Why is your competitor enjoying better growth even if your product or service is superior? Answer: What matters is whether potential customers even know about your better option. A good marketing plan ensures potential customers know about you.
Where Are Your Future Customers?
How Do You Reach Them?
These are Data Management questions RadiusBridge has managed since 1999. The answers begin with data you already have: current customers demographics, behavior of competitors, ad response tests, web traffic, customer life cycle mapping, and more.
Growth is proportional to money spent on marketing once data management is in place. From “legacy” methods that should not be avoided, up to present day channels. A company’s success is a result of marketing delivery, focused efforts, and continuous improvement which are all keys to driving growth.
Having a proper strategy for marketing and knowing where to spend, not just saves money but also leads to understanding why the growth occurred.
How Much Spend is Right?
As little as possible. With correct data management in place, there is little need for typical “scatter” approach to marketing. Even if you can afford all platforms, effectiveness is reduced by attempting too many activities. Pick some (3) and push until results are known.
A business with net annual revenue of $25 million tends to spend an average of 11% of revenue on marketing for growth. Smaller concerns, e.g., $5
million revenue, can project growth by spending 7%. Spends vary by industry and maturity.
Also, higher margins mean higher marketing budget due to competition. Note that “marketing budget” also can include sales staff to research costs.
Track change in sales by effort over time. Future budget-related decisions will depend on reliability of data collected.