marketing needs, please give me a call. I’m very happy to discuss how we could help you further.
Best wishes
Mike Spratt
www.rapidbusinessgrowth.ie
Phone: +353 1 491 3328
Tags: Budgets, Business Development, Dublin