The wide world of marketing offers a lot of options, and in many cases, very little data to justify costs. When it comes to reviews, here are the facts:
So how much is a review worth? That depends.
Think about a $10M company spending $300,000 on marketing annually. This may be a conservative number for some companies, but a 3% marketing budget seems healthy.
Step 1. Ensure source attribution is being recorded against opportunities won. Diving deeper into close rates i.e. closed versus won against sales person, against area served, against an immeasurable number other of metrics, can all be highly beneficial when determining how to adjust marketing budgets during busy and slow seasons, and who should be managing various lead types by lead source, etc.
Step 2. Aggregate revenue attribution against lead source. e.g. Can you calculate the historic annual revenue by source? If systems are not in place to do this currently, here’s what you can do…
Step 3. Determine revenue earned by organic lead sources i.e. Yelp, Google Search, Facebook…
This can be done using a number of different tools. Focus on the following:
– Source-specific landing pages and/or forms
– Source-specific phone numbers
– Source-specific promotional codes
Once these tools are put into practice, it becomes much easier to determine the value of a positive review on organic sites.
1. Set target objectives by organic lead source… “my revenue object is x , in order to reach this objective, we need to increase ROI in XYZ lead sources which would mean increasing budgets for those lead sources…”
2. Cost per acquisition: “if we’re spending $X for Y Lead Source with Z average revenue, but B lead source provides a higher revenue per acquisition and we’re acquiring less leads, when would be the best time to run a test target campaign and increase revenue budgets for B lead source to acquire more leads for less?” What does this entail? What tools are at our disposal which could provide the highest ROI (i.e. Automated Email Reviews Campaigns)?
3. Finally, track revenue growth by targeted lead source against marketing investments attributed to campaigns implemented.
1. E.g. Paid Joe’s Marketing Co. $2000 to implement a reviews campaign between April and June. Saw an increase of 5 positive reviews and an additional 10 leads converted to opportunities. Out of those 10 opportunities, 4 converted to an average of $#,### per opportunity.
2. Should we continue to track this increase as an exponential return?
3. Does this campaign need to be revisited quarterly in order to maintain the current rating?
4. Will we continue to see an increase in reviews based on future, similar engagements?
5. Can we assume this initial campaign could attribute to an exponential increase over time?
If running a marketing campaign was so simple, there would be an Amazon of marketing companies. In the meantime, find a company that can ensure you are getting a return on your investment. As a business owner, it’s important you know your return on your investment when it comes to generating leads and ad spending. You want to be sure that what you’re spending on marketing is adding up to profitable income.
Contact us to receive an end-to-end business analysis and marketing strategy that works for your company. Want to learn more about how to implement these strategies for your business?…click here!
