Know Your Priorities Before You Make Decisions

I wanted to share some real-world insight from my growth marketing clientele this week.

It goes to a problem I see often at all levels of marketing, regardless the size of the business or the experience of the team.

Goals & priorities.

Now, I’m not necessarily talking about the big, overarching company or division goals here like “increase revenue by 20%”, “decrease refund request”, or “improve customer support response time”.

All of those things matter, but today I want to focus on the smaller goals that help yo achieve the bigger ones.

Let’s take a look at a couple examples — client names withheld to protect the innocent!

Client #1: Running Facebook Ads for the First Time

Diving into paid ads for the first time — or the first time after a hiatus — can be nerve wracking. Especially now with ad costs trending higher and conversion rates trending down.

The first couple weeks can be the roughest because the data can be all over the map and it can be tempting to try to draw conclusions before the data is statistically significant.

This particular client started looking at the early data and evaluating profitability.

Now, first things first — profitability early on in the process of cold traffic ad spend is irrelevant.

Not only is the data probably not signficant yet, but it also probably doesn’t reflec the results at scale when spending $5k per day instead of $150.

But the bigger problem is the client forgot the primary reason we’re running cold traffic in the first place… LEADS!

The client hasn’t had any active lead generation activities for the past few years, so the primary goal is to stop the churn we’re seeing on the email list and start regrowing it.

If we can get to the point where we have a net cost per lead of less than $5 per lead, we’re in great shape because we know we’ll break-even within about 90 days.

But day 0 profitability?

It would be great, but it’s a secondary goal and NOT what we should be optimizing on out of the gate.

Client #2: When One Priority Clouds Your Judgement

My second client - a relationship that recently ended - was singularly focused on revenue generation.

In particular, they had a goal in mind to try to move towards a future exit.

The problem was that singular goal was preventing them from properly seeing all of the other intermediate priorities that really needed to be addressed on the way.

First, to hit that revenue goal was going to require a significant investment on the traffic & lead acquisition side…

An action that was definitely going to impact near-term profitability.

In addition, better systems needed to be in place to nurture and convert those leads in the future.

This wasn’t just a revenue generating project - an entire revamp of the marketing plan needed to happen.

And second, they also needed to keep in mind both near-term and long-term goals.

Remember, the near-term goal was revenue generation…

The long-term goal was an exit.

In order to maximize the multiple at exit, a lot more planning needs to go into HOW that revenue is generated…

• What’s the profit margin?

• Is it recurring revenue?

• What’s the lifetime value of a customer?

• Is the audience of potential future customers growing?

• What’s the customer churn?

All of these factors and many more matter if your future goal is to sell your company.

The Bottom Line…

Scaling a business isn’t as simple as “more revenue” or “more profit”.

Every action required a deeper dive into the different stages of growth and the intermediate goals and KPIs.

It’s critical to take a step back and have a clear picture of the goals, the priorities and if the actions being taken align with them.

Need to take a closer look at your overall marketing plan and see if it’s all in alignment?

You can book a Discovery Call with us here and we’ll see if we can help.

Jon & Chris