It takes skill to effectively optimise your sales and marketing costs, but dominate digitally.
Growth is impossible without sales and marketing, which are instrumental in bringing customers that generate revenue, that brings growth, if well managed. To get working capital after investment capital, the business must generate revenue that comes from sales and marketing.
Sales and Marketing in this day and age is done 80% over digital platforms because of the advancement of mobile phones and the internet. You cannot afford to ignore digital marketing as a business, and there is a need for the same to know how to effectively plan, execute, review and re-engage its audiences for growth purposes.
The Budget for Digital Marketing
In an age of instant results and DIY, many business owners assume they can do their own digital marketing, and attain desired sales results, without a budget. That does not work and never ends well.
It is always important for a business to have a digital marketing budget from onset.
A common rule of thumb is that B2B companies should spend between 2 and 5% of their revenue on marketing. For B2C companies, the proportion is often higher—between 5 and 10%. This is because B2C companies typically need to invest in more marketing channels to reach various customer segments.
However, Forbes advises that “if you want to maintain current revenue amounts, then 5% to 10% of sales allocated toward advertising may suffice”. An example would be, if you are making R100,000 a month, you must spend at least R10,000 for Sales and Marketing efforts.
This also can mean that, if you are expecting to earn R100,000 in the next month, you must at least spend R10,000 on Sales and Marketing.
A business, small or medium scale, can grow with a budget of 80% to 100% of this model of sales and marketing monthly budget based on revenue expected.
This budgeting model is not currently being used and is key to the closure of many Start-Ups in South Africa and Africa at large. To survive and grow in the various hash economic sectors, there is a need to have structured risk in business development.
In a HubSpot survey of 1,000 marketers, 47% of respondents reported that their budget would increase. Another 45% expect their budgets to stay about the same in the new year.
The Marketing Strategy (Platforms)
Together with Budgets, there is a need to have a clear strategy.
A Marketing Strategy of today is the same as a Digital Marketing Strategy, because all marketing is now digital. It is important to make sure that the team responsible for developing and executing a marketing strategy must include Web Designing, SEO & SEM, Photography, Content Creation & Marketing, Email Marketing, Lead Generation, SMS Marketing, Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Listings, and Social Media Management.
Prioritisation of marketing channels is also shifting. Traditional advertising will make up less of 2023’s marketing budget, Deloitte reports, shrinking by 0.7%. Instead, marketers plan on spending more money on social media and new media platforms.For instance, marketers plan to invest the most in Facebook marketing in 2023. While many marketers already have a robust Facebook strategy, 25% of marketers surveyed by HubSpot will invest in the platform for the first time next year.
Further, video will be a bigger investment in many marketers’ budgets. HubSpot found that 91% of markets plan to increase or maintain their investment in YouTube next year.Meanwhile, on TikTok, 56% plan on increasing their TikTok investment in 2023 — the highest increase of any social media app. Another 34% plan to maintain their current TikTok budget.Influencer marketing is another lead-generation tactic worthy of investment. According to our State of Marketing Report, 68% of marketers worked with influencers in 2022 and 88% have a dedicated influencer marketing budget.This trend will continue in 2023. In fact, 89% of marketers plan to increase or maintain their investment in influencer marketing next year. An additional 17% will invest in this marketing tactic for the first time.
In strategy, especially Digital Marketing, there is a need to be very clear about the customer journey, how they move from awareness, to consideration, and to conversion of the prospect into a customer.
The Customer Intelligence (CRM)
To effectively execute a Marketing Strategy in this day and age, a business must use a Customer Relational Management (CRM) application.
A CRM gives you a cutting edge using the internet, for better customer service, increased sales, improved customer retention, detailed analytics, higher productivity and efficiency, centralised database of information, managed communications with prospective leads, improved customer segmentation, automated sales reports, more accurate sales forecasting, streamlined internal communications, and more.
The best CRM applications are web-based and incorporate CRM, Email Campaigns, Social Media Management, Data Analytics and Reports, Forms, Bookings and Calendar Management, all integrated to Social Media platforms and Accounting systems.
The Activities (Campaigns)
The activities of sales and marketing are there to achieve customer acquisition and retention (CAR), and this is done through marketing campaigns on digital platforms.
To effectively acquire customers a business must run sales lead generation advertising campaigns, which collect data of interested prospects, pushing the data into the CRM and from the CRM lead nurturing campaigns can be run and managed.
To get sales a business needs a marketing team that creates campaign after campaign, whether paid or organic advertising. Campaigns create relationships with new audiences and create customers and also retain them for future consumption. Create Advertising Campaign strategies that are relevant to the business, and make sure you are swift in execution as time waits for no man or business on the internet. There must always be some campaign being run on various platforms.
There are two types of important campaigns – Lead Generation and Brand Awareness. Without going into depth, lead generation campaigns bring in sales, and brand awareness campaigns market the brands image, building reputation for future consumption. It is recommended to have a 50/50 balance on these two, as that brings growth balance. Sales and Reputation are both important and must be cultivated at the same time.
The Optimisation
In all this, the most important thing is to optimise the costs and the metrics of the campaigns, on the various platforms, in order to achieve set goals and objectives in the strategy. A very good CRM helps a business do this, by providing a collage of data analytics reports and dashboards to use and make decisions from.
There is Search Engine Optimisation, then there is Social Media Optimisation, but there is also Budget Optimisation, Campaign Optimisation, Followership Optimisation and CRM Optimisation.
It is not enough to focus on one without attending to the other issues. SEO is for website and search engine marketing. Budget Optimisation is watching the costs of each campaign, to measure the results based on desired outcomes. Social Media Optimisation is the application of optimisation techniques on all social media advertising, posts, and analytics.
Followership Optimisation is about ensuring the right people follow your social media channels, right audiences respond to your adverts, and the right people consume your sales and marketing literature. This includes profiling consumers based on the brand’s identity and marketing strategy.
CRM Optimisation is about productivity improvement, starting from prospecting leads by compiling data, improving customer relationships, and enhancing your business processes to achieve efficiency and optimization with a better return on investments.
All these types of optimisations form the basis for optimisation of all sales and marketing costs, whilst dominating digitally as a brand or business.
Success Stories
With an understanding of how to optimise sales and marketing you are able to reduce advertising costs per lead from R12 per lead to R3 without having to run the lead for long. These kinds of successes have been achieved by the Kupa Creative Group (Pty) Ltd, a South African based marketing business, for business with businesses in diverse industries in South Africa, Botswana, Zambia, East Africa, Egypt, and West Africa since 2019.
Source: BD Canada, HubSpot, Business Daily
