WHY WE DO IT
We Think Small Business Marketing Should Pay For Itself
Profitable Marketing Manifesto™
Genuinely successful marketing pays for itself.
Business marketing must be profitable, especially for small and medium businesses (SMBs). Otherwise, budget wasted on marketing takes profit away from the businesses. Below are five Profitable Marketing Manifesto™ ideas and three PlanStartGrow solutions for your consideration.
Successful Business Marketing Generates Profit
Businesses, small and large, exist to generate profits. Typical marketing approaches would have you accept marketing as a business function requiring a continuous flow of budget for expenses. It's time to challenge this thinking and require your marketing to focus on generating profits rather than spending budgets to support marketing activities.
Here are three solutions for making your business marketing profitable:
Measuring Marketing Using Revenue is Dangerous
Do not use revenue to judge the success or failure of business marketing activities. Directly tracking the profit (or loss) of marketing activities (Profit of Marketing) gives more accurate results, avoids revenue to profit conversion errors, and allows better business decisions. Using revenue to measure marketing outcomes can result in a positive traditional "return on investment" (more revenue than marketing expense) with a negative Profit of Marketing (less profit than marketing expense).
Every Profit Dollar Equals Multiple Revenue Dollars
Perfect businesses with impossible business models generate 100% profit from revenue. All others require several or many revenue dollars to generate each profit dollar. Determine where you are by dividing your total revenue by gross profit for a quick analysis. An answer of 10 suggests your business generates a profit of $1,000 for each $10,000 of revenue. It also suggests profitable marketing requires your business to spend less than one hundred thousand dollars to generate a million dollars in revenue. Revealing unproductive marketing activities effectively creates "virtual" revenue by protecting marketing budgets against wasteful spending (Marketing Budget Protection).
Automation Ensures Continued Marketing Profitability
Once Profit of Marketing reveals marketing activity profitability and Marketing Budget Protection stops wasteful budget spending, the automation of profitable marketing without increasing budgets (Almost Free Marketing) ensures successful outcomes continue using a marketing as a service approach. Automating profitable marketing activities allows businesses to continue achieving the results they want without doing the work themselves.
Marketing Assets Including Contacts Have Intrinsic Value
The intrinsic value of existing marketing assets can be determined using Profit of Marketing. Yet, many businesses ignore "dead" leads, "old" contacts, and "junk" web visits because they don't have a mechanism for determining their actual value. Similarly, the intrinsic value of other marketing assets can be determined including marketing materials and sales tools.
For example, the following would apply to scenarios where a new customer generates a $1,000 profit:
Successful Business Marketing Generates Profit
Businesses, small and large, exist to generate profits. Typical marketing approaches would have you accept marketing as a business function requiring a continuous flow of budget for expenses. It's time to challenge this thinking and require your marketing to focus on generating profits rather than spending budgets to support marketing activities.
Here are three solutions for making your business marketing profitable:
- Activity tracking that reveals the profit (or loss) of marketing activities, like PlanStartGrow's Profit of Marketing™.
- Budget protection that reduces unnecessary marketing budget waste, like PlanStartGrow's Marketing Budget Protection™.
- Profitable ROI that pays for itself without increasing budgets, like PlanStartGrow's Almost Free Marketing™.
Measuring Marketing Using Revenue is Dangerous
Do not use revenue to judge the success or failure of business marketing activities. Directly tracking the profit (or loss) of marketing activities (Profit of Marketing) gives more accurate results, avoids revenue to profit conversion errors, and allows better business decisions. Using revenue to measure marketing outcomes can result in a positive traditional "return on investment" (more revenue than marketing expense) with a negative Profit of Marketing (less profit than marketing expense).
Every Profit Dollar Equals Multiple Revenue Dollars
Perfect businesses with impossible business models generate 100% profit from revenue. All others require several or many revenue dollars to generate each profit dollar. Determine where you are by dividing your total revenue by gross profit for a quick analysis. An answer of 10 suggests your business generates a profit of $1,000 for each $10,000 of revenue. It also suggests profitable marketing requires your business to spend less than one hundred thousand dollars to generate a million dollars in revenue. Revealing unproductive marketing activities effectively creates "virtual" revenue by protecting marketing budgets against wasteful spending (Marketing Budget Protection).
Automation Ensures Continued Marketing Profitability
Once Profit of Marketing reveals marketing activity profitability and Marketing Budget Protection stops wasteful budget spending, the automation of profitable marketing without increasing budgets (Almost Free Marketing) ensures successful outcomes continue using a marketing as a service approach. Automating profitable marketing activities allows businesses to continue achieving the results they want without doing the work themselves.
Marketing Assets Including Contacts Have Intrinsic Value
The intrinsic value of existing marketing assets can be determined using Profit of Marketing. Yet, many businesses ignore "dead" leads, "old" contacts, and "junk" web visits because they don't have a mechanism for determining their actual value. Similarly, the intrinsic value of other marketing assets can be determined including marketing materials and sales tools.
For example, the following would apply to scenarios where a new customer generates a $1,000 profit:
- The value of a lead is $100
Creating a new customer requires 10 leads (ten $100 leads create $1,000 profit). - The value of a contact is $5
Creating 1 lead required 20 contacts (twenty $5 contacts create one $100 lead). - The value of a web visit is $1
Creating 1 contact requires 5 visits (five $1 visits create one $5 contact)