The only reason people work with us, ultimately, is because they want their business to grow.
You don’t need to step up your digital marketing, revamp your website, or take an app from idea to reality if you’re not interested in growing bigger, better, more profitable.
Now, I’ve worked with businesses at all sorts of levels of maturity. We have clients who have been in business for over 30 years who really want to fine-tune their operations, technology, and online presence and we have clients who are in total start-up mode where money is in short supply and every penny has to be invested for maximum impact.
Here is a method we have used to assist businesses who are just starting out and want to grow but don’t have a ton of money to invest in their online marketing.
And the best way to think about what I’m about to propose is through the lens of Dave Ramsey’s famous debt snowball.
How to Create a Digital Marketing Snowball
In case you haven’t heard of Mr. Ramsey and his debt snowball, here’s the basic idea (and you can read all about it on his site):
Say you happen to be in the unfortunate situation of having a number of debts you’re battling.
Each one has its own minimum payment you have to make every single month.
The idea with the debt snowball is that you continue paying each minimum payment every single month, but you also start focusing in on whatever item has the lowest total amount of debt you owe.
You add extra payments to that lowest debt so you can pay it off as soon as possible.
When you pay that debt off completely, you then take the amount you were paying for that debt and apply it to the next lowest debt on your list.
This lets you escalate the speed at which you pay off your debt by making sure you keep paying the same amount each month even when you pay one portion of your debt off.
Now, I’m not saying the debt snowball is always the right strategy to take. (This is more of a psychological game you play with yourself if you are having a hard time being in debt, as often it makes more sense to pay off the debt with the highest interest payment first such as a credit card bill instead of a car payment. But seeing your total number of debts go down faster can be motivating for folks who need to feel like they’re making that sort of progress to keep with the discipline of debt repayment.)
Anyway, how on earth does this apply to building momentum in your digital marketing?
Ah, yes, well that’s exactly what I’m going to discuss next.
The Digital Marketing Snowball
Over the last year and a half, I have been working with a professional who provides one-on-one services to wealthy clients.
She wanted to expand her client base, and she asked me to help her.
After custom designing a marketing-focused website with her ideal client in mind, it was time to drive traffic to that brand new shiny website.
(By the way, most web designers don’t know the first thing about actually driving traffic to a site and scaling it, let alone how to design for conversion. Caveat emptor when working with a web designer.)
Before we started with her traffic campaign, I made her promise me to follow the path I was about to lay out for her.
Here’s how I convinced her to implement the Digital Marketing Snowball in her business:
1. First, we identified the average value of one new client in her business.
For her business, it made sense to calculate this value over the course of one year of working with a client regularly. So, we averaged out the number of times she would work with an average client allowing for vacations and occasional interruptions.
By the way, if you don’t already know this number, just doing this simple exercise will change how you think about your entire business. Convert from being cost-focused to investment-focused and use this basic number as your guide for any decisions you make about where to spend your precious capital.
2. Once we had the one-year value of an average client as a guiding principle, I asked her to commit to a certain monthly digital marketing budget for the following 12 months.
This would be our baseline.
In her case, she committed to starting with a $600/mo. budget.
Yours could be higher or lower. The principle I’m discussing here still applies.
3. Now, with the campaigns all set up and tracking in place, we set everything to active. She was live, and her business was getting in front of more eyeballs.
At this point, it was all about tracking the results.
If you don’t know whether what you’re doing with your online marketing is working or not, it makes it impossible to know whether your investment in the online marketing is paying off. You MUST track.
Part of the benefit of online marketing is how data-driven it is.
You can know exactly what you’re spending, exactly how many people saw your ads, exactly how many clicked or took action as a result of your ads (including using special tracking phone numbers that only appear on your ads if you like), and ultimately this lets you know whether your marketing spending is letting you mint money or hemmhorage it.
One of the best questions you can ask about of any new customer that walks in your doors is, “How did you find out about us?”
4. As soon as she got her very first conversion into a paying client from the campaigns, we had an agreement that she would reinvest a portion of her uptick in income back into her campaigns.
Your specific situation will dictate what your increase should be.
I like to aim for at least an increase of 10% of the average monthly value of a new client back into the online campaigns.
So, beware here comes some math, if her average yearly client value was $10,000, this would mean that the average monthly value of a client would be $10,000 divided by 12 (months), which gives us: $833 per month in increased income.
Take ten percent of that figure and you have $83.33
That’s how much I asked her to increase her online marketing budget every time she got a new client.
5. The end result is increased results, increased momentum, and increased motivation.
The hard part in setting up an online marketing campaign is going from zero results to your first result.
You’re paying money into a process that you don’t know whether it will convert and have value or not.
Once you have your first conversion, it gets easier to believe that more are on the way.
If you reinvest a small portion of that average new client’s value back into your business, those results will come faster and faster and faster.
Speed is useful for a number of reasons, not least of which you’ll stick to your discipline of marketing your business, which will in turn cause your dreams to approach faster and faster and faster.
I’ve watched the sudden upward swing in a business’s fortunes come rocketing in time and time again, and it’s always a joy to behold. Particularly when I’ve assisted (in some small way) in helping make a client’s dreams a reality.
If this sounds like something you’d like to experience in your business, sign up for a free consultation today so we can have one of the most powerful conversations you’ll ever have about your business, your future, and how to make your dreams come true.
