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Everyone wants to grow their business, but not everyone has the time or patience to learn all the ins and outs of marketing, sales enablement, and making the most out of a CRM such as HubSpot. Join the Web Canopy Studio team, a HubSpot Diamond Partner Agency, as they chat about various topics all designed to help you grow your B2B business.
(00:00):
If you've ever been in a situation where you've been trying to figure out how much should I be spending on my marketing initiatives? Where should my budget be allocated? What should I be doing? What's what's the baseline for companies like me and, and people like me. You're not alone. That's a very common, common question that comes up from marketing directors, sales directors business owners in general. And so in this episode, I'm actually giving you access to a private workshop that I did with a select group of people. And we went deep into planning your marketing budget, not only planning it, but understanding how you should allocate it and what kind of questions you should take into account when you're deciding what you should be focusing on. My name is John Aikin. I'm the CEO of Web Canopy Studio. And this is the website conversion show.
(00:54):
So let's, let's first think about what is the biggest mistake most companies make in planning their marketing efforts. Now there's a lot of different things. People might have different recommendations. People might have different things that they say, oh yeah, this is, this is where I think we've made the mistake in the past, but it really, really boils down to two different things. Number one, not setting goals or at least not setting appropriate goals or number two, focusing on stupid stuff, focusing on things that doesn't matter. Nobody likes stupid stuff. Nobody likes wasting time and over production and just spending their wheels on things that don't really matter, which is where most marketing ends up being. And I hope by the end of this presentation you guys will start to see some of that. So let me begin by saying this. I hear from companies all the time that they are suffering from content, production, burnout, and overwhelm, and that they aren't actually making any traction.
(01:44):
You hear all the time from the different gurus and marketing consultants and agencies that tell you, you have to focus on a ton of production. You have to produce a ton of content in order to be successful. And I'm gonna tell you that that's a flat out myth, okay? That's not always true. Yes, it does produce fruit, but you can't always be guaranteed that, right. Especially if you're working within a tight budget or within specific timeframes. So just the fact that you're doing content and most marketers are doing so much content. They feel like they're drowning and they can't ever get everything off of their plate. That doesn't always equal success in the marketing boat. Massive content production is not the fastest way to revenue. I know it sounds crazy because we're so used to hearing about massive content production and all these topic clusters and all this different SEO and things like that.
(02:30):
And while it's so important, I'm gonna share three core focus areas with you today. That's gonna revolutionize the way that you play in your budget and your priorities for your marketing for the next year. All right. It's about minimizing marketing efforts and maximizing marketing ROI. Okay. How do we have that biggest impact on the return on investment? So our agenda really quick, the three things we're gonna go through setting goals for the year. We're gonna talk about understanding your budget and then gonna talk about prioritizing your investments so that we know that we're getting the most bang for our buck, if you will. So what is the true foundation of successful marketing? It's a comprehensive approach to budgeting your marketing plan for the next year, which has to be centered on profit. I see too many companies getting lost and caught up in the grind of all the different things, you know, that they have to do in order to say, they've done their job.
(03:26):
I wanna tell you a quick story about this and maybe it'll resonate with some of you. We were working with a client a few years back, a SAS company in their marketing. And this client was our point of contact was actually a marketing director for this business. And she was always so focused on showing her boss, showing the C level, you know, people and the VPs that she was doing, things and that she was having content produced because in her mind, that's how she could prove to her boss that she was doing things the right way. She'd say, okay. So last week was, was a great week boss. We published two blog posts. We sent two big email blasts and we made 25 social posts. But in reality, those blog posts weren't really read by anyone. If we looked at the data at least any one of importance right off the bat, the social post didn't bring in any new clients or any new leads or anything like that.
(04:13):
And the emails didn't schedule any new demos either. So her boss probably was feeling like, man, we're doing all this work, but what's the return. Why am I paying you to do all this work? We're doing all this work, but what is the actual return on the flip side, she's over here, touting her achievements and pointing to what she's gotten done. When you know, all actuality, it didn't impact the business. She was not focused on the things that mattered. We had some extra room at one point left over on our budget for one month. And we said, Hey, we're gonna here's what we think that we need to do. We're gonna help you out a little bit more. We have some things that we can work with. We think we need to spend this extra time and revise the lead scoring inside of HubSpot for you.
(04:55):
Because if we can get really granular with lead scoring, we can actually deliver a, a way better list of prioritized contacts for your sales team to start working right away. And those contacts should be like really hot, cuz they're highly engaged. It's leads scoring, right? So high engagement, high fit. And she was appalled. She said, oh my gosh, no, if we have extra room in the budget, we, we need to publish some extra social posts instead, because that's what we want our CEO to see that that's the stuff that he's gonna watch on LinkedIn. That's how we're gonna be able to report that stuff was actually done. So if we, if we just do stuff on the back end, he's never gonna see it. Never gonna know that that, that I've been doing something. Okay. Ultimately it ended up being a sad story because we could never get her to buy into the things that we wanted that actually mattered.
(05:40):
They ended up going in a different direction. And let's just say that she doesn't work for that client anymore. cringeworthy. I know it's not always the best of story, but that just goes to show like marketing marketing directors sometimes don't have the right frame. They don't have the right priorities in mind and we need to fix that cuz it's not about tons of production. If you can tie, if you can tie revenue to your name and not necessarily tasks to your name, you're gonna be extremely, extremely valuable to your company. So this is a critical mistake that we see happening all the time. Okay. So let's talk about setting goals with this, right? The first one, why are goals so important? Well, they tell us where we're going. They tell us what the actual target is. They can be broken down into short term.
(06:26):
They can be long term, but if we break them down little by little, we can start to see, okay, I have steps one, two and three in order to hit that big goal, they give us KPIs to track throughout the year key performance indicators. They give us the things that we need to know. So if my goal is seven new clients, then I need to know, okay, what is that actually? How many leads do I need to deliver to the sales team? Okay. So we're gonna start talking about that here in a second. So in order to do this, we're gonna start with the big picture. Okay. And then we're gonna start breaking things down into those individual KPIs or metrics, right? Because if we can know what the goals are, if we know where we want to be six months, 12 months and so on, we can actually appropriately budget for that and, and get the strategies and the things implemented.
(07:09):
And we can plan around those expectations so that we can truly hit these benchmarks as time goes on. So how do we do that? Well, let's first break down what these goals are little by little. So the big picture one right a year from now, what's the company's annual revenue goal. This might not be as a marketing director or something that you are always privy to, but this is definitely worth a conversation to have with your boss. Then we wanna know the average revenue per customer. What is the average deal size when you land a new client? Right? Is it 10 K? Is it a hundred K? We need to know what the average deal size is so that we can start putting some numbers to that annual revenue goal. Because once we know the annual revenue and once we know the average revenue per customer, we now have our first KPI, our first metric, which is total number of clients that, that the company needs to bring in in the next year.
(07:58):
So we're using HubSpot terminology here. So if we're gonna say life cycle stages, let's just look at life cycle stages. Let's look at how many opportunities do we actually need in order to produce a client. Now, a lot of the times this is a tough question for sales people because they don't actually, or for marketing people because they don't actually know the answer. They have to talk to sales. So if you don't know how many deals your sales team needs to work on average to land one customer, that's a conversation to have internally. I know these conversations can be cringeworthy. They can be difficult to have, but these are things that we wanna bring out into the open because once you do, you can start to have some really, really great conversations around how you can impact and bring more opportunities to the table. So how many opportunities, which are like deals being worked.
(08:45):
If I'm using sales hub inside of HubSpot, these are the different accounts that I'm working through my pipeline. So how many opportunities do I need in order to close one customer? Then we look at sales, qualified leads, sales, qualified leads are basically leads that have been accepted to work. So if we're marketing and our job is to bring SA bring leads to the sales team we could say this person is qualified, but sales also has to say, this person is qualified. So this will be a sales qualified lead. How many people come in and then need to continue on? So how many SQLs to produce one opportunity could be a lot, could be none, very few. And then lastly, we have the really important number that we want to be tracking from a marketing perspective, marketing qualified leads. We, we call them M QLS.
(09:31):
In order to be an MQL, you have to be a highly fit and a highly engaged lead. So this can't just be someone who meets all the requirements that we're hoping to have as a client. And then we pass 'em to sales because they're not engaged. It also can't be somebody who is opening every email, downloading everything. We send them and coming back to the website a million times that is not a good fit because it could be a student, it could be a competitor. And so they're never gonna buy. So we don't wanna waste the sales team's time. So a marketing's job marketing person's job is based around this metric. If you're really getting granular, we really, really want to tie marketing directors to a marketing qualified lead deliverable. So how many MQs does it take to produce one SQL or opportunity as well?
(10:16):
Let's do some examples here. I'll show you some examples. I'm gonna give you two examples so that we can kind of walk through this. Let's just say this is a software company a SAS tech startup, and they're selling B2B software, which is probably a lot of you here listening. So annual revenue goal 5 million, okay. That's not counting. This is new revenue. That's not counting existing clients. They're, they're trying to bring in five new 5 million in new ARR over the next 12 months. So average revenue per customer ever an average deal for them is about a hundred thousand dollars. So great. A hundred thousand dollars. Awesome. That means it takes about 50 customers. They need to close 50 deals to hit their annual revenue goal. Okay. So that's starting to make things a little bit more tangible. We now know, instead of, okay, $5 million, that's a big markup in the front.
(11:04):
Hopefully we hit it. It's like, no, you need 50 clients. Okay. Let's build a marketing plan around what we need to do to deliver the leads to hit 50 clients. So we're gonna say for every we're gonna identify opportunities and we're gonna say for every two opportunities we have, we close one customer. That means we need 100 opportunities to be worked by the sales team. Or if you're a smaller company, maybe you're CEO, or maybe you're doing the marketing and sales as well. So that means we're at about a hundred opportunities to close 50 customers. Great. That's really good to know it, it could be a lot worse. It could be a lot better, but Hey, that's really good to know. Then we go back to the, to even further to SQLs how many leads need to come in for us to work opportunities.
(11:47):
We need to accept 500 leads to get 100 really good opportunities to, to get 50 customers to close 50 deals. Okay. And then we're gonna go back even further in order for sales to actually vet these leads, we actually need a 10 to one ratio. So it takes for every 10 leads that marketing delivers to sales. They will accept one in. So that means we need 5,000 M QLS in order to bring to sales. Now that number sounds really, really high until we start breaking it down monthly, then it starts to become a little bit more tangible because what that actually means is we only need 417 MQL handed to sales each and every month. That feels a lot more tangible. Now that might be a lot of, of contacts if you don't really have any. And maybe, maybe you have a a ton of people.
(12:35):
We often deal with clients who have 22,000 contacts in their user database that does not mean they need to generate enough to bring out 417 new M QLS every month. It means that they need to find 20 of their 22,000. We can mine that and get 417 out each month. Here's another example, smaller company we're saying it's 1.25 million is their annual revenue goal. Their average customer is $72,000, which means they need 18 customers backing that out. They need 54 opportunities to hit 18 customers at two to one to SQLs. They need 108 SQLs to reach 54 opportunities. And then lastly, we need 864 MQs to close 18 customers that breaks it out to 72 MQs handed each month, roughly. Okay. So that is a really important thing. I want you guys to go through this kind of an exercise, take a screenshot of this and start breaking this down on your own and figuring out okay.
(13:30):
On average, where am I? And if you have big question marks around the area, I would not just guess I would actually have a conversation internally. Hey, sales team, what do we actually think? What is the actual scenario here? What actually happens? Okay. So how do we get MQL S you guys following me so far, is this making sense? Getting MQL S is easier said than done, of course, because we need to figure out how to actually bring in a steady flow of highly qualified leads through a format that's scalable. So we're not against stuck in this production grind in order to do that. What your marketing must first focus on is building what we call a machine, which will help funnel people into sales calls or demos. If we don't know our numbers in the first place, we can't predict how much effort needs to be applied to hit our goals.
(14:18):
The last thing we want to do is spend money unnecessarily to hit a goal that was actually quite attainable for much less or worse, not applying enough effort in the right areas and completely missing our goals. You will want to build this machine before you actually start to work on fueling that machine with all kinds of content. The machine is going to be something very specifically designed in a unique format, which should come in the form of like webinars or master classes, video sales letters, or challenges that get people engaged and get people to book a sales calls on their own. Now, I know many of you already do some of that today, and that's great. I know a lot of people do webinars today, and that's awesome, but I can tell you in the 10 years that I've actually run Web Canopy Studio, I've not one time had someone come through or, or that I've engaged with who is actually doing webinars the right way.
(15:09):
If you're just giving away information and then asking someone to go to your website, you're missing out big time. You're doing it the wrong way. All right, those are, those are educational webinars, and those are great to, to help build rapport, but they're not gonna help you get leads. All right, we need to talk about marketing that is focused on sales kind of webinars. The second core area of focus is around establishing what that budget should be. The main thing to understand here is that we need to establish how much we're gonna spend in order to hit our goals. So we've established our goals. You might say, we need 400 MQs a month. That's fine. How are we gonna get it? Do we have the lead flow now to hit it? Do we need to do ads? Do we need to go back into our database?
(15:48):
Like we need to start understanding that budget and how it's gonna be broken down. So why do budgets matter? They give us a framework to work within. It allows us to track and monitor return on investment over time, and it'll allow expectations to be set from the beginning. So the first question that we have to ask around this is will the marketing efforts that we currently have achieve the goals we just set. This is really important because if you are doing the things now that are gonna hit, you hit your goals. Don't change it, keep doing what you're doing. If your goals are on track, you and you start throwing a wrench in the spokes, you're gonna cause a lot more damage than you are doing good. And so don't change things if you don't need to. The second question to ask is if it's not gonna hit our goals, the efforts that we have, what am I gonna do in order to change what I'm thinking in order to hit those targets?
(16:42):
The old school traditional thought about marketing is that you should reinvest 10% of the revenue that you bring in back into the business for marketing. Now that can get a lot of money, especially as your company grows, just huge. And, but that's gonna cover everything in marketing. So it's not just money that you're gonna bring in and that you're gonna spend on ads or content. It's not like saying you have a $5 million budget for, for ads or something like that. It's also covering the costs and of overhead for your marketing and all of your salaried employees. So you're covering all your marketing expenses here, and you're gonna make up for line items that you can't get back in direct one to one from sales. This should also cover all the software you're using. So essentially that number, that 10%, if that's your mark that you set aside for your marketing budget should cover everything your company has to do in order to make money come in, right?
(17:31):
This is the line item for that. I like to use the 10% as a base for what marketing should be, but that definitely needs to be tweaked as we're adjusting, depending on any number of variables inside of your company, as your revenue increases, your percentage can decrease. So the second example here at the bottom the, the top ones, the 10%, the second one here at the bottom, we're looking at a company with 20 million at a 4% ideal marketing percentage that gives them 800 K to work with. This is probably a little bit more in line with where you, you want to be as you get bigger. The higher you go, you're gonna lower your percentage. I would never really go below two to 3% maybe. Just because you don't want to exclude everything completely. And I wouldn't do that unless I was probably over a hundred million anyway.
(18:19):
So just, just kind of some, some line items to think through here, as you're setting your budget, the third core area of focus is about prioritization. We need to prioritize what marketing efforts are gonna have the biggest impact on revenue. Okay? So you can work your butt off and spend a lot of money on marketing, but if it's not the right place, if it's not the right kind of marketing, you're completely wasting money, right? This is key because marketers and business owners typically take the approach of throwing a million things at the wall to see what sticks, right. Most marketers get so overwhelmed with an immense amount of production or hiring agencies or managing consultants, but they never actually move the needle in the revenue column. If I, if I, if I ask you as a marketer right now, to point to all the deals that were closed in the last year, and to tell me exactly what marketing efforts brought them in, would you be able to do it?
(19:13):
Usually the answer is I can point to some, but not to most of them, or I have a guess, but I'm not a hundred percent sure or I think, but I don't know. And on the flip side, if I grabbed any random piece of marketing production that you had, would you be able to tell me how many deals or prospects engaged with all of that content before signing a deal? Which ones were the most influential, which of those social posts or those blogs that you wrote, which one had the biggest impact on revenue? Not just on views. I ju I don't wanna see just views and CTA clicks. I wanna know which ones were essential. So these are critical, absolutely critical things that you, as a marketer should be able to do. And you need to build into your system next year, if you don't, and I'm gonna show you how, but that's what you want to do so that you can point to your return on investment.
(19:57):
That way the company was gonna start saying like, wow, these campaigns that she set up for us actually brought in $800,000 and new revenue in the last few months, right? Talk about job security here. This is so critical and so important. So why does planning matter? The first thing is it breaks out high impact items, right? It helps us understand what the most important items it are. We might call them quick wins, but we're gonna help understand where our efforts need to go. First, it's gonna lay a foundation for our long term plan. So we know where we're going, and it's gonna allow us to see where we need to allocate our resources or when we need to bring on new people to help us in different areas. Now, I know what you're thinking. It's hard to determine what the biggest impacts impact items are.
(20:45):
It's very difficult. The tricky thing is that most marketers are working through their operations the wrong way, right? They're prioritizing the wrong stuff. Like I said earlier, they're focusing on content, content, content, just so much content production, rather than building a high impact machine that will bring in clients on demand. Many of you have seen this graphic before, and I don't wanna bore you, but you know, if you've gone through any other webinars, you probably have shown something like this before to give a quick synopsis, though, of what it's showing this woman right in the middle here of the screen. You know, she is responsible for marketing for her company. Maybe she's the owner, maybe she's the marketing director, what have you, but in order to to look busy and to utilize her marketing budget appropriately, she just does a huge amount of production.
(21:32):
And she's super fast to get overwhelmed. She's taking work home with her at night, and she's constantly chasing all the things that she has to get done her week looks insane. And so that's what this is representing all those little bubbles off to the side. Those are all the things that she's trying to manage, but what does that do? Really a whole lot of nothing. You see, she might hire some people to work under her, and that's what you see. Those three people there. She, she's trying to offload that whether it's an agency or some other staff or whatever, but she does that because she's trying to offload this mess of work. So it's not all on her plate. However, now we have lots of hands in the pot, lots of messes going on and no real clear picture of alignment. And with all of this cloud of stuff, this, you know, rats nest of things that are floating out there in the middle you know, we might be able to show that we produced a customer on the back end of that.
(22:23):
Hopefully, you know, which don't get me wrong is awesome. It's great to always be able to, to show that, however, is that scalable at all? Is that really profitable? Can we show what we're doing is actually having an impact on return? The answer is a, is a big question, mark, which ultimately means no. Okay, does this story sound familiar? Does this story sound like something that resonates with you guys? So what should what should this marketing person have done instead, she should have prioritized her most important items first, which would be anything that she can prove generates customers. And in her case, because she's doing marketing and not sales, that might actually just be that she's doing things that get clients to book a demo, or to get clients, to book a sales call which is really all she can do. And frankly, all she needs to do, because if she's not running sales, she can't really help.
(23:13):
What happens after that? This is scalable though, this is profitable. This is repeatable. If we know the machine, which again is probably a very sophisticated video or webinar series or masterclass or challenge campaign or something that is, you know, built with all the perfect emails, the nurturing automation, the shares and everything like that. But if we know the machine is getting on average 50 prospects in that's turning into five demos booked, which, you know, the sales team closes into two clients, something like that. You know, that's all she needs to do. All she needs to do is play the numbers game 50 equals five equals two. Okay. Because then what happens if it's 50 equals five equals two customers and her boss says, okay, the goal is 10 customers. She now just needs to run the math backwards instead of 50, I need this.
(24:00):
I need to get this many people to enter into the funnel. Okay. So that's how it works. I hope that's making sense. Is that making sense? I think it's exciting. And guys, if you don't if you don't have that now in your marketing tool belt, this should be your number one priority with your marketing budget. It works a hundred percent of the time, and I've never had a client come through that, did this with us and it didn't work. Right? So once she has the machine built, then she can focus on the fuel, which is answering the question of how do I get as many people into this machine as possible. That's where she's gonna start with the scale and the production of valuable content, not just content for the sake of producing content producing content for no one helps no one, right?
(24:49):
If you don't know what the goal is of that content, then you shouldn't be spending time doing that until you have that goal. It just makes the most sense. Unless you have literally 80 hours a week, that you can produce massive amounts of content. I wouldn't even step on it yet. That's what we call the fuel, which is gonna be scalable and smart. All right. If we had two clients out and we needed four clients, then instead of 50 people coming in, we need a hundred. So how do we get a hundred? Well, I can produce content shared on social. I can run a, a quick ad campaign. I can make videos and share with my existing leads. I can utilize my LinkedIn network and my staff. These are all things that we need to think about and that we can focus on as far as priorities go.
(25:31):
Is that all making sense? Now we call this process, flipping the flywheel. And the reason we do that is because most of you are familiar with the flywheel from HubSpot. It's cool. It works. I think, I think we all agree on that, but the question becomes, how fast does it actually work? And the reason is if we're focusing on SEO, like organic content, topic, clusters, and pillars and all that stuff, most of the time marketers are gonna spend weeks doing messaging in months, and we're gonna do messaging and buyer personas, and we're gonna do keyword research and we're gonna do topic clusters and pillar pages and blog planning and blog writing and all these other things that really fall under the attract stage. And most agencies literally are gonna write you entire proposals with services that exist almost entirely around that stage. Only in the flywheel, that's where all of their services are gonna focus.
(26:28):
And they'll throw in other things like landing pages. And we're gonna give you some, you know, premium content and so on, but that's where their, their efforts are gonna stay. But why is that wrong? Well, it's not wrong, but it's not gonna bring you revenue. I would argue for at least a year. Okay. It takes six to nine months for organic content to really start to have some SEO traction and some impact, especially at scale. And you might get lucky with one or two things that pop up quickly, but that's the reality for just about everyone. And even then, what are we doing? That's just the start of the buyer's journey. So do you want to do all of this work that essentially makes you bogged down in production for a year with no revenue showing up? No, no one wants to do that. In fact, marketing has the highest turnover out of any position.
(27:18):
So marketing people could be gone in that time. Right. But I can tell you, no one is letting anyone go. That's tied to revenue production. I'm sure you've noticed this too. And so the reason is the reason we're focusing on flipping the flywheel is because we have to get to the bottom. We have to impact what's at the bottom of that flywheel, not at the top of the flywheel first and work our way back. So to fix this, the correct answer, flip the flywheel and start with the end of the engaged stage first, which is that machine that we were just talking about. And when you flip the flywheel, you're gonna tie revenue, focus, metrics, and KPIs like sales calls, books, and MQL and demos and things like that directly to what your marketing team is producing. All right. Can you guys see yourself doing that?
(28:05):
And if you're wondering if this works only in specific industries, the answer is no, this is not something that only works with just a few different kinds of companies. The overwhelming majority of our clients are B2B SAS companies or tech companies and manufacturing businesses too. And we do this with consulting work and all these different kinds of businesses across the board. And it works every time. The only place I would really modify this is if you're selling low dollar eCommerce, you know, like $5 candles or something like that, then you're gonna want to do something probably different because you're working with mass volume and not just core leads coming through. Here's an example of how this actually works. This is a client of ours called KP evolution. They're wireless startup in Texas, super cool company. They created a system inside of HubSpot with us that would basically help them get more demo requests, right?
(28:53):
New startup really big deal. They needed to show traction and make sure that they were getting new customers onboarded quickly. All right. And so what we did was we focused inside HubSpot and on their website, we focused on building a machine with them and we helped them hit $1.7 million. In just 10 months. We didn't have to do this with a ton of content. We didn't have to spin our wheels, doing all kinds of things, just to get SEO and personas and all these things out there. Like we focused on what matters. And then we fuel what matters. It's common sense. And it just makes so much sense when you put the right effort in the right places. We want a HubSpot impact award for the work on this website and the results that these people have achieved. And I couldn't be more proud of these guys, just a great company a really cool partner to work with.
(29:38):
Can you guys imagine if this kind of stuff happened to you, if this was your company and you could build a machine that would make this work well, there you have it, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for listening in. I hope it was helpful at the end of each episode, I like to give a quick synopsis of the talking points of the major things that I hoped you would take away from this. And so I know there was a lot, we went over a lot of content in that presentation. So the three most important things that I would do if I was in your situation today, the first thing that I was I, I would do if I was trying to figure out what my marketing budget should be and where I should go with it, number one, I'm going to set my goals for the next 12 months.
(30:15):
I'm gonna look at what I want to do. I'm gonna look at what I'm trying to achieve, what I'm trying to accomplish, because the last thing you want to do is if you're a marketing person, for example, is go to your CEO and say, I need $120,000, or I need $500,000 for my marketing budget without really being able to show them an ROI or what that's gonna deliver for them. And so we wanna make sure that we are able to set those goals. If you're a business owner, you know, as well as I do, the last thing you wanna do is just be spending money for no reason. If you're not gonna know what's gonna come back from that return. Right? So number one, we have to set goals for the year. We have to know what we're trying to achieve, what the expected outcome is, and that will allow us to track whether or not we're on target.
(30:57):
Okay? Number two, we have to understand that budget. We have to know if we're on track. If we're hitting the things we want to, where it needs to be broken out, what kind of things we need to do differently, we need to have a plan, right? We need to have a plan for where we're spending that money. The last thing I want in my marketing budget is sponsoring my kids. T-Ball team. T-Shirts right. That's yes. That's the right thing to do. I love my kids. Don't get me wrong. I didn't even play T-ball anyway, you get what I'm saying? Like the return on investment, unless that's your market, maybe that's your market. Like maybe families is who you're selling to then great. Totally do it. There's probably your return. But with me, that's not my market. And so that would not be something that I would want to allocate my spend to.
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And I know that's a silly example, but it happens all the time. Okay. And then the last thing would be prioritizing your monthly investment, know where you're spending, how much you're spending and why you're spending it. You're gonna prioritize the important items first, and you're gonna deprioritize the things that don't deliver results. Okay. Stop focusing on stupid stuff. We're gonna focus on smart stuff. All right. I think that's it. Make sure you guys, if you have not done so already check out the website, conversion assessment at webcanopystudio.com/assessment. It's 30 questions. It's super quick. It's really easy to go through. You're gonna get a customized report about what you're doing wrong, what you're doing well, what you need to have some ideas to improve upon. And it's gonna give you checklists and guides and all these different tutorials of things that you can do on your own to improve your website conversion. I think that's it. Let me know if you have any questions and we'll see you next time.