3 Ways to Safeguard Against Wasting Money and Time on Marketing

It’s shocking.

Shocking, I tell you…

… how many businesses have no idea what kind of return they are getting on their marketing.

And I get it, it’s a lot easier to track ROI for some businesses (like e-commerce) than others (brick and mortar or service-based).

But I submit to you that there are methods that any business can put in place to make sure that they minimize waste and frustration.

Let’s get started.

Get Your Plumbing Set Up

Call it a cookie, call it a pixel, call it a magical piece of code that follows your prospects and customers around the internet… reminding them how awesome you are.

When you get your plumbing set up right you will:

• Have the ability to retarget individuals who have previously shown interest in your product or service.
• Send data back to ad platforms that allow them to place future advertisements in front of new people who are very similar to those who have already bought or shown interest in you.
• Track very important metrics, like Return on Ad Spend and Cost per Acquisition.

The two primary pixels that you need are those provided by Google and Facebook. Without installing these two pieces of code on your website, you are shooting in the dark with your ads and I guarantee you are wasting a LOT of money.

This is non-negotiable.

While this isn’t a technical post, Facebook and Google both provide some help when it comes to getting all set up.

Here are instructions on Facebook

Here are instructions on Google

Map Out Your Journey on Paper

Get out the yellow legal pad.

Or gather the team around the whiteboard.

It’s time to get low tech.

Why? We’re looking for possible breaking points in your customer journey. To do that, you need to visualize the whole thing all at once.

If you discover down the road that you aren’t making money from your marketing, you need to know what’s broken so you know what to fix.

Your business may have a very complex customer journey, or you may have multiple customer journeys to map out.

Or… you may have one simple ad that goes to a sales page and a thank you page.

Whatever the case may be, map it all out.

I can tell you from experience that this exercise can save you a lot of time and money by not fixing (and continuing to fund) the wrong parts of the journey.

Not that you have your journey mapped out, I should also tell you that it actually won’t do you much good unless you…

Set Up a Growth Scorecard and Use it Weekly

Don’t make decisions based on assumptions… use data.

…and not just any data. Choose the metrics that are important to your business BEFORE you start spending money.

Assign at least one metric to each stage of your customer journey that indicates the performance of that stage.

Pick something that actually affects your business (no vanity metrics). It also needs to be relatively easy to quickly grab the data you need. Because you need to record it weekly.

The act of looking up important numbers weekly will make sure that you are efficient with your money and time. It will also ensure that you focus on the right thing and not the latest shiny object.

We also recommend that this is a public document (on Google Docs or something like that) that your entire sales, marketing, and leadership team have access to. The transparency might be uncomfortable at first, but it will pay off in the long run because everyone’s numbers will eventually look better and instead of pointing fingers, you can let the data do the talking.

If you have your plumbing set up, you’ve mapped out your customer journey, and you are checking your growth scorecard weekly, you should know exactly how your marketing campaigns are performing and you should be able to quickly diagnose problem areas without wasting a ton of time and money.

These are the foundations that we use before we create anything for our clients. It’s all done in onboarding before we create a single ad. If you’d like to put us to work, try our 90-Day Scale or Bail Campaign.