Читать книгу 99 Marketing Mistakes - Kenyon Blunt - Страница 31

Mistake #24

You Spend Too Much On Marketing

Spending too much on marketing can be as bad, or worse, than not spending enough. Overspending on marketing tactics that don’t produce is a waste of money, just like underspending leads to lackluster results. How do you know when your spending is just right?

The Three Bears Formula:

To get your marketing just right (not too high and not too low), you need to know how much it costs to acquire a customer (CAC). An excellent CAC depends on your industry and business model. The basic rule-of-thumb is that the payback on CAC should be under 12 months.

How Do You Know If You’re Overspending?

I mentioned in mistake #2, No Marketing Budget, that a good rule of thumb for small businesses is to spend about 7-8 percent of revenues on marketing. It’s called the A/S Ratio, advertising to sales ratio, and it is a valuable metric for planning and budgeting. In very general terms, any expenditure over 10 percent of revenues may be overspending. I used the word “may” because your strategy could call for spending a higher amount for a specific reason (e.g., a new product launch or to counter a competitive threat).

Some of the signs of overspending are the following:

 A large audience

 Too few targeted messages within a campaign

 Numerous subscriptions to social and web analytics platforms

 Low engagement rates on your digital advertising and social media posts.

Strategies for Reducing Spending

There are two keys to spending just the right amount of money: 1) know your customer acquisition cost and 2) conduct small, iterative marketing campaigns (see mistake #52 for more on testing). Then, it’s merely a matter a trashing the ones that don’t have the required CAC and repeating the ones that do.

Another strategy is to focus your marketing on tactics that are free or that don’t cost much money. These could be things like email marketing, content marketing, PR, free videos, etc. One of the fundamental principles of Lean Marketing is to own your traffic. Lean Marketing occurs when you have the name and contact information for your customers and prospects. You then control the marketing (as opposed to Google or Facebook). It also lets you communicate with your prospects in a highly affordable manner.