Aligning Your Marketing Strategy With Your Financial Goals
Aligning your marketing strategy with your financial goals helps ensure your actions are focused and impactful. But for many businesses, there isn’t adequate communication or strategy to align the two. Bridging that gap can help you take steps towards increased growth. Here are three practical ways to align your marketing strategy with your financial goals:
1. Determine which marketing mediums help you achieve your goals.
Marketing is a diverse field. There are traditional marketing mediums, like radio ads, business cards, and other print media. Meanwhile, digital marketing has exploded over the past years as the number of blogs, podcasts, and more have increased exponentially. But finding success isn’t as easy as just turning on pay-per-click ads on Facebook and Google and waiting for the sales to happen.
You will need to experiment to work out which marketing mediums work for your business. It can be useful to consider what your competitors are doing, and reflect on whether you have the ability to compete on the same platforms. If they’re using Facebook, for instance, you should consider:
- Do you have the time to regularly post?
- Are you familiar with Facebook’s data analytics and how you can use them to improve the quality of content you provide?
It will take time and some patience and creativity to work out what’s impactful and what’s not, but this is key to long term marketing success. If you aren’t certain where to start, speaking with a marketing specialist to work out a strategy could be worthwhile.
2. Develop a short, mid- and long-term marketing budget.
Marketing works best when it is strategic, planned, and focused. Your marketing consultant or in-house team can only make that happen if you plan for and provide a budget for them to work with.
Your short term budget should be granular. It should contain details about how much you’re willing to spend on certain types of advertising, as well as details about why you chose that particular type of marketing to achieve that goal. For instance, if you need to drive short-term sales (because, for instance, your inventory is going to expire or be updated), your marketing budget might prioritise pay-per-click ads to ignite sales quickly.
Mid and longer-term planning should outline how you plan to develop brand awareness and what you’re planning to do to build your brand outside of paid ads. SEO (search engine optimisation), public relations, and published content are all marketing investments that will have long term impacts. By outlining your marketing budget, your marketers can make impactful decisions with the marketing budget allocated to them.
3. Create a framework that allows you to measure your marketing.
Some marketing is simple to measure. Google ads can be set up so that user clicks are tracked right through to the cart, so you can see how much revenue your ads generate directly. But there are other elements of marketing that are more difficult to measure. For example, users might only click to purchase a product because of a customer testimonial on the website.
Setting up a framework to measure this involves creating specific Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). If you don’t already do this, you should consider measuring:
- Cost of client acquisition (how much it costs to get a new customer to make a purchase).
- Lifetime customer value (how much a new customer is likely to spend over the course of the relationship).
- Website traffic vs website sales.
- Average customer spend online vs in store.
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