It amazes me how much cash large brands throw into the wrong places.
Rather than thinking about how best to spend their money, they throw £50 bills at the wall and hope that some might stick and start to drive sales. Not so long ago, one UK bank set their Google pay per click and online advertising budget at £1m.
That’s £1m to really interrupt people. Not only that, but to interrupt the wrong type of people. By retargeting to PPC, all a brand will succeed in doing is pissing a lot of people off, whilst potentially not reaching any credible prospects at all. Great job.
This got me thinking. What could an inbound marketer do with £1m?
Just think about it.
A message to the big brands
Renting your marketing sucks. Why? Because the moment that you stop paying for your marketing, your brand disappears. Take your billing details off of Google PPC and you’ll be gone before you can say the magic words. You’ll be the David Blaine of marketing.
Rented marketing is the digital equivalent of tripping people up on the street at random. It’s aimless, it upsets people and it won’t get your sales revenue anywhere.
Not only this, but it threatens to shrivel your brain up too. Throwing cash about isn’t getting you thinking about your relationship with your customers, how to build your brand, and what might attract prospects to you.
Don’t be a mindless ninny. Be useful, helpful and interesting to your customers and prospects. Trust me, it’ll be worth it.
What to do with all that dough?
Unfortunately, this isn’t a question that many inbounders get to ask, but let’s just head to Narnia for a second.
First off, with our £1m budget, we’re going to turn marketing into an everyday event. We’re going to build relationships and become a trusted advisor and valued resource to both customers and prospects…
Now this is all very well and good, but how do we get down to the nitty gritty of it all? What should you consider before starting to splash out any cash?
- Get prospects and customers involved with building the channels too so that they become engaged with your brand.
- Start with one platform, do it incredibly well and then start to investigate and add new channels.
- Building up your online platforms are also an important part of the ‘attraction’ phase. Start with blogging, then major on Twitter, introduce Facebook, develop LinkedIn and add in others that you think might work.
- What is your strategy going to be for each of these stages and what content are you going to produce to help them through the whole process?
- You can then start to define your customers’ buying stages and consider the desired outcome at every stage.
- By clarifying who your prospects are, you can start to bring into focus what you need to do to find and attract them to your brand.
- What makes your prospects tick? What are their frustrations, challenges and issues? Who do they turn to for advice, ideas and help?
- Getting a firm understanding of the types of customers that you’re trying to reach - your personas - should be your starting point, regardless of your budget.
- The starting point is the stuff that you can do for free.
- Setting up workflows to help nurture and build the relationships that you are establishing is also a free and easy way of keeping your customers involved after the initial attraction phase.
- Building up your content is the next phase that you need to consider. This can be as costly as you like. With a budget like this you could invest in content such as videos and podcasts, and start to produce them on a grand scale.
- This money also gives you the opportunity to think like a publishing house and start to churn out high-quality content quickly. This will help you to turn your company into an enterprise-level content generation machine that can really maximise its ability to attract prospects in.
- Make sure that your content constantly addresses your customers’ concerns
- Make sure that your content is easy to download
- Make sure that your content is remarkable to read
- I would also recommend hiring journalists from newspapers and magazines and not just marketing writers. These guys know how to write stories and write them well.
- So now we’ve established ourselves, we need to set out on the more expensive development phase.
- Reserve about £250k for PPC and social media advertising for the first year. This will drive traffic to your content and accelerate your growth enough to serve you over a longer time period.
- Invest in technology that gives you a complete overview of your activities, describes what’s working, informs you of sources and allows you to automate.
- Should I get Hubspot and Moz first? This will allow me to analyse what does and doesn’t work and invest in the right places long-term.
- So now I ramp up: my plan was always start small, think big, test quickly and scale fast.
- I need to figure out what works and what doesn't. This means using tools to analyse and reevaluate the direction that the company should take.
- Think about conversion rate optimization and how you can test and improve upon it.
- Now you have the volume, you can execute some more A/B testing and get statistically relevant data back, which will help you to plan longer-term.
- I also need to start broadening my appeal to a wider market so that I can continue to grow.
- We need to start gaining more reach on social media. It also means more content, which means hiring more journalists.
- It also, hopefully, means more sales, so I also need to expand those teams.
- I need to look at account management and customer service and consider how the buying process will be consistent across all of our departments.
- Now I’ve got prospects rolling in all year round and my content is the most helpful and engaging in the world, I can simply sit back and watch it happen.
- Thinking long-term means a lot of reviewing. Review budgets, review results, do it quickly and turn it around in order to plan effective business strategies and keep your company moving forward as it should.
- If your customers are going to be loyal in the long-term, you need to maintain a high performance, this means getting relevant results, reviewing constantly and listening to customers on a regular basis.
Don’t get excited and let all that cash be for nothing
Think of it as an investment, not a lottery win. In order to get a good return, not only have you got to put it in the right places, but nurture it too.
That’s if you get a million pounds in the first place – we can live in hope.