Tabla de contenidos
1. Underline the growth potential
When it comes to Top Management Executives numbers and growth projections are the key to persuade them. They are often not too interested in the creative strategies, SEO ideas or traffic on the website as they come from different backgrounds and do not understand too much of the KPIs that you as a Marketing representative are interested in. These executives need to defend the current overall strategy they implemented, the business perspectives and what is there for the shareholders. And to defend this strategy you need straightforward numbers like EBIT, revenue, Debt/Equity Ratio but also very important for the future outlook of the growth potential – and there is the catch for you! Do not tell them how much more traffic there is for the website if you improve the SEO with an external consulting group or how you allocate your budget, get 2 steps further and show them what is at the end of the funnel – how much more sales and therefore revenue can you project. A decrease of 5% bouncing rate will not grab their attention, but for sure a 15% increase in online sales will – so go hit them with the big numbers at the right spot in order to improve your marketing budget allocation!
2.Benchmark with competitors
In a digital marketing world it is relatively easy to find out how much approximately the most important competitors are spending and what their marketing strategy is. Top Management always thinks of the competition and what they might make better than your company. One way to convince them to give you a bigger slice of the budget cake is to show them what the competition is doing and how successful they are with it. Google analytics and other online tools (and there are many!) to estimate for example traffic on other websites will be good friends for you in this task. Also here with the help of an outside consulting firm, which has experience from other companies, they can give you an estimation of what is the industry standard for which type of marketing spendings or also information on a direct competitor as they have a good overview of the industry as a whole. Furthermore, benchmarking your company with the competition regarding marketing spending allocations can also help you in finding out new sweet spots or advantages, also in marketing activities. What are we doing better than them? Is there some certain content that we need to even further exploit and communicate as it turns out competition does not provide this message/tool?
3. It’s all about the image!
Whether you are in a B2B or B2C business model – the success of your company stands and falls with the respective image, reputation, perceived positioning and therefore also the right marketing budget allocation. Top Management needs to understand that Marketing needs the right tools and weapons to communicate the right message. Image building and positioning is long-term and therefore needs enough commitment in terms of budget and attention. Therefore the emphasis should be to underline the plans and make clear where and how you want to be seen in the future and especially what the strategy is to go there with all the relevant KPIs to measure if you are on track. As mentioned already in the first paragraph your colleagues from the top management floor want to see numbers and how you allocate your budget, so get the right KPIs together, show the potential and the tools you want to use in order to get the appropriate funding. Although the positioning and image is often harder to measure than the straightforward evaluation numbers from your website traffic, there are a lot of ways to see how you are perceived by the customers with fundamental market research. Of course, especially for small firms, in-house made market research is not possible from a resource perspective (financial, manpower etc.). But do not worry – there are a lot of market research firms and consulting firms out there who can help you and get you the data you want – but you should be very specific about what you want and how you want it delivered, before spending a lot of money on useless insights to an overcharging research company.
4. Let the consultants do the pre-work for you
There are a lot of consultancies out there that can show you their plans, the right marketing budget allocation and how much they would charge for these services. Coming back to the first paragraph, these numbers and projections can help you to convince the budget deciders to get some outside help and an eagle-eye view on the business. It is often the case that companies are losing the out-of-the-box-thinking and see things way too much in the way “they always did it” and do not think of incredible opportunities that are existing for marketing strategy improvements. These consultants know a lot of tools to use also from best practices from other companies, and this knowledge is worth much more than that one time investment. Problem here is that the number could seem huge, so have a really good back-up plan to justify that investment!
5. Benefits of strengthening the long-term strategy through the loyalty programs
If you own or run a business, you probably have heard how important it is to develop customer loyalty strategies. Without a doubt, building customer loyalty should be one of the objectives that you must set for yourself in the medium and long term. Customers are the foundation of any business and allow your brand to stay alive. The objective of loyalty programs is that the consumer continues to buy products or demand services from a company. For this we must use various marketing techniques and strategies focused on communicating your value, it’s stated that it’s cheaper to retain customers rather than attract new ones. When a client repeats it because he is satisfied meaning that it speaks well about your business and keeps making you the protagonist in the market.
Contact us for more!