“As a small business in the current economy, how have you modified the advertising portion of your marketing budget this year? How has it been working for your company so far this year?” (Question on LinkedIn)
Melissa,
Hopefully, nobody says, “Business is down, money is tight, so let’s cut advertising.” But you SHOULD ask, “Where do we get the most bang for our scarce marketing buck?” Then examine advertising along with your other options.
Ads or promo? Direct mail or email? Internet outreach? Networking or public speaking? Asking for referrals? Cross-selling current customers?
And not just about advertising in general, but for each type of ad placement.
To figure this out, I would create a grid: Down the left column, write every every type of advertising, and every other marketing activity that attracts business for you. Then across the top, head columns by the most important criteria for you, such as:
- How much you’ve spent on this, in both dollars and time (Put a dollar value on an hour of your time.)
- Size of customers or sales this brings you
- Number of customers per time period
- Desirability of the customers
- Lead time till you get the customers
- Its potential to bring you more in the long run
- (add your own)
Then rate each marketing activity by each criterion. Add up the totals and see what gets high and low scores. This is an eye-opening exercise.
This approach is over-simplified. It ignores interactions among types of marketing, and ignores strategic marketing with a long lead time. But it gives enlightening answers to the question, “What marketing gives me the shortest route to cash flow now?”
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Mark. My firm is in the headhunting business, and one of the nice things about this is that we speak with many people on every search. Every search assignment we’ve ever gotten has been as a result of our ongoing searches. We’ve been hired by our placed candidates, unsuccessful candidates, as well as even people who served as references.
That said, we’ve invested money into a nice corporate website, and spent zero money on a blog. Since the blog has been going, it’s generated 2-4x the number of visitors as our website, and become the primary driver of traffic to our corporate website. All this has been great in establishing us as thought leaders in business thinking, which is terrific in itself. Whether or not the blog ever results in cash flow / business for our firm remains to be seen.
“Whether or not the blog ever results in cash flow / business for our firm remains to be seen.”
Yeah, this is the web 2.0 $64k question, isn’t it? But just as celebs say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, surely anything that drives traffic to your site is worthwhile. Someone like me would never have learned about your firm otherwise, and who knows what future client of mine might need your services?
By the way, for me it was a two-step. I first found you via LinkedIn’s UCLA Anderson group, and then went to your blog.