It never ceases to amaze me how much potential revenue small businesses are leaving on the table without realizing it. Small business leaders are not unintelligent, but, as humans, we don’t know what we don’t know, and that has a big impact on the pace of growth of your business. It’s also a great reason to reach out to a marketing consultant who can help you identify what is going well in your business and what could be working better. We help you figure out how well your marketing budget is working for you.

Marketing agencies are great at implementing marketing activities, but marketing is not an activity, it’s the basis and strategy for your entire business (to learn more about marketing strategy, check out this blog). And agencies each have specific areas of strength, so they may not be able to identify or correct the things that are not working optimally. And agencies use general metrics that tell you how a specific activity is working, not how well that activity is delivering business results (i.e., revenue increase) for your company. Marketing consultants are less focused on the solution and more focused on the business results, and we use different metrics.

I recently had a client who had great website traffic, a really low bounce rate, and amazing engagement statistics. His sales were all through his website (by design). That was not why he came to me for help. His issue? He was not making as much money as he wanted to make, and he wanted to know how he could make more. Sound familiar?

I have a very different way of looking at things than a marketing agency does. My process starts with identifying the underlying issue(s) and following the path of potential causes through each of the marketing tactics before I design a solution. I have developed my process because I found that the majority of business owners tend to be more focused on the impact of some marketing tactics than others, especially when there are cost differences.

For example, if you’re doing paid internet advertising (Search Engine Marketing) you might focus on your ad campaigns, but there may not be anything wrong with them. If you tell your digital marketing agency to fix the ads because they are not working, that is what they will look at and change, but that may not increase your revenue.

In this case the client was only converting one-quarter of one percent of his engaged traffic. To be clear, that is 0.0025% of the traffic he had worked hard and paid so much to attract. More than 99% of his potential revenue was being lost to something, and that “something” was what I had to determine. What I found was something the business owner had not considered or asked the digital marketing agency to address.

He had dropped his paid advertising, and even fired several agencies, because he was “not getting results.” But neither the ads or the agencies were the issue. The real cause was related to a misalignment with the buyer’s journey combined with a need for onsite lead capture and conversion optimization.

As this case illustrates, you could be leaving a lot of money on the table and fixing the wrong things to try to address it. That’s a double-hit to your growth and profitability (lost revenue and increased marketing costs).
How much business – and increased revenue – are you missing out on? I’d be happy to help you find that out. Schedule a complimentary call with us here.