How important is marketing?
How important is marketing? We all know you usually only get what you pay for, but marketing often has an ambiguity that makes the cost versus Return On Investment a mystery.
People will happily (some less happily than others) pay for professional services like lawyers and accountants, knowing that one will keep them out of court and the other will keep more hard-earned cash in their pocket than the taxman's!
But what does marketing achieve? Try asking someone whose pipeline of work is drying up, whose cash flow is starting to suffer and whose sales team are starting to moan.
The market place is crowded and it's getting harder to find a USP (unique selling point, for those less into
acronyms). The internet is giving people instant access to see what competitors offer, so selling has simply become harder.
But if marketing is done well and monitored carefully a clear return on investment can be shown. Why marketing returns should have this air of mystery about them is beyond me. The facts are all there...
For example, at my company AGI, (Action Graphic International), one of our clients has been running a Google Adwords campaign. After reviewing it, we found it had some fairly serious holes in it.
The client's biggest mistake was omitting to use what are known as negative keywords, These little critters protect you from the masses of would be searchers who have no interest in what you do but will click on your advert just wondering why you turned up in their search.
Click... £1, Click... £1, Click... £1, and so on. Adding the negative keywords to this campaign and making the adverts a little more specific has increased the Click Through Rate (the measure of the people who see an advert and click on it), by more than 30 per cent, with a similar increase in the number of website visits that converted into business.
As a result, the average cost per click (Avg CPC) has now dropped by 10 per cent while the advert's position on the page has jumped up a space, making it more noticeable!
However much you're spending on a campaign, a 10 per cent drop in costs allied to a 30 per cent increase in potential business just has to be great news.
Businesses are tightening their belts at the moment so the most important thing to consider is not how much to cut your marketing budget back, but how best to spend it to hit the most targeted and focused customers possible.
Getting your message across in the most cost-effective manner while raising your conversion rate is the real trick and this requires some serious and expert help.
With digital marketing adding its own complex array of solutions to the already substantial assortment of traditional marketing methods, knowing which way to turn often requires a little more research and a lot more patience.
Google Adwords is a great tool, fast to set up, easy to budget and simple to monitor. But start a campaign rolling without professional help and you may be paying over the odds and blowing half your budget on traffic that is irrelevant.
For more on Google Adwords visit www.google.co.uk/adwords or for my top 10 tips and in-depth view, visit www.designerlondon.co.uk/page/blog
