Today’s marketers have a bevy of channels to choose from. Despite the plethora of options, the job is to drive sales in some form or fashion. With that single-minded goal, marketers often have to place the focus on the channels that have a more direct route to the sale (also known as the shortest path to conversion).
Reality Check
The reality is that sales are not the ONLY goal marketers are held accountable for. Marketers are also responsible for driving brand awareness, engagement, and growing the prospect pipeline. These goals are traditionally classified as “top of the funnel” actions.
Unfortunately, “Top -Of -Funnel” does not get a ton of budget love and, therefore, the unique value that each channel represents in the sales cycle is often passed over in favor of the sales sweet spot.
Let’s Do Some Mixing
Have you tried mixing it up with your budget allocation by channel? By now, most marketers understand that each channel offers it’s own unique value in the sales cycle. Some channels are great at generating awareness, but not so great at converting that awareness to a sale. Other channels prime the customer experience in such a way that these customers retain better than others. And of course, the channels that convert into sales are well known and leveraged.
What if instead of loading up the highest converting channels with 100% of the budget, you moved a small portion into a channel that delivers on awareness, and another modest portion over to a higher retention channel.
Pipedream right? I mean if you can’t produce that goal cost per acquisition (CPA), it’s not going to be approved.
What if you were then able to demonstrate that the prospect pipeline grew 40%, with a modest 3% increase in budget? What if 28% of your clients retain at a higher rate? How much would both of those results add to the bottom line?
What Could Be the Impact?
How would these results impact the average revenue per customer? What if you were able to demonstrate a value that extended beyond the front-end CPA? In the end, the CPA is the ultimate metric for determining the value of a campaign, but it is worth understanding the full scope of each channel’s value.
The marketing channel mix offers the opportunity to explore the potential value offered by different marketing channels.
The secret to mixing it up with success is to have a specific goal to measure the effectiveness of your intent in each channel. Understand what you are targeting with each channel in your mix and ensure that CPA is the secondary goal of measurement.
Just like a ton of clicks does not always translate to conversion, a super efficient CPA does not always make the most efficient Cost Per Client/Customer.
The key is to test if increasing retention rates, or increasing prospects in the top of the funnel (or whatever you have elected to test), offers a more comprehensive value proposition. In other words, will a minimal increase in these actions result in more efficient average revenue per customer?
Mix it up and let me know!
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