Imagine If Your Marketing Budget Justified Itself…

You know the feeling…

You want to do more marketing, try different marketing channels, test something different and you need a bit more money to try it.

Your boss thinks differently.  Marketing already ‘costs’ too much every year.  You’re out of sync with your financial year and it’s been fixed already.

Of course they don’t remember the crazy idea they bolted out of the blue last month that you just had to implement…that ate into your budget, in an area that you never, ever, had in your marketing budget.  Of course that wouldn’t be remembered.

You suffer this all year long, then you come to next year’s budget.  Costs have went up.  Advertiser’s want more.  More is expected (of you, from the boss).

But you can only have 1% increase due to inflation.

You have to rework the budget again, and again.  And you can’t remember what you got out of that campaign last year so you have to pick a number out of they sky.

Sound familiar?

What if your marketing budget justified itself?

Image if you never had to fight for more money, and you could prove your campaigns were bringing in positive returns.

Go and ask your boss for 50 bucks and say you’ll give him $75 back and see what happens.

Then imagine going in for the kill and saying, “Cool, so you like the concept of making more money, so can I get 30% more in the marketing because last year the return on investment was 325%, and I reckon it could be higher with a bigger budget, and you know what that means Mr Boss?  You can afford an extra week off to play golf” (or ahem, hire more staff).

What would your boss would say?

And you know the tool that can do all that?  Google Analytics.

If you invest time knowing how to use Google Analytics properly, and make some modifications to your website (if required at all) you can start to track everything that happens from your online efforts including all of the stuff below :

• Ecommerce Transactions
• Form Submissions
• Email Clicks
• Phone Number Clicks
• Social Media Clicks
• Fixing your website traffic numbers that are probably inflated at the moment due to spammy referrals…or a dodgy setup by your web developer.

Once you turn all that stuff into events and goals, and assign some value to each of them, you have enough in your arsenal to justify your marketing budget.

You’ll also probably be amazed at how many people click on phone numbers on your website as well – remember on average over 50% of web traffic in AU and NZ is from mobile devices.  If this isn’t tracked, your boss will just think all the other stuff works better than it does – yes, maybe even something like the Yellow Pages.

… and you’d be able to tell your boss his madcap idea that just cost you an unplanned week in preparation, wasn’t quite such a smart idea after all as you got no business from it.

As well as that you can also work out :

• Where people are exiting your website
• What search terms people are using to find your site… and more importantly, which ones they aren’t finding your for!
• …and lots lots more.

Of course you can also work out what hasn’t worked as well either, but wouldn’t you rather know that so you can tweak it or bin it and not waste any more of your budget?

If you can get to this point, you can get past the old way of thinking of marketing as a cost.  If your campaigns are giving positive returns you should keep on spending until they aren’t, or you have no more widgets left to sell, or no more seats on your jetboats.

If you’d like to know more, please sign up for my Google Analytics All Day Workshop on Tue 17th May in Queenstown, NZ.

It’ll be a great day and you’re sure to learn loads.  It’s a bring your own device workshop so you can log into your own account and ask questions to solidify your understanding.  I’m so confident you’ll learn stuff that I’ll make this a risk free spend for your boss (or you!) with a full money back guarantee if you don’t learn anything.

Find out how to :

• Track Campaigns with custom URLs
• Set up events and goals
• Report
• Investigate website usage
• Find out if that paid advert on a third party site is really worth it next year
• Fix common setup errors
• Ensure your data is reporting as accurately as possible
• Correct common mistakes when dealing with third party website
• Ensure you put tracking in your website brief and why it’s so important to do early on

Head over to the Google Analytics Workshop in Queenstown page to find out more.