To have a productive marketing system in your small business is something that will bring positive results to your whole company. What is marketing productivity for your company?
Is it something with fewer marketing tactics that you will use in your marketing efforts? Or, is it something that means to use more marketing tactics in your small business? Is it something that will mean to spend less money on your small business?
Marketing productivity will mean many things for you as an entrepreneur. Still, you need to be aware that better marketing productivity means more customers with fewer inputs from the side of your small business.
What type of inputs do you have regarding the marketing systems in place in your company?
Money, Time and Efforts as Input in Your Marketing Processes
Your most essential inputs are money, time, and efforts that you have invested to bring one customer into your small business. Let’s talk about these as specific numbers in one simple example.
For example, when you invest $100 in your marketing tactics, you spend one day implementing this tactic, and you spend one day for three members of your team. These are all your marketing inputs or your spending.
Let’s say that your time is valued at $300 per day, and one day for your team members is valued at $200. You will value all your inputs at $1.000,00. Or $300 for you, $600 for your team members, and $100 for marketing tactics. With these inputs, you will get ten new customers for your small business, which means that you will spend $100 for one new customer generated with this campaign.
But, what about if you improve your marketing productivity and you can do the same things in a half-day instead of the whole day. Also, your improvement will lower the costs of your marketing tactic by 50%. Then, inputs valued at $500 will bring you ten customers, which means spending $50 for one new customer. But, if you also improve your marketing tactic to bring you 20 customers instead of ten, your spending about getting one customer in your small business will be $25.
As a general rule, you will need to do the following things if you want to increase your marketing productivity:
1. Do more with less input.
Always work on improvements of your inputs in the marketing system. These improvements will enable you to do more with less. For example,
- Remove all distractions when you are working on your marketing tactics. Distractions are something that will decrease your productivity. So, be sure that you keep the possible distractions at the lowest possible level.
- Develop an automatic performance measurement system. You need to measure the performance of your marketing activities if you want to know what is working and what will need to be improved. So, start thinking about performance measurement system that will ensure quality control and continious improvement of all of your marketing efforts.
- Improve the content of your marketing tactics. Improving content will help you improve the results from your efforts. Simply, use A/B testing to find what brings the best results. Remember, you want to increase the number of customers you will generate with your marketing tactics.
2. Organize your marketing processes in such a way that it will enable you to increase efficiency and effectiveness.
Doing the right things at the same time when they are done the right way will drastically increase your marketing productivity. Are you doing the right things? When you know that you are doing the right things in marketing, are you doing them the right way? Answer these questions, and you can find improvement possibilities.
This step aims to improve your marketing processes focusing on the right things and on the right way of doing things.
3. Use new marketing tactics that will need less money, less time, and less effort.
Your creativity is the only possible limitation when it comes to ideas for new marketing tactics. Increase your creativity and see how many new and improved marketing tactics you will have in your hands to increase your overall marketing productivity.
Today, there are many different platforms where you can market your business. Using social media for marketing, you will get extraordinary performance measures to see what works and what is not appropriate for your company. Having a website with a blog is another great tactic that will not require significant investments from your side.
4. Increase the results from your marketing process – more customers for your business.
The only valid positive result from your marketing process is the number of customers that your business will get. Analyze what influence the number of customers, and improve all those elements. Do not blame your customers because of the poor results of your marketing process. You can’t improve your customers, but you can improve your processes.
Improvements in the process will improve the results in the number of customers that your company will get.
Question: Do you have a system in place to measure your marketing productivity?
