Create your very own Auto Publish News/Blog Site and Earn Passive Income in Just 4 Easy Steps
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Money can often be the barrier that keeps you from being stuck where you are or breaking through to the next level. This includes whether or not you have a budget, using it correctly, hidden revenue, or even misaligned goals – all of which affect your growth curve. These four shared secrets have helped my company take our clients to the next level.
1. Financial transparency for ROI
The first blind spot we often see with new clients is that there is no clear connection between your tools (like ads) and a CRM like HubSpot to see which channels are driving the highest ROI (return on investment). Do you know your best performing channels? Or your best performing sales copy? Which document is most likely to be opened and result in a deal?
And we're not just talking about marketing and sales; this applies to many connected platforms – for example, closed-loop sales or your ERP systems. If things aren't connected, they're disjointed and siloed. You end up flying blind. If you don't connect your marketing tools to your sales tools, and that's CRMs, financial platforms, ERPs, to name a few, there's a disconnect and the arms and legs end up moving in different directions.
Here's a simple example we see all the time: If you knew that a channel was driving more deals with a 75% faster conversion rate, wouldn't you invest more time and energy into that channel than one that only had a 10% conversion rate? Many people don't want to share revenue numbers within the company, but all that information informs the other departments; without sharing those revenue numbers, your money secret remains hidden in hidden silos.
Related: I Reached $100 Million in Annual Revenue Through Greater Transparency – Here Are the 3 Strategies That Helped Me Succeed
2. Strategic investments to avoid blind spots
Another financial blind spot is not investing in marketing. We've had prospects with no budget and no internal marketing team, but we want to grow 150% and spend $1,000 total. I wish that kind of growth was possible, but unfortunately it isn't. The old adage that you get what you pay for, or that it takes money to make money, speaks the truth. Your investment goals should match your growth goals. The amount of money invested should not only be measured by short-term, quick wins, but also by long-term investments in growth.
You would never measure an HR department solely by the number of new hires. However, if you look at the bigger picture of longevity alongside many other important KPIs, you wouldn't employ an HR department for a few months. It's something constant and needs care and attention. Marketing is no different – if you measure marketing solely by the number of leads, you're missing the bigger picture. Marketing helps drive leads through nurture campaigns, creates automation, lead scoring, creates new campaigns and testing, supports sales enablement activities, and many other components. A buying cycle is rarely a straight line of click and buy, unless we're talking about Amazon.
However, everyone has a budget, margins and reserves to stick to. I'm not saying you should throw your budget out the window, but your goal should match your budget. If you have modest growth goals, be realistic about the budget you need to achieve them. Set incremental micro-goals, but stay on track for long-term growth.
Related: You won't have a strong budget until you follow these 5 tips
3. Data-based decisions to save costs
Another money secret that costs companies money is spending without corresponding data. We had a request from a company for a new website, a complete expansion, new navigation, new content, new page layouts, migration to a new CMS, new design, and all the bells and whistles. They said they had a budget of $75,000 for the entire project. In theory, that sounds great, right? Ready to invest? Yes. Do you have a budget? Yes. Do you know what the end result should be? Yes. But when we asked them the next question, they looked at us like we were crazy: “Do you have data to back up the changes you want to make?” Do you use a tool like Hotjar to see real user data that shows how these proposed changes will impact your existing inquiries and the only source the sales team currently uses for leads?
The answer was no. Do you know what happened when the heatmap was overlaid? Well, they wanted to create this new navigation and replace the old one – almost 90% of traffic went directly from the navigation to two pages of their site, both of which they originally wanted to remove. In this case, it wasn't just about having the money, it was about making sure the decisions you make with the budget are based on real data: user data, sales data, marketing data, and more. The more informed you are by closing the loop on your data, the better your bottom line will be.
Related: Want to make better decisions? Here are 5 steps to better data-driven business decisions
4. Modern marketing channels as growth drivers
The most likely cost is using old-fashioned channels with no way to measure them. Companies have spent the last decade using traditional marketing channels and are now moving to digital. Historically, the company's growth has been based on things like trade shows, print media, postcards, and online magazines. We ask what ROI they've seen on each channel and rarely can they put a concrete revenue number and say it's for brand awareness. Some of the budgets for these traditional methods are over $50,000 to $100,000, but there's no ROI associated with them, and yet they continue to do them.
When the pandemic hit, we saw a massive influx of businesses moving to digital marketing from what were once just down-to-earth businesses. The lockdown changed everything; there were no more trade shows, no more door-to-door sales, and no one picked up their mail or faxes daily. It made traditional sales channels challenging and obsolete, forcing a new level of openness to try new ways to get the job done. In the example of running ads in online magazines, there are many ways to capture them. We can use UTM tracking or referral analytics, or create a custom landing page for the offer and capture the leads directly. Without driving them to a landing page or form, you are relying only on the online publication for leads and analytics. We have seen people display a list of just names, no emails to follow up, or just display a random number of visitors on the page, not a single name. It is important to know what they provide for reporting and tracking when you publish or use traditional channels. The rule of thumb is to leverage connections and tools that transform old-fashioned methods into technology, and not to blindly invest in channels that cannot be measured.
Stop wasting time, energy and revenue on these blind spots. There are simple solutions so you can avoid them and focus on growing your business!
Create your very own Auto Publish News/Blog Site and Earn Passive Income in Just 4 Easy Steps
