Developing a long-term plan to achieve an objective is not a ground breaking initiative by any stretch of imagination and any first year business student or budding entrepreneur will attest to being indoctrinated with the elevated importance of having a strategy for achieving their goals and objectives before starting out on the journey. After all, a strategy is nothing more than a long-term plan to achieve certain objectives. But in the process of developing and implementing an approach to marketing, many marketers are failing to fully consider the cost of their marking plan to the bottom line of their organization.
The ever broadening digital marketing environment requires a strategy that considers not only the total number of potential customers reached, but one that is based on attracting the best and most profitable customers. If it is costing a hundred dollars to land a fifty dollar sale, than the strategy is attracting customers that a company doesn’t want or cannot afford to serve; a concept that many volume driven marketers find difficult to adopt. But today, being effective is mostly about quality and less about quantity.
To the effort to avoid spending money randomly and acquiring low value customers begins with identifying who your high-value customers are and implementing a plan to target them by utilizing the most efficient marketing media and collateral. The effort requires collecting and analyzing real data to determine the most efficient way to reach high-value customer candidates. The process includes metrics that measure a strategies return on investment (ROI) and return on advertising spend (ROAS) to determine the real cost of customer acquisition. Calculating the “cost per acquisition” for all marketing spend, whether it is SEO, PPC, Email, Social Media or Display will pay big dividends and is essential to an organizations achievement of its overall goals and objectives.
The traditional assumption that throwing more money at the process of attracting customers will, by itself, lead to an organizations success and increased profitability fails to recognize the ever changing dynamics of today’s business environment.
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