Making Marketing Dollars Pay: Why it's so darn hard to feel good about your marketing spend

By: Ginger Clay

You know you need to spend money to make money. The most successful businesses in our industry have embraced marketing and have learned how to articulate their value in order to boost sales. While your marketing person/team struggle to find the right marketing tactics to fill the sales pipeline, you - as an owner - might find it even more difficult to justify spending more on marketing when it's difficult to measure the results and feel confident about what you have already spent.

There are many reasons why this occurs but the biggest reasons is simply that marketing is not a traditional investment. Unlike equipment, salaries and software, marketing funds are typically "risked" or hedged investments. Several factors influence your brand's ability to be constantly visible and always remain top of mind when a buying decision needs to be made. Frequency, consistency and relevancy are factors with which you can exercise some control. However, psychology of what's makes a buyer engage and ultimately buy is a studies art that takes practice, consistency and pure measurement to get it right...and to get it right often.

Before you spend another dime on any type of marketing or sales activity, it is important to consider a few steps to gain clarity about what you want your marketing to achieve to better understand what you need to measure. 

6 practical quotes for helping you understand how to make your marketing dollars pay!

1. "If you don't know where you are going, you might not get there." (Yogi Berra) 
• Marketing, like Sales or Operations needs to be tied to specific management and strategic goals. I have worked with technology owners who see their sales lagging, invest in a quick marketing campaign, hire more sales people and still experience lagging sales. This is often the result of throwing marketing money at a problem without really understanding what you are trying to achieve. Defining your end result provides you with laser focus on targets and goals, mitigating risky (marketing) investments that fail to yield results.
2. "Garbage in, garbage out." (My mother) 
• The quality of data you put into your system defines your ability to measure your activity and results. Defining the data you want to collect and store is an important 1st step in accurately measuring any investment. It is important for you to figure out how you will collect and measure results across multiple channels, activities, networks, and databases. Social media, advertisement and online marketing is only as effective as your ability to target, collect and measure results.
3. "In God we trust; all others bring data." (W. Edwards Deming)
• Develop a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that will help everyone on your team understand how to benchmark performance and understand results. I can't tell you how many times I have had marketing managers say to me, "We increased our campaign open rate by 33%," or "We had 30 hits to our blog this month." As a business owner- with other things on my mind- the first thought that enters my mind: "What does that mean?" As an owner and manager, you don't have time to guess what your team is trying to achieve and understanding performance is far greater than understanding the cost. Performance indicators help you understand incremental change like the value in your change in revenue (are you making more money now than before) or the % of change in revenue (Are you increasing or staying the same?). 
4. "If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you are doing." (Mr. Deming, again) 
• Formalizing a process for collecting marketing campaign and activity data is key to implementing a process that everyone can get behind and execute with success.  I have worked with countless business owners who tell me they want to invest into marketing to grow. To make this happen, it is not enough to throw money at a campaign or hire a social media expert. To really implement an effective marketing program, you must follow steps #1-3 and create a process that fits into the way your organization works. Think through all the ways you touch your buyers, collect data and customize your message/offering. All of these items need to be tracked and measured and the best way to do that is through a formal process.
5. "If everything is important, nothing is important." (Andrei Herasimchuk) 
• Too much information will overwhelm your ability to quantify the business revenue impacts of your marketing investments. I always recommend you produce visual reports of your marketing success to allow everyone to wrap their minds around the results. 
6. "By perseverance the snail reached the ark" (Charles Spurgeon)
• Don't give up too quickly. Tying marketing goals to management goal, determining how you will measure those attributes, formulating a process for systematical measuring results, and making subtle modifications along the way is often underappreciated and over-looked. In a hurry to find ways to generate revenue, we over-look the essentials that help us craft a winning marketing strategy and measure the marketing spend. 

Finally, stick with it; don't give up too early and relish in small successes along your journey to building a business that is visible and feeds your sales pipeline with calculated success.