So how are you going to find all those extra clients this year?
Recently we have looked at your average client spend per year and used that to calculate how many leads you need to generate to hit your targets. This time we are going to take the next step and look at what marketing you need to do in order to hit your targets.
Hopefully you track how your leads/enquiries are generated. This basically tells you how successful your various marketing channels are. Do you track that? If you don’t then you probably have a good instinct into which ones work best.
Grab a piece of paper and a pen and write down a list of the different marketing channels you use. Next to each one write down the number of leads/enquiries generated by that channel. For example I expect you go networking, so out of all the leads/enquiries that you received in the last 12 months how many do you think came from networking?
Hopefully you now have a list that looks a bit like this:
Networking 10
Website traffic 5
Referral partners 5
Exhibitions 1
Speaking 1
Email marketing 3
Total number of enquiries = 25
Continuing to use the same example of the 50 leads with the above list of results from the various marketing channels we need to double our marketing effort. That could mean one of several things…
- You could do twice as much of the same marketing. Marketing is a numbers game so it is reasonably safe to assume that by doubling your marketing effort you would double your number of leads.
- You could focus on the most successful marketing channels and increase your effort on those only. In the above example that would be networking, website traffic and referral partners.
- You could improve your ability to generate leads from the marketing you are already doing.
The right answer is probably a mix of all three. I’m a great believer in doing a wide variety of marketing and not focusing on just a few channels so my personal preference would be to analyse why certain channels are working better for you than others and then put a plan in place to improve your results, while also doing more marketing across the board. Cost and time are also important parameters to consider.
This week’s task is to assess your sales & marketing performance from the last 12 months, work out the level of increase you need to achieve, and then plan your marketing for the year so it will drive the increase in sales you are looking for.