Robust but flexible How to tune up your marketing during the “off season”

from UAC Magazine - Winter 2023

by Georgia Urban Ag Council

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Robust but flexible

How to tune up your marketing during the “off season”

by Trip Jobe, Sales & Marketing Consultant

Image by ar130405 on Pixabay

It’s the beginning of a new year and hopefully after some reflection on the P&L you are pleased

with how 2022 turned out. But the last few months have created new headwinds and more uncertainty for 2023. How should you best address that to maximize your revenue and profit potential for 2023? The fact that you are thinking strategically about it is a positive, vs. doing nothing or pushing off any decisions on marketing or advertising for the new year. I’ll address some ways you can think through your goals and objectives and develop a robust, yet flexible plan to drive your growth this year.

Review your current programs

Are you working with a marketing company or handling this yourself? What metrics do you use to determine the health and return of your marketing investments? Now is the time to make sure you are looking at the effectiveness of your 2022 efforts. If you are not measuring key performance indicators (KPIs), then you should take the time to determine some to track in 2023.

We refer to KPI’s as the metrics that should give you insight into the health of your business and marketing effectiveness. Vanity Metrics (VM) are metrics that can look great but don’t truly enhance your business. Many firms can help you grow social media followers, but is that generating revenue? Here are some examples of metrics you should consider:

Categorize your expectations

One of the common mistakes I see are business owners who lump everything into one bucket and expect things to average out. They tell me they expect to grow 5% in sales, on the same level of spending. This doesn’t sound unreasonable until you dive into where they expect to grow that revenue. If a large portion of your customers only use a portion of your services, this can be attainable. However, if you expect to grow by entering new

geographies or by mostly recruiting new customers, this 4

Cost per lead (VM) vs. cost per deal (KPI). A supplier growth will rarely come “free” in that first year. A simple way to approach your resource needs is to think about this mix of growth. You can put this in a pie chart totaling 100% of your expected sales. If current customers and products make up 90-95% of your sales, then status quo can be reasonable. But if you always have 10-15% customer churn and want to grow new products by another 10% of your total sales, these efforts will continue to require resources to attract those customers. can easily lower your cost per lead by adding more leads to your funnel, but are they worth anything? A better measure of your spending is tracking leads all the way through to deals and then track the initial costs over the deals you gain.

Awareness (VM) vs. Engagement (KPI). Many firms will tout the number of followers or visitors to your 4 website. I’ve seen many tricks to build these numbers from contests and splashy promos. These followers often have a limited interest. Focusing on engagement metrics such as time on website or downloads of material will give you a better idea of potential engaged customers. New customer sales ($) vs. Lifetime customer value. I won’t call new customer sales a vanity metric as there 4 is usually real value here. It’s a quality marketing metric you want to track but it may or may not really show the long-term health of your business. By working to determine your lifetime customer value, you have a better understanding of all customers, new and existing.

Build flexibility into your plan

Big companies often promote their annual plans and have a full calendar planned and spent when the year kicks off. Sometimes in advertising and media you need to make commitments, but don’t tie yourself down. Some of the best programs and tactics our teams ever did were fairly last-minute opportunities when we had available dollars to invest. This doesn’t necessarily mean wait until you see the business landscape, but retain some flexibility in how you spread out your budget. I’ve often held 10% of the total budget back until mid-year for these opportunities.

Set up checkpoints for the year...now

Set dates now to review your marketing performance. Let’s face it, the season will all of a sudden take off. Depending on the usual patterns, have a review planned with your team or outsourced marketing partner for March or April. Three months is an ideal review, but you may need to review sooner to make adjustments. Plan another review shortly after school is out to check in again. With these touchpoints, you can be ready to speed up or slow down your spending. Most of these ideas aren’t complicated, they just take some advanced planning and a willingness to stick with it. You will feel more confident in your marketing investments if you take the time this off-season to put some of these plans in place. Not sure about where to start? Reach out for a brief call. Good luck in 2023!

About the author Trip Jobe is an independent sales and marketing consultant and frequent contributor to UAC Magazine. P: 678-642-3933 | E: tripjobe@gmail.com