Do you need to invest in your brand and marketing? How much? And, perhaps more importantly, how do you know if that investment is working? These are all smart questions for businesses to ask. Let’s unpack each of these questions today.
Should You Invest in Your Brand and Marketing?
First, do you need to invest in your brand and marketing? The reality is marketing investments can potentially drive qualified leads and inquiries from potential clients. This results in greater revenue. Do you need to invest in your brand and marketing? Certainly not. But can it be helpful to invest in your brand and marketing? Definitely.
Second, how much should you invest? Generally, small businesses often spend 6-8% of their revenues on marketing. The higher your gross margins, the more you can afford. Of course, these are averages. If you find marketing is where most of your business comes from, you may want to spend more.
Third, how do you know if it is working? Certainly, for some business models an investment in brand and marketing can be difficult to track. For others, it is a simple math equation: money spent, revenue generated and divide that number by your profit margin to yield your ROI (return on investment).
Of course, there are a lot more variables to determining ROI. There are both hard and soft benefits to investing in brand and marketing—many of which are not always quantifiable.
A big factor to consider is what is the best source of new revenue for your business. Ask yourself these simple questions:
- Is it from existing customers where you are selling them more products or services?
- Or do you depend on attracting new prospects that you then convert into becoming clients?
In both cases, it is important to recognize the decisionmaker here and identify if there are influencers that can help advance the conversation and help close a sale or conversion. This will help identify if investing in brand and marketing makes sense for your organization.
Steps to Investing in Your Brand and Marketing
Let’s say you have decided to invest some dollars in your brand and marketing. Where should you start? With the customer of course.
Ask yourself these key questions:
- Who is your customer?
- What problems do you solve for your client?
- What value do you provide to your customer?
As with any sale, make sure you know the pain points of the key customers and how you might be able to reach those key customers. Good branding and marketing start with knowing the customers well.
Once you know the pain points, make sure to ask yourself some key questions surrounding your value proposition:
- Why is your product or service better compared to competitive offerings?
- How can you prove this to your potential clients?
- Can case studies or market research provide proof of your claims?
- Can client testimonials help?
- How and where can you get this word out?
- Where do your clients consume the most content?
The answers here will help unpack your value proposition, which can help position your brand. Understanding your customer and your value proposition are key to embarking on a marketing plan.
Take some time to unpack some of these questions. Once you identify the need and the opportunities, begin to create some marketing materials to help. Perhaps it is a whitepaper or a webinar or an email or social media campaign. In many instances, SEO (search engine optimization) will be key in order to reach new potential customers.
After your marketing plan is deployed, make sure to track the data to see if it is working. This can be done in many different ways, such as with analytics on social media or in email campaigns. A CRM (customer-relationship management) system might also be a good option to track interactions. Tying all of this data together can give a good picture of if the marketing dollars were well spent and if conversion is happening.
