Welcome to the Mastering the Art of Marketing, Forecasting & Budgeting.
It’s quite interesting how I’ve sort of struggled with the two sectors. But it’s more and more becoming more important as marketing systems become more complex, as you need to use more resources like email, websites, social media, paid advertising, etc. You do need to do some more joined up thinking and that needs to tie back to a financial model.
Okay, so how do we develop the model in the first place?
First of all, we look at “Why have a budget?” Well, it’s about controlling that we spend. I don’t know about you guys, but I know we’re in fairly economic turbulent times. We did restructure the business during the summer, in order to cope with increasing demand for more specialist services. So, we’re more of an agency associate model now than and we were just a team of people in Manchester, still got some of the team, we’ve also now got about 10 to 15, very highly specialized specialists that we tap into. I think that’s going to be the model going forwards for any business, especially sort of marketing where, you know, we offer outsource marketing management. And it’s important, we deliver exactly what the client wants, not what we’ve got resources for. And working with the global associate audience has given us that. But we do we do have to control spending as anybody else does.
You know, we need to know what your limits are.
The old fraying of “Turnover is vanity, profit is sanity, reality is cash”. Which is important thing – reality. So, it’s important that you know what you can spend. It provides a focus. I was doing ours this morning going through all the spend, and going through going well, what are we buying paying for this? Why are we buying this, etc. It’s very easy, especially in slightly larger companies, and we’re not a huge company. But we’re about a quarter million-pound mark. It’s very easy for extra cost to creep in, that you don’t know about. And so, you need to know what’s being spent and how effective that spend is. Is that money being spent sensibly? And therefore, you get financial certainty.
So, what is a financial model?
I was conscious when I was doing this. I use business financial modelling all the time. But if you’re not into finance and things like that, well it can be a spreadsheet or an app, which takes the resources and lets you simulate various options. And you’ve probably all played around with spreadsheets, putting in your budget, putting in and so on. And if you ever speak to an accountant, because they don’t really know much about marketing, they’ll just put one line of budget. Well, it needs to be a lot more complicated than that, in order for you to understand what’s working, and what’s not working. And hence, why we developed the model. We initially used to use spreadsheets with clients. But now we’ve got the model to work with.
Okay, so you can imagine, most companies sell quite a lot of things, especially if you’re an E-commerce company, you might have several thousand products. But it’s really interesting. One of the things I love about data is that if you have enough of it, you can get sensible averages out of it. So actually, you can model this on the average sale value. Now, most e-commerce businesses, most accounting packages, will give you this number straightaway. And basically, it’s you know, if you add up, if you take or add up all your sales, and then divide by the total number of orders, that will give you your average sale value. Now, it sounds a bit arbitrary, but actually, it works. And you’d be surprised what that number is.
So, the other thing that customers need to take into account. And this is, you know, what is the lifetime value of a customer. If you’re selling washing machines – washing machines lasts between seven and 12 years, depending on the maker, etc. You know, so for a sort of company selling washing machines, the lifetime value is actually quite low, because only buying a washing machine £500 every seven or 10 years. If you’re in Tesco, or any of the supermarkets you walk into that supermarket, you automatically have a quarter million-pound lifetime value on your head. So, when somebody changes from Tesco, Sainsbury’s or whatever, as a quarter million pounds, it’s just dropped out that business, it’s quite interesting when you think about it.
So yeah, we’ve all moved to whether we like it or not recurring revenue type models for buying software. And the game is if you can, in your business, if you can create some recurring model yourself, because then the return, lifetime value becomes a lot higher. And then it makes a lot easier when you’re trying to acquire a customer. So, if the lifetime value is, say, three years for a software-based product, then you can add up that three years. So, the acquisition costs can be quite a bit more than the initial subscription cost, prime revenue. So, it’s an important thing to think of what is the lifetime value of your average customer, and maybe have your best type of customers, or maybe your worst type of customers. So, you can see where you can put your effort into.
Breakeven points really important.
You know, what is your breakeven point? When I’m working with clients, because they don’t always know the profitability. And what we do is every year we say, right, okay, what’s the breakeven point now? What revenues do you need to bring in, in order to cover your costs? And then all I have to do then when I meet up with a client is say, “Well, what was your revenue?” Because I know, what the breakeven point is. So, I know whether in profit or loss without having to go “What’s the profit this month?” Because they may not know. Work with your accountant and find out what your breakeven point is.
And then if you’re below breakeven point, what do you need to do? In order to get past that, that’s another super important point, you got to know what that is. Obviously, when you’re calculating breakeven, it’s also based on your direct costs, it’s easy if most of your costs are overhead, if you’re a small sort of business. But if you also got variable costs in there, then it is a bit more complex. And especially if you’ve got a mix of, we’ve got a customer who’s got some services that 75% gross margin and then and some that are 50%, gross margin. And so that mix will also change breakeven. And that’s where you end up sometimes having a conversation with your accountant because it’s faster to deal with, to talk to them about it. But it’s very important, you need to know, on sort of what your average is.
Burn rate.
So, this is, when you’re launching a new product or service, you need to sort of take into account the fact that it will burn money. So even if your existing company, the opportunity cost loss, because you’re working on something else means that you know, it will be consuming money, you may not be able to see it. And it may be that your wages, but because you’re developing a new product, you’re not out there selling you know, they’re networking and gaining more customers for your existing. So, it applies not only to new companies, but it also needs to be borne in mind when you’re working, even you’re existing company. I mean, for example, as developing our app has sought took quite a lot of my time, that’s time I’ve not been networking, time I have not been in front of customers and so on. So, there is a cost, and we call it burn rate.
If you’re a startup working with investment, then you’re literally burning through money. And you’ve got to be able to control that. I’ve been with one company where they had to go for three around investment because the business owner kept changing his mind, and kept changing the design of the systems that we’re doing. And that kept putting them back instead of launching, getting some money in and then fixing it. He wanted it to be perfect. And perfect is the enemy of any of launching any business. Because if you keep working for that perfection, it’s longer you’re burning cash, etc., etc. So, if you are burning or launching something new, do calculate the burn rate, and then ask yourself – “Is it sustainable?” And if not, what’s your contingency, what you’re going to do. Are you going to slow down the product development? Are you gonna go out and get some bank funding? Are you going to get an overdraft? But you must always be planning that.
We’re going to just step into the Step by Step by Guide.
Now, this is where we are going to get sort of hurt your brains a little bit, I’m afraid. I’ve tried to keep it as simple as possible. This is the model that’s actually embedded into our app. And this is the model we’ve used in spreadsheets with when we’ve been working with funded high growth startups.
So hopefully, you’re all familiar with the term “Return on Investment”. This is a principle that every pound (£) you spend on marketing, there should be an associated rise in sales of some kind. And it may be delayed. So in marketing, it’s often delayed. Although marketing is often used in digital marketing, especially when you spend some money on Google advertising, and you’ve got an E-commerce site, that that translation is quite quick. If you’re doing PR, for example, brand awareness and so on, it may take a lot longer, networking’s exactly the same. And we’re going to look at these different elements to get you to see that you know, that the model has to take that time delay into account.
So typically, in E-commerce in crude terms – if you spent £20, you are kind expecting to get about £100 of sales, because don’t forget £100 of that sales, 40% could well be the cost of those products. You’ve then got a delivery which is around about 10%. And if you’re spending 20% on your advertising, we’re quickly running out of money to spend to buy overheads and to give you a profit.
That’s why although e-commerce businesses sound really exciting and really fun, they’re not the most profitable businesses in the world, because of their margins. And if you then sell to Amazon and eBay, those percentages get a lot higher. What they take for putting you on the platform. So, that cost of acquisition is very important, you need to know whatever business you’re in, how much does it cost to acquire customers, because we then go back to the lifetime value. So, if the lifetime value is saying £1,000 and it cost you £500, so it’s not going to work. But if it costs you £50, to get £1,000 lifetime value, then that’s fine. And you should have an idea of what your lifetime value of your customers are.
So, this is where we kind of hit the brain a little bit. So, we’ve got whatever the marketing activity costs, multiplied by a percentage conversion ratio, which we’re going to do a deep dive into in a minute. And then the average value of a conversion. And if you remember, we calculated what the average order value is. So, you then get the potential sales from the marketing activity. And that’s the basic model, it gets a little bit complicated, because we’ve got to take some time, delays into account. But that’s the fundamental principle, you spend some money, you have a conversion ratio, and we’re going to be talking about what those might be. And multiplied by the average value, that’s going to be what that potential sales can be.
And with some, like Google advertising, whether you meet effects quite immediate, you spend some money. People click on it, you pay that money, they go onto your website, a certain percentage will buy a product turns into money, and we can do reports and stuff like that quite easily on that sort of thing. And, you know, it’s a very easy, direct relationship, some of the other stuff a little bit less direct.
So, we’re going to look at what’s actually involved, what are all those costs. We’ll, you’ve got the initial setup costs, maybe building website, for example, doing a video, etc. And then if you work with an agency, there’ll be some monthly management costs. If you’re not working with agency, you’ve still got salary costs. Salary costs are not hidden. Even if you’ve got an apprentice that is costing you money for them to do whatever it is they’re going to do. And if you’re using LinkedIn, or if you’ve got a website, LinkedIn Sales Navigator as a cost, Hootsuite, Social Champ – these social media things, we must spend about £2000/month on systems to manage all the client information. Then you’ve actually got to spend itself, if you’re on Google Ads, Facebook, TikTok Ads, and so on. And sometimes there’s not that cost there. So, it’s search engine optimization, it might be that you pay an SEO company £500 to £800 pounds a month, and they they’ll do work on an ongoing basis. But then with SEO, it does take time for that to kick in. So, the conversion ratio of spend to signups can be a bit lower. I’m going to go into that in a minute.
One of the things that I’ve always looked at is why only a small percentage, whenever you do any marketing, there’s only a small percentage that actually converts to sales. And I thought I must have come across something new and I was just doing some research and then boom, here it is – Buyers pyramid. if you Google buyers pyramid, only 3% of your market. And this is borne out in what I’ve seen over the years and even when we had things like you know, when we posted mailshots 20, 30 years ago. Now, we put stamps on things and send them out in the post and I never understood why that number is so consistent. It’s even consistent in all the digital marketing so forth. If you get 3% click through on an email marketing campaign you’ve done well and it’s because only 3% of your market actually in open you know. Ready to buy, they’re ready to do something. And it’s surprising when you talk to the stats with people, you go “Gosh! I didn’t realize that.” But if you want to know the science behind, it’s called a Buyers Pyramid just Google it, fascinating.
Here, onto the Conversion Ratios.
So, obviously as an agency, we look after quite a few marks, email campaigns. We also as a coach, digital coach, help other people do their marketing and with outsource marketing management, and on average, and if you can Google this “Marketing”, and we see it all the time. But email marketing operates 18%, there have to be a really collected audience to get higher than 80. And then from that, you get about 2%, click through. So, if you’re on a really engaged audience, say, for example, I always recommend manufacturers to email on a regular basis, offers ideas, innovations to their distributors. Those will get bigger stats than that, but if you’re doing it to a relatively warm audience. If you did on a cold audience, those numbers plummet to round about 5% and probably .1%, numbers really do drop like a stone. And of course, it’s how well targeted your mailshot. If you’ve got a fairly diverse customer base, then you should segment that database into the different sectors, because people only want to read what’s really relevant to them.
Google search, because again being an agency, I get probably about every month 30 odd reports of Google Search console of number impressions. That’s time since it’s been displayed on Google, against how many people have actually then clicked through on that on that link. And yep 2%, it doesn’t work. We’ve got some clients doing millions of impressions a month, and some are doing a few. Stats doesn’t change, it’s back to the buyers pyramid. When I get chance, I’ll do some more research on it, because I find it absolutely fascinating. I get see lots of stats and 2% is a very difficult barrier to get above on Google. So those numbers, you know, you’ve got to do a lot of stuff in order to get some traffic. So, that’s why if you’re a niche industry with very few competitors, then obviously those numbers can improve. And they can improve quite a big margin. But the majority of people, it’s 2%.
On Ad spend. Again, this is very much a generalization. But if you spend £1,000 – it’s a £ per click. You’ll get 30 people clicking through, it’s just the way it is. And that’s why, when you’re spending on Ads, you’ve got to make sure that they are set up correctly. And 2% of web traffic, again, will convert. So, if you’ve got thousand people on your website, you might get 20 inquiries. It depends how focus your website is. How easy is for them to navigate your website. We’re doing some research.
We use a thing called Semrush, which is a SEO type management package. And there’s a thing called “intentional keywords”. What’s their intention? Is it just information? Is it commercial? What’s the traffic? And the bulk of traffic queries that are going through are not monetary, not looking to do something now, they’re just getting information. And if you want to improve any of this, any of these things, like I said, you’ve got to improve the audience.
Easier to deal with email marketing, a lot harder to do with these. But it does depend, say on search. How well the site’s been optimized. Are you targeting the right keywords? Are you writing stuff that target buyer intent keywords. Keyword where the buyer is actually looking to do something. The longer keyword search, the more intent there is.
So, you can improve your conversion ratios. Look at your demographic, look at what their background is, what their goals are, is there a certain personality to those? Where I’m playing around with TikTok at the moment and I’ve gone for quite a well breakdown a generation. But a Baby boomer type approach, very sensible, very straightforward. Whereas if you look at the other sort of people do marketing and so forth on TikTok, is very much more Gen Z, and very much more interaction, and so on.
So, it’ll be interesting to see how that experiment goes. And that sometimes you do have to experiment, especially with things like TikTok, because the rules aren’t written yet. People think they’re written but I don’t think they are. We’ve got a client who trains coaches, and he’s doing a daily I think, a little stand-up chat to a camera. And so, I’m very interested to see how that develops. You know, what works and what doesn’t work at the moment on TikTok. I think, is still open. The other channels like Instagram, and websites and so forth is pretty much we know what you’ve got to do. But, look at what their challenges are? What are their pain points? What are their major fears? How do they buy, you know?
Different generations, we’ve got Alpha generation coming up behind Gen Z, so it’ll be another set of rules. Because each of them has been more and more embedded into technology, and digital life. So that changes people’s buying behavior. There’s a whole generation that doesn’t watch live stream TV, live TV. So that’s a real challenge for people with doing TV ads, and so on. How do you sell to somebody bought a TV ad, which is what you normally do, like your cars and things, if they don’t watch live TV. Now, I know, I watch stuff on all four, on the app, and then they force you to watch the Ads, because we have the free one. But on things like Disney and all those Netflix and so on, we don’t get Ads because we pay for it. So yeah, things are changing.
So, we now think about the actual tasks that you would do in your marketing. And that’s not just digital marketing, it’s also, sort of networking, good networking. As I said, the business network up Lancashire does a great job. You know, there’s shout and, you know, BNI is a bit marmite, but it works very well for some. So, you know, these all require money, and they all require time, all of which is in short, short supply. So, you’ve got to get that return on investment. You can’t just go to these things and keep going. And if they don’t give you a return, then you should be looking at other things – conferences, exhibitions. So, I’m one of the keynote panelists on the thing on Manchester, on Friday, at a FinTech conference tomorrow.
So, some of this stuff does work, but you got to look at what your return is. So, we’d expect you know, a mix of these things when working with clients. But notice, you look at all these you think, actually do I do all these? You know, I do look after my website, and so on. Do I do some keyword research? Really important for you start building a website, do some keywords, because you want to be writing about stuff that your target audience wants. And you’ve got to know what your target audience wants in the first place. But some people don’t, as I found out the other day.
What I’ve done in order to produce a model? I’ve got to break things down so on and so we’ve got assets like website, E-book, calculators. Alone, if you put a website up these days, it will not produce any sales guaranteed. I know I spoke to some of you only about a year ago. And they were saying “Well, I can’t put my website up.” Well, I get flu, and said “I’ll be down there packing the boxes with you if you do get uploaded” because that’s never going to happen. Just get the thing up and start talking to people.
Assets don’t in themselves, don’t generate anything. You can’t say I spent 5,000 on the website, and I’ll get “X” back. It isn’t gonna happen. It’ll will just sit there and do nothing.
Advertising if you want the fastest way to get something in, if you if it works for your industry, it doesn’t work for everybody – Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Facebook Boosting, Instagram Ads, TikTok Ads. They’re all about getting somebody, attracting them, taking them to a shop. Or converting them into an inquiry, if you’re an inquiry form or downloading an E-book or whatever it is at the start of your marketing fund. And those are the easiest to measure because the time delays are quite short.
And you’ve got email marketing, which we call Promotional. And there, it’s not the spend that’s important, it’s the volume and the quality of the database. So, we have to twist the model just a bit to cope with that.
And then you’ve got Activity – this is where: Search engine optimization, PR, networking, conferences. We’ve acquired, after several years of doing stuff on LinkedIn and people remember you. Remember the buyers period? They may not be ready, but because your brands out there, and that’s why PR and social media are so important. They won’t always be immediate. You should never do social media, by the way, to get an immediate effect. Unless it’s through a Facebook Ad or boosting a Facebook post. If you just put organic stuff out, it is not likely to turn into a sale.
I’m a Kayak instructor, and I do run our club’s website. That’s the way it is different. We get a lot of people, lot of community stuff going around the web. The club has something special happened and we do get an increase in inquiries. There is a bit of a delay. We won the world championship called court racing. And a week so ago there was loads and loads of stuff on our social media, we’ve had about five or 10 people signed up since then. So, this stuff, sometimes it does work. But if you want it guaranteed, then you need to put money in the pot to do that.
Okay, so we’re looking at Type of Cost.
So, we’ve got the Setup Cost – that’s just setting up by building a website, etc. You’ve got the Activity Cost – it’s either gonna be an Agency, or it could be an Employee. But there is a cost and activities cost where you will not get any return. You can’t say, “My apprentice cost 2,000 a month; I’m gonna get £10,000 pounds worth of sale”. It doesn’t work, so you can’t include that. You then got the Systems Costs – Web hosting, Sales Navigator. Like you say, you might use Social Champ or whatever, or a program to do the posting, etc. So, there’s those sorts of systems costs to take into account. And then you’ve got whether that activity is like Google Ads, or whether it’s like MailChimp, where you’re just posting stuff out. The activity gives an expected return.
One of the things that people don’t always think about is Dependencies. How one thing’s linked to another. You can put it into a spreadsheet into right okay. For say, content management, you need to done the keyword management first, can’t just go write articles as a waste of time. Can’t build the website until you done the content management. What do you want to say to these people? What’s important? Can’t do SEO, unless you go to website. Can’t do a Webchat, without looking at a website, and so on.
So, there are certain building blocks. And it’s a bit like building a house, you can’t put the roof on if you haven’t got the walls. And we use a thing called “Creately”, to do flowcharts, fantastic piece of software. Love it. Very cheap, but it allows you to put flowcharts together. And typically, if you actually thought about the joined-up marketing, if you really want to say “Right, we want to grow our company.”, that’s the kind of thing you’re gonna need to be thinking about. You know, I’ve just spent last week building automated reporting, because we need more clients and ourselves need more and more in-depth reporting. So, Google have launched a thing or lots while back, a thing called Looker, well Data Studio. It was now Looker Data Studios. And we’ve actually found a specialist who’s really good at putting quite detailed reports together, because it’s not the easiest piece of software I have to say.
You can use some generic ones but if you really want depth out of it and real understanding of things be reported to you. So, you can do the analytics, then it’s worth spending a few quid with them. And we’ve also use SEMrush, so we’ve done quite a lot of reporting on. So, we’ve got a lot more transparency to what we do. And so, we can actually then have these discussions with clients. “This month, we’re going to focus on this. This month, we’re going to focus on that.” And that applies to your internal teams as well. You know, salary costs for digital people, or marketing people in general, are expensive. You got to make sure that everybody’s focused on the right jobs. But you can see how each of these things build from each other, you’ll be able to get a better look in the slide deck, which will be posted up in a couple of days.
Okay, so this is where we expand on model of work. We’ve got our activity spend. I’m going to just gloss over this one and show you the spreadsheet, and I’m going to show you some more detail ones, but we’re now building up. So, we’ve now put this, we’ve got the spreadsheet, if anybody’s interested, I’m happy to send you the spreadsheet. So, we’ve got all our marketing resource down the left-hand side. What type it is? What type it’s governing, what the calculation is? So, if there’s an asset, as you can see, there’s no conversion. But if you’ve got the Ad spend, which is this green, it’s then turning into conversions a month. Here, we’ve just used an average sale of £100 pounds. So, we’ve had 40 conversions, average value £100 – so, we’ve made £4,000. Minis obviously just dummy numbers. And then for email marketing, that’s all about promotional. So, then it’s how many people are attending and what that conversion is. So, for here where we count for SEO, public relations, social media, etc., they will over time develop stuff, develop inquiries. So, you can’t say it’s not going to be any. So, we’ve got lower percentages in here, and that then gives us some numbers. And these numbers are obviously are lower than these numbers, because these are more direct push approaches. These are more inbound approaches.
And what you can do is with the real detailed reporting, you can go right, okay, we’ve spent this on this. And this is what we’re getting back from it. And it will tell you, you know, the reporting will tell you how many inquiries you’ve had from organic search, how many from paid search. How many from email, and, you know, with the changes, because Google made some changes from what’s called Universal Analytics to what’s called GA 4 Analytics in around about July. If your web designer or marketing person has not told you about these things, and has not adjusted things, then you may not be getting the right data through. So, it’s worth having a conversation with them. Because then you can feed that back into saying, well, actually, we had three inquiries that resulted in that sales.
Oh, by the way, one of the things you do need to ask when people buy from you, if they’re buying from the phone, is try and find out where they heard from you. What was it they were doing when they decided to pick up the phone. Fortunately, these days, less people are using the phone, it’s more digital, so we can actually track it just with gear. But there are sophisticated phone systems as well for picking this kind of thing. Depending on the size of business. If you’re a big business, you can do a lot with phone technology these days.
Okay, so we’re going to look at the formula for Assets. Just having an asset doesn’t mean sales. And, so for financial modelling purposes, it’s simply an overhead cost that reduces a gross profit. If you look at the formula for advertising, so this is a critical one to be honest, because advertising if it works for your business, doesn’t work for everybody business. You can’t go, “Let’s go and do Google Ads”, because it gives you the quickest return, might not work for your business as quite a few that don’t. Clearly give it a try, but do it on a small-scale basis. But there is a saying that there is like a flow: if you don’t spend enough, even initially, it’s not enough to give you the correct data. And you’re looking at probably about £500 a month now or even higher to £500,000.
So, we’ve got Marketing Spend – what you spend on Google, what the ratio is. So, if you got 1,000 people sort of seeing it, how many will then click through which will be round about, say we’ll call it 10% or 1%. How much to pay on that click, it’s £1. And then that gives you the cost. Sorry I clicked too many.
So, we’ve got £1,000 pounds cost per click, so call it a pound, it won’t be that far off for quite large companies. So that’s 1,000 clicks, what’s percentage, let’s call it 1%. It could be a little bit more to one, so 1%, then click through. So, 10 click through, what’s the average volume conversion, it’s £10 or whatever. And that gives you the potential sales and the marketing activity.
Promotion, which is where you’re doing a mailshot. So, it’s all based on the number of emails sent on your conversion ratios, remember, 20% opened 2% actually did something multiplied by your value conversion. And every time you put a step in, by the way, there’s this very heavy cost of paying conversion ratio. Unless you’ve really got a good video, your done what’s called conversion ratio optimization, which is a whole lot in itself. This is a spends a little bit less complicated. Not pay per click, and just paying activity, conversion ratio and value conversion. But your conversion ratio is about .1, or even 0.05%. Depending on, you know. So, for SEO, for example, if you’ve got a website has been an SEO for, say, two years or whatever, you know that could be quite a high figure. But if you’re just starting out on the SEO, it’ll be extremely low figure.
So, you then in a spreadsheet with all your input costs, and this is where the app comes in, because when I started then talking to people about this, everybody’s eyes glazed over, which I’m sure yours probably are as well. And which results in the output sales. Our vision app does all that. So, you might end up with something like this, this is a startup. So, they spend, spend, spend. It’s a cumulative cash flow. And then hopefully, at some point, it goes, “Yeah, we’re getting more sales, and we are costs, and we recover through the outside.” And, this is the rate of burn this bit here. And this is the length of burn. Okay. And this works for new products or services that you’re building on an existing business, it will be costing you money, even if there’s an opportunity cost. And just say it’s safe to remind you everybody that no plan survives first contact with reality.
So, the whole point of a business model is that you iterate it to what it needs to be. And that can take 12 months, you know. Looking at the stats every month, looking at what sales are, making sure you collecting all the stats, because that’s the one of the biggest issues, actually collecting that raw data. And then feeding it back and saying. Well, actually, we had this amount of organic traffic, and we got this sales from the organic traffic, and we got this sales from the paid for traffic. And so, you know, if you do an exhibition or a conference or a network, you know, how many business cards did you get? How many people did you follow up with, how many one-to-ones did you get out of it? And then you can work backwards. And you got to collect this data, if you’re actually going to do this stuff and make sense of this stuff.
So, some Actions. The first thing to do is bring together all the costs of your digital marketing or marketing into a spreadsheet by month. And as I say, in a few months’ time, you’ll be able to do this with our vision app. We’ve had to create it separately to Vision2Success because marketing consultants are telling us that if they’re going to use the app, they didn’t want to see all the stuff that we’re doing here. So, it’s now a separate completely separate brand. And it will have its own marketing channels and so on.
But you’ll have the app to do all this for you. But it equally works in that spreadsheet which if you email me, I’m happy to give you.
So, enter what your costs are, your average cost per click and so on. Look at the analytics, get the conversions and then create a value and now should be able to compare actual revenue with predicted. And so, if you’re keen to get going straight away, send me an email and I’ll send you the spreadsheet. If you’re happy to wait, then the vision app will do all this for you. And then, of course, like any business, you should review everything.
