Business Insights

Having trouble measuring your marketing ROI?

Customer retention versus customer acquisition: It’s a battle for the ages.  We know that keeping loyal customers can be easier and more profitable than finding new ones. Yet, many businesses still dedicate more resources to acquisition.  It’s vital that you balance your focus on customer acquisition with customer retention. Your loyal customers provide the most lifetime value, after all. So, while others work themselves to the bone trying to generate leads, you can come up with an effective retention process.

Businesses with properly aligned sales and marketing teams sell far more often at a higher profit margin. When our part-time Marketing Directors arrive in a new business, they’re often asked for marketing strategies to increase sales. As they look into improving the sales process, though, they actually find that the relationship between sales and marketing isn’t as it should be.

Many B2B businesses place more emphasis on lead generation than customer retention. This is often a mistake. Not only is it cheaper to retain customers than attempt to win new ones, it also takes less time and effort. In fact, it can cost 5 times more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one. Furthermore, as loyal customers repeatedly purchase your products and services they offer greater lifetime value, which in turn boosts revenue.

How do you measure brand awareness? Many businesses treat brand awareness as something intangible; a metric without a rubric. They know it’s important to be a recognised name, trusted by customers and respected by competitors, but establishing just how trusted and respected they are remains something of a mystery.  Digital marketing specialists don’t always help: they see success on their own terms rather than on those of the business as a whole. If they’ve made a video and it’s had a million views, a thousand shares, and half a dozen influencers have talked about it on LinkedIn, they’re happy. But you’re not just making content for the sake of putting it out there. It’s there to do some good for your business: to make some demonstrable impact on the bottom line.