In the past 15 years I have been involved with marketing one way or another. Throughout that time, there has been one trait I’ve seen in CEOs and Owners across industries that gives them a distinct advantage – they understand the role of marketing as a critical part of their business’ success. The following outlines the top 5 assumptions I have heard successful CEOs make about their marketing.
1. A Marketing Strategy is Your Plan of Attack to Engage More Qualified Prospects
Marketing your business involves more than putting up a web site or talking about how many leads you need. A well thought out marketing plan that a CEO can evaluate includes some of the following.
- Strategic marketing campaigns
- Expected lead volume growth by campaign
- Conversion
- Marketing Budget
- Cost per new customer acquisition
2. Good Marketing Should Encourage Sales to Happen, but Not Make the Sale
If your marketing campaigns are drawing attention from prospects, shouldn’t they also encourage the sale? A better question to ask is “how can marketing encourage a sale, but not make it happen?”
The following illustrates how a great piece of content can be used to encourage engagement, which ultimately leads to new sales. (P.S. If you’d like to download the Ebook used in this example, we have a link provided at the bottom of this post.)
Astute CEOs understand that sometimes you must educate new buyers of your product and services and encourage them to learn more about your company. Not everything is meant to be sold through your web site, but since the continuous publication of content is what search engines want, your business needs to capitalize by educating. If you encourage learning, sales will happen… eventually.
3. We Know Our Customer
CEOs who are successful with marketing inherently understand who their customer is, why they buy, and why they buy from their business. From a marketing stand point it boils down to understanding which Personas (or profiles) buy from you and how they engage with your marketing. For example, at Fannit, we know that our CEO Persona is made up of the following information
- Age 47-65
- Personally make $200-$300k per year
- College Educated
- 54% Male
- This persona engages Fannit content on an average of 5 times before they contact Fannit to either inquire about services, engage on social media or make a referral
Fannit tracks over 7 main personas of the people who engage our materials on our web site.
4. We Should Know What It Costs to Bring in New Qualified Prospects
With the right monitoring of marketing activities and regular review of financial performance, you can absolutely calculate what it costs you to bring in qualified leads to your business. There is some debate in this area of marketing because not all leads can be attributed to only one campaign and, therefore, the expenses for acquiring new leads cannot be accurately calculated by campaign.
Marketing Managers usually get twisted up trying to figure this out, but successful CEOs know that it’s an aggregate effort by multiple campaigns that ultimately secures qualified leads, so they understand to only calculate aggregated marketing costs using lead volumes to get started. The only exception to this rule is when you know specifically which campaigns secured the new leads.
5. Marketing Is Never Something We “Figured Out.” Instead, We Focus On Perfecting The System Of Marketing.
There is no silver bullet in marketing, although you can build a “system of marketing.” This can help you learn what is working, starting to work, or no longer working during a certain time period.
Whenever a CEO tells you they understand what their marketing delivers for them, they are really telling you that they have figured out the following for the latest period of campaign tracking because it fluctuates, just like buying behaviors.
- How much they are paying for each lead they get
- Which types of content visitors are engaging with most
- Which types of content visitors are converting on
- How many sales will occur from a given number of new leads
- The dollar value of the new sales they will generate from their current marketing effort
At Fannit, we dig into web site traffic with deep analytical abilities to uncover the answers to these key marketing questions with tools like Google Analytics. Below is an example of part of a custom dashboard we look at to tell us how our content is being engaged by new visitors.
Ask yourself, “what assumptions am I making about my marketing capabilities?” This could tell you which key areas may benefit from deeper marketing analysis, development, and invested help.
