Michael Tasner
CEO @ No Joke Marketing, a demand generation agency focused on ROI & results. Dad, Former CMO of Guerrilla Marketing, Bestselling Author
Michael Tasner , Forbes Councils
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I firmly believe that marketing is the single most important function in every business. When I look back at my successes and failures over the last 15 years, my greatest achievements came when my marketing was on fire and on point. My failures occurred when I stopped marketing and stopped trusting the process.
The ultimate goal of marketing is to make it 100% free of charge. Let me ask you a question: If someone offered to give you $10 for every $1 you chipped in, with the only caveat being that you would have to wait a month or two to get paid, would you do it? Chances are, you would take that deal in a heartbeat.
Now, apply this idea to marketing. If you knew that you could put in $1 to marketing and get $10 back in your business would you take that same deal? A $2,000 investment becomes $20,000 in revenue; a $5,000 investment becomes a $50,000 return in revenue. Chances are, you would say yes. Then, why don’t you do it?
Through working with entrepreneurs, CEOs and organizations all over the world, I have found that marketing is usually still viewed as an expense. Budgets get set in stone, and that becomes that.
There are lots of ways to drive new eyeballs to your business and, in this article, I’m going to focus on one tactic that works quickly and pays handsome dividends: paid traffic.
How To Abolish Your Marketing Spend
Paid traffic is the perfect way to drive whatever number of eyeballs you need. The goal is to cover your investment and then scale the campaigns from there, making your marketing 100% free.
The beautiful thing with paid traffic is it’s very similar to a faucet. It can be turned up and down as needed. So if you have seasonality in your business, you can adjust the “flow” of new business and new leads coming your way, as needed.
It’s also highly controllable and highly trackable. There is a running joke about marketing — 50% of your marketing efforts are working and 50% aren’t and, if you could only solve which half was working, you would be rich. This concern is banished with paid traffic.
With this method, you can drive targeted eyeballs to a targeted landing page, and the proper tracking metrics will allow you to quickly quantify your results. So, here is the play-by-play on how to build your marketing ATM.
Step 1: Pick one source of paid traffic to start with.The most popular places are Facebook and Google, with which I suggest beginning. There are other social advertising platforms (Instagram, Twitter, YouTube), as well as major ad networks that allow you to buy traffic from just about anywhere on the internet. But the goal is to cast a narrow net initially.
Step 2: Establish a testing budget. This number will vary based on the size of your business, your budget and, frankly, the value of a new customer, patient or client. My suggestion is to start with a minimum of $1,500 monthly.
Step 3: Put some financial goals together. If you are investing $1,500, how can you back into your numbers? The only number you won’t have from the start is your cost per lead, but use something to start with. For example, if you’re working with a $1,500 budget, 15 leads equates to $100 per lead. From those leads, you can plug in your closing percentages and the average value of a customer. For example, of the 15 leads, you reach 10 and three ultimately become new customers, each yielding $2,500 in lifetime value. You just invested $1,500 and got back $7,500. There are two important concepts to note here:
1. Consider the lifetime value of a customer. If you are a chiropractor, for example, the initial consultation might only be $150, but say your average patient comes back 50 times throughout three years at $75 a visit. They are worth a lot more than the initial $150. While from a cash-flow standpoint you must be cognizant, you need to be factoring in the lifetime value of a customer to get accurate numbers.
2. Just because you only closed three customers doesn’t mean more won’t close down the line. Often, prospects are not ready right then, but they will return later. Implementing a system to keep marketing to them over time will improve your numbers.
Step 4: Setup great campaigns. There is a lot of work to be done when it comes to crafting great campaigns. The keys are knowing the right potential people to target and using the traffic network’s tools to hone in on those people. From there, you want to make sure you have well-written, direct-response copy and great creative (videos, pictures, etc.) to attract and interest.
Step 5: Craft a compelling landing page. When your potential customer clicks on your ad, they should go to a well-written landing page. Similar to your ads, this landing page needs to solicit a response from that potential customer. Use a tool like CallRail or CallTrackingMetrics to setup tracking numbers so you know precisely where those leads came from.
Step 6: Leverage the metrics, test and scale. As you drive some traffic, you can then leverage the data to see what’s working and what’s not. Maybe one image is working better than the other — pause the one that’s not performing as well. As you start to gather some data, you will be able to see your cost per lead and have even better numbers to back into so you can adjust your spend and budgets. The goal is to cover your marketing investment — making it free — and then scale from there. Increase your budget slowly and methodically.
If, for whatever reason, you are not generating enough leads, go back to step one and start over. If your closing percentages are off, you should take a more in-depth look at your sales and follow-up processes.
Paid traffic, when deployed correctly, works 100% of the time. Execute this marketing strategy and you will never have to “pay” for marketing again!