Business Insights

You’re a Premier League football manager, watching your team play the last five minutes of a crucial title decider. In that moment, what do you need to know? Stats are so ubiquitous in the game now that you could find out the number of tackles made; the possession achieved by each side; or how many metres each player has covered across the pitch.

Is there a more contentious marketing issue for small to mid-size B2B businesses than CRM? Of course, every business needs a customer relationship management system, but the damn things often seem like more of a hindrance than a help.

What exactly is marketing? A lot of people think of it as the visible stuff: the posters, the adverts, the social media campaigns, the email newsletters. And while these are certainly elements of marketing, they are simply tactics and strategies to reach a specific goal. With no clearly defined goal or purpose, all this activity is meaningless. For any organisation, of any size, the key goal of any marketing activity should be working towards - or directly impacting - the bottom line. Marketing is a combination of planning and budgeting - but to be successful, there needs to be a measure of what success actually looks like: your return on investment.

Marketing is often perceived by outsiders as being a creative industry, and, indeed, much of it is. Marketers are often caricatured as quirky creatives or flashy account managers – not skilled data analysts. But the most important thing in marketing is data: customer contact details, website analytics, email click throughs and everything in between. Get data management, analysis or reporting wrong and everything else that follows is potentially wrong, too.

Getting a new customer might feel more glamorous than retaining one, but your chance of making a new sale with an existing customer is 60-70%. That same statistic for a new prospect is just 5-20%. And yet, the never-ceasing search for the secret that will see your marketing connect to an ever increasing group of new customers is the ultimate goal for some. This article was originally published at http://blog.vistage.co.uk/3-metrics-to-prove-why-you-should-market-more-to-existing-customers.