How to scale up your marketing

Most people jump to this stage of the process first. This is the equivalent of placing a first order of 100,000 widgets based on a design on the back of a napkin. Yes, there's a chance they might do the job but you're risking losing a lot of money in the process. (Read 'Turning your marketing upside down' for a more detailed explanation)

First, you need a robust marketing function in your business that leads your customers comfortably through their buying process. You need to make sure you've designed your marketing to be effective and you've tested it out and are confident that it is converting customers with a good return on investment.

The process of doing this will almost always result in an upturn in sales, but if your sights are set higher and you want to grow your business more, you have two choices:

1. Increase the marketing activities you're already doing that are proven to work
2. Add new traffic sources

The order of these is important: it is far easier and more efficient to increase sales from existing, proven marketing activities. People often shy away from doing this because they're not confident their activities are delivering ROI. If that's the case, go back and put measures in place so you know whether they're working or not. 

Do more of what works

Once you're confident that your existing marketing activities are efficient and delivering a good ROI then scale them up. Increase the budget on your Adwords or Facebook adverts, run bigger or larger magazine or journal adverts, send mailings to more people (obviously in a GDPR-compliant manner!), do more PR, get a bigger stand at your best exhibition, etc.
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If it's working, do more of it!

​New sources of traffic

As you increase your marketing activities, eventually you'll notice your ROI will start to drop off. This is because there tend to be limits to how much traffic can be generated by a single channel. It can also be dangerous to put too many eggs in one basket: ask the people who rely solely on Facebook ads for their business and find their sales crash every time the platform updates its algorithm.

As your business grows, there'll come a time when you need to add new traffic sources.
For each new source you need to follow the same process:

1. Create a specification with clear objectives and measures
2. Design how it'll work to lead customers towards your business
3. Optimise the experience from the buyer's perspective, making sure that at every stage the next step is clear and easy for the customer to take
4. Test it out, measure the results and make incremental improvements to improve your ROI.

Then, when your ROI is high, scale it up... again.

And then do it all again with another traffic source!

The most effective way to do this is to add one traffic source at a time, because its easier to measure the effect on top-line sales if you're not changing too much at the same time. However, if you have a long buying cycle then you may want to speed up the process by adding a new traffic source while you're still refining the last one. If you take this approach, make sure you can isolate and measure the sales that have resulted from each activity separately. If you can't, you risk attributing sales success to the wrong activity.

If you need some support to do this, or you know your marketing activities are not delivering ROI yet, do get in touch. I'd love to hear from you and see how I can help. Contact me by phone, email or via social media