What difference can a marketing strategy make to your business? Find out how it helped us earn 3,150% more
Curious about what kind of results you can see when you get marketing right? Find out how it helped us increase our profits by 708% in just one year – and how we can help you.
If you want to know how successful marketing is, you need to look at the numbers. What these numbers are will depend on the specific goals you set for your marketing, and the metrics you are using to measure that goal by.
For example, you might run a brand awareness campaign, with your chosen metrics being your social media following. In this case the numbers that will decide whether your campaign is successful or not will be your follower numbers. (It’s always wise to set specific, SMART goals – so rather than just ‘more social media followers’ you’d set a goal like ‘to increase our Twitter followers from 1,000 to 5,000 in six months’.)
But whatever specific goals you may set your marketing, there are some numbers that ALWAYS matter, and that is your turnover and profit. Because the ultimate goal of marketing is to make your business money. That’s why the success of your marketing is measured in your return in investment (ROI). In other words, how much money did you earn for the money you spent on marketing?
And that is the key word: investment. Because marketing should never be seen simply as a cost. Done properly, with a plan, marketing should always be an investment, and reward you with more than you spend… even if that investment is long term rather than aiming for a short term win.
That’s why, on our online course Marketing The Easy Way we teach you to look at the numbers. We ask you to set a SMART goal for your marketing – whether it’s an evergreen strategy or a marketing campaign. We then show you how to choose the metrics and measurables you will use to track and analyse the performance of your marketing, and ensure you get the right ROI.
So exactly what difference can this make to your marketing and why? And how did it help my increase our profits by 708% in a year (and 3,150% in five years)? Let’s look at why a marketing plan makes such a difference first.
Why does a marketing plan make such a big difference?
When you know what you want your marketing to achieve and, specifically, what numbers you want to achieve, it makes it much easier to plan what you need to do, where and how much money you need to spend (if any). You’ll be able to strategically decide what activities need to happen on which platforms, and what results they need to achieve.
As you implement your plan you can also quickly see what’s working and what isn’t – what is getting you close to the numbers you need and what is lagging behind. This enables you to quickly change where needed, to put more effort, activity and budget behind what is working with your audience, and tweak or abandon elements that aren’t performing as well.
For example, when we run Facebook ad campaigns we have specific goals for our ads. And we check them daily to ensure they are on track. If not, we’ll stop an ad and either split test different variations or create a new one. This means that we don’t waste money on ads that aren’t working.
By tracking your results over time, as we do, you also start to build a picture of what works and what doesn’t. This has enabled us to create a template for our marketing campaigns that we can rely on to work – to the extent that we were able to predict the results of our SEO Kit last year to less than £100.
Over time marketing delivers compound results
Of course there’s always room for improvement and we continually experiment with new approaches, while keeping the best performing elements of our campaigns untouched. This enables compound improvements over time that (as you’ll see shortly) have a significant effect on your business profits.
It also makes planning your campaigns easier and more enjoyable. With (in our case now, years of) results to draw from, you can develop campaign templates and processes to adapt each time, rather than start with a blank page. Over time we’ve developed a campaign launch planner that we just fill in each time, saving us time and enabling us to create far more profitable campaigns.
So now when we launch a new campaign, we just open a new campaign launch planner, work out our dates, then build a to-do list with pre-populated items that we simply tweak as needed:
(You get a copy of our planner in Marketing The Easy Way.)
Once we have our to-do list we just work through it, creating each element and briefing the freelancers we work with, well ahead of our deadline, and scheduling everything to run as needed.
This means you can plan a campaign months in advance, set up the elements and just sit and watch the sales come in as the campaign triggers and runs.
So what ultimate difference can this make to your marketing?
We increased our annual profit by 708% when we started marketing
As you can imagine, it takes a lot of the frustrating guesswork out of marketing. It also saves you time and enables you to be more organised (which ALWAYS feels better and yields better results than reactive, ad hoc marketing on the fly).
But the biggest difference it can make is to your bottom line. Because when you start getting your marketing right, with well-planned and properly implemented strategies you should see a big change in your bottom line.
We first started tracking our monthly figures properly part way through 2016, when we hired our first business coach and got serious about making money. So from 2017 onwards we have a clear picture of our turnover and profit. Since 2017 we have been gradually learning more about marketing, developing our own approach and getting better at identifying what works and what doesn’t.
Here’s how that is reflected in our bottom line.
- In 2018 we increased our annual profit by 708%.
- In 2019 we increased our annual profit by 73%.
- In 2020 we increased our annual profit by 70%.
The huge jump in 2018 reflects the difference that just doing marketing properly can make versus ad hoc guesswork, which was our approach before (and is now most small businesses do marketing). As you can see, simply by starting to plan and implement a marketing strategy we grew our profits by an incredible 708%.
And year-on-year since, as we work on developing our marketing strategy, you can see that our business profits continued to grow by more than 70%.
Our marketing results are sustainable and grow year-on-year
Please note the figures above are PROFIT, not turnover. Some businesses I speak to have an impressive turnover, but the cost of their marketing is so high that their actual income is far lower than ours. Our approach (the same one we teach you in our marketing course here) isn’t simply to chase vanity metrics like a ‘six figure launch’ but rather to grow a sustainable business that makes a healthy profit.
In fact, I liken our marketing approach to losing weight healthily and sustainably.
If you want to lose weight you know you can embark on a crazy crash diet and live on ‘miracle’ diet shakes to see impressive instant results. But you can’t live like that forever, and as soon as you return to your old eating habits the weight will return.
Deep down, you know that if you want to enjoy long term weight loss (and be more healthy), the only real way to achieve it is with long term, sustainable changes to your eating habits and activity levels.
To me that is what real marketing is like. It’s not an instant quick fix that you can’t maintain. It’s about identifying achievable changes you can make to see a consistent difference over the long term – and results you can build on as you grow your business.
Thanks to marketing I earn 3,150% MORE money while working part time
There’s been another big change that marketing has made to our business. In 2016 when I first started working with a business coach and learning about how to market properly, I was working almost seven days a week on Talented Ladies Club and taking nothing out. It was relentless and demoralising.
But over the years not only have we started earning proper money thanks to proper marketing, but it actually takes LESS time to run the business! As incredible as it may seem, in 2021, we made an incredible 3,150% more profit than in 2016, and I only work part time on the business today. My work hours are Monday to Thursday 8:30am to 3pm, and I take time off from that when I choose.
So for example, when my son had a driving test recently I was able to take the day off to be with him. And when my daughter has been off school sick, I have been able to spend time with her without worry or guilt, or leaving work undone.
I have also achieved this without needing to rely on gimmicks or investing heavily in advertising. I haven’t needed to sell my soul or do things that go against my values. I have simply applied proper, best practice marketing – an approach that can work for any business.
I want to help you achieve results like these too
The mission for Talented Ladies Club is to help you unlock your potential. And there’s so much more potential in many small businesses than they are currently accessing.
Over the years I have worked with dozens of entrepreneurs and freelancers, and better, more consistent and properly planned marketing has helped to unlock their potential – and earn them more money.
If you are not currently earning the money you want – if you don’t have all the customers or clients you need and aren’t bringing home the income you believe you deserve – then there is a big chance that marketing is the reason why.
From experience, I’d guess that you are making one of these common marketing mistakes:
- You haven’t got (or aren’t working to) a proper marketing strategy
- Your marketing activity is ad hoc or guesswork
- You have a marketing strategy but it’s missing elements or is incorrect
And there’s no shame if are making one or more of these mistakes – I was too way back in 2016! The simple truth is that we aren’t usually taught marketing at school, and without learning how to plan a strategy for a small business you can’t help but rely on guesswork.
I want to change that, which is why I developed our online marketing course Marketing The Easy Way. I want to give every small business owner and freelancer who needs it, access to a simple system to create and launch a marketing strategy that will work. A plan that will help your to grow your business and profits in the long term. And give you that all important ROI you deserve.
Join today and start transforming YOUR marketing too
By following the process I teach you I was able to increase our profits by 708% in just one year, and last year made 3,150% more profit than in 2016. I was also able to reduce my hours to part time and take Fridays off, while continuing to make more money.
I want to help you reach your business goals too. Take a look here to see how Marketing The Easy Way can help you finally create and launch the marketing plan you need and deserve. It could be the best investment you ever make in your business. I look forward to helping you unlock your real profit and potential.
Find out how Marketing The Easy Way can help you create and launch a plan that works in just eight weeks.
