Your Digital Marketing Genie
Have you ever put on a digital marketing person or agency to help you promote your business, only to find out that they have successfully WASTED thousands of your marketing dollars:
You’re Not Alone.
I’ve faced exactly the same challenge for many years. As have so many other business owners I’ve talked to over the years.
Hi, my name is Tala Chisholm and over the last 21 years I’ve owned and run 9 businesses with a combined revenue of close to $100 million. A few years ago as the GFC hit, our mostly-bricks-and-mortar businesses faced massive challenges as online competition increased,
sales plummeted and the market changed rapidly. Cashflow was getting tighter and the future looked bleak.
Better and smarter marketing was the way forward to start growing again.
We could no longer spend tens of thousands every month on old-school marketing that got us there so far. The world had changed, and our businesses had to change accordingly.
We had to get smarter about marketing. Fast.
That’s where my journey started with digital marketing. I had to quickly learn as much as I could about marketing, partly because we didn’t have the cash to put on the best marketers in the country and more importantly because I didn’t want to get caught out again without having control of the most important aspect of my business: how to attract and convert the customers.
Here are a few factors that your marketer must be actively considering in order to earn this position:
What the right marketing channel is for your business.
I’ve seen so many marketers recommend Facebook advertising when Linkedin is a much better fit simply because that’s all they know about or because Facebook is the one everyone is talking about these days..
Whether the channel you have selected can deliver results at a reasonable ROI (Return On Investment)
to actually make the campaign worthwhile. This not only includes the cost of the advertising but ALSO the cost of the ad campaign management as well, i.e. what you are paying them.
Using an overseas team to perform any tasks that can be outsourced
especially such tasks as campaign maintenance and optimization, web development and creative landing page creation. In today’s global economy and especially in a country such as Australia where labour is quite expensive, any task that can be effectively outsourced to reduce operating costs SHOULD be outsourced.
It is unrealistic and makes little business sense to have the person who is talented in marketing strategy and ad copywriting (usually charging rates at $100-200 per hour) be the same person that also does all the web development, photoshop editing and repetitive split test ad creation.
As a matter of fact, it’s unfair to your business since the tasks could have been done at significantly lower costs if outsourced.
Any advantage that YOUR BUSINESS can gain over your competitors in the form of getting more done at a lower cost should be utilized.
Having an integrated approach with the business they’re helping
to ensure that the priorities haven’t shifted, that the lead quality is good and to explore new possibilities, markets and offers that might achieve better results for the BUSINESS not just for the marketer
What the best marketing message is for your business.
I’ve experienced far too many marketers not even question a marketing message simply because that’s what the client said without giving honest constructive feedback on what might work better based on their experience. I know personally that I would have preferred for a marketer to point out that something I suggested was not going to work and recommend I take a different approach based on their experience.
The importance of ongoing and repetitive testing. Again and again and again
Whether it’s testing for new target markets, new offers, new landing pages, new colours, new images, new ad text, etc.
An overall view of the business and an understanding of the processes within it.
Most marketers see their only job as lead delivery, that’s it. It is of course possible that some leads are easier to acquire but harder to convert. And vice versa. I’ve seen marketers (and business owners for that matter) OBSESS over lowering the cost per lead to the point of ridiculousness without the slightest consideration to the speed and likelihood of those leads to convert. Many marketers simply try to get the lowest cost per lead but hardly ever consider the Cost Per Acquisition, i.e the cost of converting the lead into an actual customer, which is what ultimately matters to the business owner. A good example for this would be Google Adwords leads (if relevant to your business) are typically easier to convert than say Facebook leads since they are already actively looking for your product or service. However Adwords quite often translates to higher cost per click and quite often a higher cost per lead.
Hence the differences between the service we offer compared to many other marketers.
It is the added business wisdom that I add to the equation, which very few other marketers can grasp.
So who to choose?
Starter Google Adwords campaign set up and management for one product/brand
Full Google Adwords e-commerce campaign set up and management for e-commerce website
for Lead Generation campaign set up and management
e-commerce campaign set up and maintenance
for Lead Generation campaign set up and execution (the one we have already on the Linkedin assistant page)
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