According to Forbes, B2C companies usually allocate between 5% and 10% of sales to their marketing efforts. This would mean increasing your annual marketing budget incrementally based on your revenue objectives. Simple math would contend that if you made $1,000,000 in 2023 with an ad spend of $50,000, you would increase that by $25,000 if you’re trying to reach $1.5M in 2024.
So how do you allocate this budget based on historic performance?
In 2017, I began working with SA through one of Arizona’s largest residential tree companies, and found that one of my biggest challenges as a marketing director, was lead attribution. Cost of client acquisition was almost incalculable due to the fact that lead sources in our system were not only poorly written, but my prospects were telling me “how they heard about us.” Working with a $6.5M company meant that our marketing budget was in excess of $200,000. So where was all this money going?
Lead acquisition was not a problem for our company, at the time we were running ads via Google, Home Advisor, and Angie’s in addition to 2 publications, 6 Home Shows, and 2 semi-annual EDDM campaigns. We determined one way to keep track of ad performance was by dedicating various phone numbers via Ring Central for each lead source.
The problem? Each quarter, I would task a 3 day operation where CSRs would cycle through inbound calls from these phone numbers and attribute the leads source to the respective lead, client and estimate within Service Autopilot. Cumbersome I know, but I needed to get a pulse on what was and wasn’t working.
Another method that we implemented were dedicated landing pages for each campaign, however, our prospects still had the option to select their own leads source through the required dropdown field on my lead collection forms. While reporting in Google Ads was telling me how many leads converted, I had know idea the worth of those converted leads versus the money spent on ads.
At a certain point, I was forced to accept the reality that I would never truly know the worth of our marketing expenditures. Reconciling campaign ROI to estimations based on the efforts of our 3-day CSR data sessions, multi-platform conversion comparisons, and best guesses.
Fast forward to 2024. After helping said tree company increase annual revenue by 25%, I spent years working with an agile software development team, implementing systems & automation for several CRM systems across multiple industries, assisting organizations with lean implementation and user adoption. The world of tech grew at light speed within just a few short years, but my passion for the home services industry kept pulling me back to SA.
Now, 7 years later, I’ve determined that any GOOD marketer or marketing agency should be able to tell their clients exactly how much they’ve made them. Insert the power of webhooks.
Webhooks are designed to allow platforms to communicate in instances where they normally shouldn’t. We all know that SA is a closed source platform with only the most vetted and high-value, technical partners getting access to their ironclad API. Well, webhooks bypass the need to dig into the intricacies of SA’s backend code, allowing anyone to send data to and from their system to and from another system. Example: landing pages or another CRM platform.
Now, using our own dedicated two-way event based API, or webhook, we’re able to show our clients how their marketing dollars are performing.
You should want to know not only how many leads and clients you’re acquiring and the cost of acquisition, but also how much those clients are worth to you in order to determine how your marketing budget it best spent. $20,000 in post cards this year means less money allocated to your other campaigns. Comparing client acquisition cost versus actual revenue acquired from your advertising campaigns will tell you when and how much you should throw money at your various lead sources.
Start with our free report to check-in on your growth this year and reach out to Ready Business Systems if you’re ready to market like a $10M company. Watch the video below for more details.
