There’s a gap.
Together, big and small businesses alike spend millions of dollars educating their customers, doing redundant paperwork, fielding pointless phone calls, and responding to emails written by cave dwellers.
It’s how a lot of big and small businesses blow billions of dollars each year…not with their advertising budgets…but by how much time they spend educating customers about solutions that might work. Do you realize how time you spend in this unbalanced information spin cycle every day?
Why do we spend so much time writing bits, blurbs, and pieces on our website for people just looking for our phone number or store location?
How do we stop wasting time reaching the wrong customers?
Things we need to consider in the digital realm
Do you have any idea how many people read your last email newsletter or Facebook post? How many of them actually clicked on it?
Did your last email results look like this?
Emails Delivered to Mailbox: 15,465
Emails Opened: 592
Email Clicks after Opening: 71
Pay for Only the Clicks That Make Money
Did any of your last social media posts or email campaigns make your business money? Did any of those clicks generate meaningful action toward a purchase? Did any of these actions actually drive revenue?
How much time did you spend responding to emails or wandering through the comment section on social media?
Did anyone even read it? Is this thing even on? Are there better ways to reach customers?
Things we need to ask in the retail and brick-mortar world
Do you know how much extra revenue you generated from your last coupon or discount campaign? Are you sure that customers weren’t already going to buy that product even without the discount rate?
For the time and money spent on advertising and its related activities, what other activities could you have been doing?
It’s easy to forget that it’s not just the money we spend on advertising, it’s the time spent in the trenches: responding to new emails and new messages from potential new customers.
Time is fickle, and the real cost of digital advertising is sublime when we’re not looking at the full picture.
Is your advertising and marketing strategy actually driving you toward a more robust market position? Or is it just sucking money out of the bottom line?
It’s easy to point out how many people liked your Instagram photo, gauge how many people saw your billboard based on traffic volume, or reach 99% of drivers over 35 by running radio ads. It’s really easy to make up statistics in hypothetical scenarios. It’s really easy to justify marketing activities by clicks, likes, and views.
What’s hard is making predictable and scalable advertising models that keep money where it belongs: in the net revenue pile.