(As seen on LinkedIn)
Transcript: Companies who are tracking conversion—and able to identify their customer acquisition costs for specific marketing tactics where they’re investing their marketing dollars—are much more likely to be the ones who leave their competitors in the dust, grabbing marketshare because they’re in tune with what they’re spending, and they’re able to do more of what works and less of what doesn’t work.
And that essentially is what marketing is all about: to grow a company successfully and create revenue. You’ve got to know what works.
So it’s just a critical thing any modern marketer should be doing in terms of their metrics. They’ve got to be able to track customer acquisition costs and conversion.
They just have to.
As a marketer, it makes the job a hell of a lot more fun, too, because when you can say, “Hey, you know, this year I’ve created a 50% growth or 150% growth in revenue for you, because of the marketing you’re investing with me,” it’s fantastic. It just it makes the job so much more fun.
And it is also great for client retention, too. You’re much more likely to keep those clients when you’re able to substantiate the marketing spend, and you can show what you’re contributing to company growth.
That’s a client you keep for a decade. And it just makes the job wonderful.
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No company is too small to be measuring their conversions, and to be able to track a direct line from their marketing efforts to the revenue being created. Because when you’re spending money on marketing, if you’re not able to track what’s working and what’s not working, then you’re just throwing darts at a dartboard without any real idea of what’s effective in your marketing spend.
And I just think, you know—small, medium, large company—size makes no difference. Being able to do that is mandatory. It just ensures that the money you’re investing in marketing is producing something useful, something valuable.
As a marketer, I think there’s nothing more gratifying than tracking conversion, tracking your key performance indicators and your customer acquisition costs and knowing… being able to show leadership exactly how fast you’re making improvements.
Because without tracking, when it comes to your digital marketing tactics, you have no idea what’s working and what’s actually generating revenue. And when you when you’re able to connect that effort you’re making in marketing to actual revenue that’s being created from your efforts? It’s just incredibly rewarding.
And I think that’s one of the reasons I like being a keyword analyst so much, because it’s so easy to, you know, pull baseline metrics. Do the project, start launching the implementation from the project, and then look at the results—because you can see them within less than 30 days.
And when you look at the big picture six months later, or a year later, it’s insane. It’s fantastic. It makes me so happy to see clients happy. So it’s just incredibly rewarding.
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You know, there’s a lot of jargon and marketing and acronyms and big words. But what it comes down to at the end of the day is: are you able to track the money you’re spending in marketing for specific efforts to results that it’s generating? Is it actually creating revenue? If a company isn’t having that conversation on a regular basis, they’re doing a disservice to the company.
They’re not spending the marketing dollars in a way that that is substantiated. It’s not able to show the value.
And I know it can be a complicated discussion for companies and, you know, especially companies with many channels, a bigger marketing team, lots of gears moving. It can be really complicated to actually sit down and connect all those dots. But it’s just it’s so important. It’s worth it.
It’s so worth it.
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You know, customer acquisition costs can be intimidating for a lot of marketers, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. I mean, basically what it comes down to, is the marketing spend for a particular effort—say on your SEO or on your Google ads—what’s the annual spend you’re investing in that particular marketing tactic? And divide that by the number of results you get. That gives you a cost that you’re able to use to track how much you’re spending.
What is it costing you to get that customer?
So here’s an example for one company that I’m working with… a retainer client. They have a specific product, right? And so we spend, say, $60,000 a year on SEO, on organic SEO. We’re able to track the number of jobs that result from that spend using our CRM—our active campaign software. We know exactly how many jobs result from that spend, and how much is being, you know, how much they’re spending.
So we’re able to calculate an average dollar amount for the jobs, and how many jobs. And when we take the spend and divide it by the number of jobs that are sold, that gives us a cost for each one of those jobs that we’re able to compare to other marketing tactics that we’re doing, so that we’ve got an idea of how much it’s costing us for each one of those customers. And we can apply that to say, “OK, this particular ad spend is costing us twice as much as an organic lead, or it’s costing us twice as much as, you know, an advertising lead from this particular source or this social media platform.”
So is it worth it? Do we want to continue spending that, or is the customer acquisition costs so high that it’s simply not valuable? Then I need to shift that spend to something else.
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So being able to have those kind of conversations are invaluable for a business because it just really gives them a clear picture on where they’re spending their marketing dollars, and what’s happening as a result of that spend. What is it doing for the business bottom line? Not just, you know, generic metrics like the amount of traffic it’s driving or what our current keyword rankings are—because those are good metrics, but they’re not a great metric like a customer acquisition cost is—that’s directly related to the big picture, to the revenue it’s creating for the dollars you’re spending and what actionable result is happening because of that spend.
And that’s where the value lies. That’s where the knowledge you need to have for your marketing budget really is. And I just think that there’s no company too small to be monitoring those kind of numbers.
So, you know, maybe small business, it can be really difficult if that’s the size of a business… whether it’s an entrepreneur that’s doing everything and wearing all the hats, or it’s a small company with a handful of employees.
But once you start to spend marketing dollars at a certain level and you really are looking at diversifying your marketing spend, you need to have those conversations.
And if you’re not, it’s doing the company a disservice.