Set Goals

We all know Goal Setting is an essential part of energising a business - putting it simply it 'gives us a direction'.
Once you've conducted your Digital Marketing audit, and worked out your lifetime value of a customer, then you can set yourself some goals e.g. 20% growth in new customers this year.

But to achieve these goals, you want to look at the sources of new customers, knowing the cost of those sources, and then allocate resources to the best areas.

Let's look at how you can track the source of leads across all channel e.g. as for ‘last month’:

Then you can specify an average number of leads (new contacts) to be generated.

In order to gain insight into the stages of lifecycle of your new leads, you will want to run a spreadsheet like the following:

Once you have done this, you should look to:

Give your Marketing team one primary metric, and the one I would encourage is the generation of MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads).

To do this, you first need to have the criteria for an MQL e.g. downloaded a brochure, as opposed to a ‘Lead’ being someone who has only downloaded an ebook.

Next, consider what will make an MQL and SQL (Sales Qualified Lead). They may get verified by the Sales Team or through e.g. ‘real world event attendance’.

When you have this, you want some mechanism by which you can see the movement between stages:

In this example, visibility on SQLs to customer conversion rates for last year is showing 44% conversion rate for last year once people reach this stage.

An example:
In order to create consistency across products/services, we’d suggest you think in terms of Sales Units as a weekly target. A Sales Unit is roughly the value of the first purchase a person makes with you e.g. £3000.

Let’s say your aim is to achieve 20 sales units per week;
And you aim to deliver 50% of them as ‘new customers’.

Here is the breakdown…
New customers: 10 sales units per week (50% of 20) = £30,000 a week revenue from new customers

And let’s say there are MQLs generated per week*: 50 (i.e. 200 a month)

The average cost per acquisition of an MQL is £50

*MQLs = event bookings, ‘product brochure’ downloads, and potentially a ‘scoring system’ whereby user activity e.g. call requests/email opens/clicks etc moves them over a score of ‘50’

Note: ultimately it needs to be SQLs generated from MQLs that is valued – if not, e.g. you would be focused on people ‘saying yes’ to an event, irrespective of them turning up.

CONSIDERATIONS

In terms of ‘breakdowns’, look to optimise each stage of the process to increase
conversion rates. This includes:
1. Sales team connecting with people prior to events (phone/email)
2. Tracking open rates of confirmation emails; using text follow up to increase likelihood of attendance where appropriate (not bombarding)
3. Increasing conversion in the room
4. Non-attendee follow up – giving alternatives to the event to gain more knowledge (e.g. ebooks, meeting, brochure, and ‘webinars’)
5. ‘Attendee non-purchaser’ follow up by the sales team