I’ve spoken before of the marketing chain. In short, there are many steps from someone who has never even heard of you, to a loyal, repeat customer who refers others.
Now, unless you are starting out brand new, you’ve got something going on already.
Let’s also assume you DON’T have an unlimited budget.
Where do you spend your dollars?
That’s what I mean by the sweet spot. What is going to get you the best return on your $.
There are two ways to approach this:
1. What is working right? IF you have something that is working well, if you can double that part of the chain, you’ll double what comes out the other end of the pipeline – meaning customers. So find out – is it POSSIBLE to double that, and what would it cost. Since you have something already working, you can make a pretty good estimate of time and costs.
2. What is the WORST point in the chain? If you are getting lots of people to your web site, and you’ve verified they are qualified prospects, but from there they disappear, then your website is leaking like a sieve and chances are improving that will get a BIG improvement in leads and customers.
Estimating costs, time and return approaching from this direction is more of a question mark. Even though it may be wildly obvious what is wrong with the website (or whatever it is), how good it has to be to function well may be an educated guess.
So you see, this is not an area where you can have certainty in advance. But look at it both ways, see what looks like the easiest, cheapest, most productive fix – and if you only have the $ to do one thing, do that.
If you have the $ to do more than one, go for it. The alternative is trying a number of things one after the other, until one really works. REALLY works.
Crystal balls in marketing are in short supply, so better if you can try multiple approaches at once rather than perhaps lose months, even years trying different approaches until your marketing really takes off.