Business News

GUEST BLOG: Turning ideas into invoices through marketing

By Business & Finance
03 May 2016

By Oisin Browne, author of The Binman’s Guide to Selling and The Binman’s Guide to Marketing

Marketing in business has one overall goal: to increase sales.

In today’s business world if you make special offers to increases sales, you create brand awareness to increase sales. Your PR machine works to create an image that too in turn, increases sales.

As someone who worked in sales before marketing, I have learned the benefits of targets and margins and the impact of being metric driven when working with a marketing budget and creating a target.

Marketing is an essential cog in the selling wheel of business. Sometimes, the marketing experts focus on so much of the aesthetics that the return on investment can be disappointing for the client.

If your marketing efforts are not focused on increasing sales you can end up doing a lot of costly and irrelevant work.

For me there are three key areas you need to focus on to help align your marketing and sales efforts and turn the ideas into invoices.

1. Calculate your customer acquisition cost

How much does it cost you to obtain one new customer? If you knew your cost per action or the return on your marketing spend before you started, it would possibly shape the strategy of all your future marketing activities.

The total cost connected to convincing a customer to purchase your product is your customer acquisition cost (CAC). When you know your CAC, you can evaluate the quantity of new customers needed to reimburse the delivery of your marketing efforts.

You can estimate the number of new customers needed to make X amount of margin. A lot of businesses simply don’t bother to work this out. Some business people work it out after their marketing campaign is long over. The right time to calculate your CAC is before you start any marketing activity.

Your CAC is the cost required for your research, time, all offline and online marketing expenditure, advertising, people and the products. The best way to estimate your CAC is your total marketing campaigns spend divided by the number of new customers within a particular timeframe.

The advantage of analysing the numbers on a day-to-day metric as it happens is that it will allow you to make better decisions. When you have this information on tap, you can adjust your spend accordingly and fine-tune your marketing strategy if the numbers aren’t stacking up.

Create a formula that suits you and your type of business. Strictly speaking, there is no right answer to the CAC question as marketing campaigns can have many hidden costs and different pricing models. Markets can be unpredictable.

Failure to properly look at your cost or budget your marketing plan could lead to problems

2. Cut your metrics to measure

Over spending and coming in over budget are worrying signs in any plan. We have all heard the saying, ‘What gets measured gets done.’ It’s no different in marketing. Measure everything everywhere. Pick the top five to 10 key performance indicators (KPIs) relevant to your goals.

If you have an online platform achieving zero to any other number, measure it. When you measure movement over a length of time you can pinpoint patterns that can accurately tell you where you are strong and where you need to change.

If you know how many visitors come to your website and how many are making purchases, when they are making purchases and where they are sourced, you can tweak your campaigns to speak and sell to a particular audience.

Link your marketing metrics to the bottom line to give your marketing activity a cost-effectiveness focus. Consider all measurable factors when creating your marketing KPIs.

You can divide your metrics into two divisions:

  • Qualitative metric (the experience)
  • Quantitative metric (the numbers)

The qualitative metric consists of brand awareness, customer satisfaction, goodwill and likeability. The numbers may not directly link to a sale but without it the sale may not happen. Also, within the digital field you have the qualitative measurement of engagement from reach to followers and subscribers.

If you have a website you need to measure visits against page click through rate, purchases and drop off rates. If you are running campaigns measure your cost per click, bounce rate and your conversion rate.

The quantitative metric includes statistics such as customer acquisition, expenses, sales, estimated margins, and profit and loss. Included in the quantitative metric is your digital metrics of website click-throughs to direct sales. You may argue you don’t need this because you are not really online. I would say that statement is an indicator of how much you need to focus on the digital arena.

When you have your marketing KPIs, follow each with a weekly action plan. The data is live and you need to react in real time to the data to have maximum impact. Remember, you can measure everything but that doesn’t mean you need to look at everything. Keep the metrics meaningful and relevant.

… team up and combine your marketing skills with those of an accountant to make sure that the numbers add up

3. Mind the money

The best marketing campaigns keep an eye on the budget and give a healthy return for their investment. Going over budget is not an option when it comes to your marketing spend unless you have a money tree planted in your garden.

Make a price plan and use it as a guideline. Don’t add to it because an agency tells you it would be great to get X, Y and Z and it will enhance the campaign. If anything, look at what you don’t need as opposed to what you need.

Failure to properly look at your cost or budget your marketing plan could lead to problems. Insufficient funding for such items as equipment or staff can become unwanted headaches for the whole business.

It is the lack of a suitably constructed marketing budget that dooms many marketing plans and campaigns. A marketing budget is the marketing plan written in terms of costs.

When it comes to creating a spend strategy for your marketing campaign, hold back a minimum reserve of 10% for emergency resources. If the plan is not working or if your competitor reacts, you will have finances to call on if needed.

Also, team up and combine your marketing skills with those of an accountant to make sure that the numbers add up. You need to know that the overall spend and predicted return is realistic.

Oisin BrowneAbout the blogger

Carving out a successful career from the back of the early morning bin truck isn’t exactly your typical office desk for a budding entrepreneur and author but this is exactly where Oisin Browne found himself just over 18 years ago.

His own business journey to date has spanned from the back of Galway city bin trucks to the expansion of The City Bin Co. in Ireland and the Middle East, alongside two literary offerings.

He has honed the skills and insights he has learned over the years and documented them in the hopes of inspiring and guiding young entrepreneurs and business people.