16Oct

How to Scale Your Business: The What, Why, When, and Who of Setting Scaling KPIs

16 October 2020 MarketingScaleurs 312

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So you want to scale your business. You’re probably figuring out where to start to maximize your scaling potential. Well, let’s start the way we would with any other part of your business: By understanding and setting Key Performance Indicators (Scaling KPIs) to scale your business. This article will walk you through the what, why, when, who, and how’s of setting your scaling KPIs. If you want a shortcut, check out our innovative DashIQ tool. Otherwise, let’s jump right in.

What Scaling KPIs

Let’s start with the basics. If you’re reading this, you probably know what KPIs – Key Performance Indicators – are. In the business world, they’re how we measure performance for a company, department, team, or individual. Using the right KPs, we have a better idea of whether we’re meeting objectives or falling short.

Why

KPIs are so useful because they allow us to break down performance into quantifiable, discrete categories that we can continue to measure over time. KPIs bring a method to the madness that is operating a growing business.

When you start to think about how to scale your business, KPIs are even more important. The right KPIs act as your north star to understand if your efforts to strategically grow are working in the way you intended.

Keep your CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) in mind when calculating KPIs, as this will determine whether you can afford the plans you are considering. For more on understanding and calculating CAC, check out our blog post on it.

When

So we now have the basics of the “what” and the “why” down. Now we’ll throw in a complexifying variable: “when.” There’s never a perfect time to scale your business, but there are things you’ll need to know before you start. We want to minimize the unknown and have a clear plan for what is actually achievable.

Some initial questions you’ll need to ask yourself: Is your business able to grow in the ways you’d like (operationally, financially, etc)? Is your business actually able to accommodate this growth once it happens? In other words: Can you actually do it and can you maintain it?

Remember that scaling differs from pure growth in that scaling represents more growth with limited added resources. One of the most common tools for making this happen (after strategy is set) is technology. Technology has facilitated scalability in recent years by making it much easier to acquire customers and expand markets, opening unprecedented opportunities for businesses to go global. Make sure to assess your current technological capacity and technological needs in the future as you scale.

Two key indicators that are good signs that you’re ready:

Your numbers say you’re good to go — specifically, your income shows steady growth rather than extreme fluctuations or no growth at all.
You have a steadily growing income stream rather than one that jumps up and down every month.

How

No matter how much we systematize and structure plans for scaling, there’s always a magic and luck factor that influences the outcome. However, we can minimize the unknowns by asking some crucial questions. The answers to these questions will help you set your scaling KPIs.

Are your finances in order?
Make sure you have a financial plan that can accommodate the unknowns and potential unintended outcomes or costs that go along with changes in business. Make projections and estimations. You can start with a simple list of “must-haves” and “nice-to-haves” and build your budget around the “musts” will room for the “nice’s.”
Are your marketing processes in order?
There are many kinds of marketing processes and it is absolutely crucial that you have a plan set up that will accommodate the change and growth. For example: What is your sales team supposed to do when a lead comes in? Create a playbook and make sure your team uses it.
Is your tech in order?
As mentioned earlier, technology is often a core component of scaling a business. As such, you need to have a clear vision of what your marketing needs are, which will in turn determine your tech needs before, during, and after initial scaling. Make sure to get a clear idea of your requirements, the tech’s functionality, and costs. Balance that with the revenue that tech will most likely generate: For example, with A-SAFE, we used Hubspot’s costly marketing suite knowing that it would generate more new business than what we paid for it.

Who

Next after “how” is a truly important component: “Who.” Who is involved in your scaling plan? Obviously the entire organization, but let’s get a little more granular. There are two main components to the “who”: your team and your customers. Use the questions below to map out the “who” part of your scaling KPIs plan.

Do you have the right team in place?
Think seriously and thoroughly about your team’s current strengths and weaknesses. Rarely can marketing scale without hiring new talent or skill sets. This means you may have to let some employees go and probably will bring new ones on. Make sure your team is open to change, experimenting, and taking on new tasks as needs,
Do you have enough demand?
Everything may be in place on your end, but you’ll hit the limits of what’s possible fast if there isn’t sufficient demand from your audience. Before you scale, you need to have a solid grasp on market trends and your target customers. Be sure that as you scale, you can attract enough customers to meet your goals. Inbound leads should be high or will be high with relative certainty.
What are your customers’ expectations?
And once you have the new customers and sales coming in, what are they expecting of you? Just as with understanding the market, don’t rely on assumptions, but do an analysis to get a clear idea of what your customers will want from you. Ultimately, your scaling KPIs will have to align with your customer’s needs first, then you can align your own business needs with those– it won’t work the other way around.

In Conclusion

Scaling KPIs are crucial if you want to scale, and a thorough analysis of each element of your KPIs – what, how, when, why, who – are crucial in setting your KPIs properly. If you follow the steps above, you’ll be well on your way to being ready to successfully scale your business.

Become a Successful Scaleur

Scaling is a strategy that can only be mastered by a scaleur who is a dedicated learner and considers real-time business priorities. I hope the article above has helped! Marketing Scaleurs is a scaling company that helps entrepreneurs scale their marketing efforts. We’re experts in growth marketing, product development, and more, creating custom growth plans for startups, entrepreneurs and scaleurs in order to help them gain traffic, generate leads and increase their revenue.

If you want traffic, leads and sales, get in touch and you’ll start getting results in no time!

12Aug

Emulate a Growth Mindset

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To have a growth mindset means being an entrepreneur who also has the perspicacity, confidence, and dedication to scale their business. The scaleurs think differently about their own business: they don’t merely want to expand by working proportionally harder. Instead, they look for smart processes that allow for a huge bump in productivity and profit with a comparatively smaller uptick in labor and resource expenditures.

We can divide these scaleurs into two groups, the ones with a fixed mindset vs. the growth mindset.

Focusing on the growth mindset entrepreneurs, they see the bigger picture of the journey, are more resilient, and have a better chance for a long-term success. Here are a few ways to emulate this mindset:

1. Give up control and delegate

It’s understandable to maintain a tight grip on everything in the beginning stages. Most of the work is done by you, your co-founder, and maybe another team member. Processes are not documented, so you’re used to overseeing everything closely. But when it’s time to scale, you have to find a way to delegate appropriately. Not leaving the scene but learning to trust and build your people up. Giving them the right tools to execute without you and helping them realize their potential, too. Don’t micromanage. Having a dashboard to follow your KPIs is immensely helpful for this. Dash IQ can help you with this

2. Embrace challenges as growth experiences

The easiest way to do this is to simply ask yourself in the face of difficulty (or as a matter of fact in the face of success too): “What might be the opportunity here?” This will help you approach a given situation from a more open, optimistic perspective and offer you different angles of how to solve the problem.

I often encourage entrepreneurs to ask themselves this simple question: “What’s the worst that can happen?” Often, we subconsciously exaggerate the gravity or risk of a challenge just because it’s new or unfamiliar. When you really think through what might occur, you often discover that the worst plausible outcome is in fact not that bad.

3. See the bigger picture by breaking it up into tactical steps

It is time to build necessary systems and most importantly to work on your strategy. As much as the creative side and the experimental phases are fun, scaling needs more structure. Instead of immediate gains, seek ways to implement tactical steps to follow a long-term strategy. Setting this in place will allow you to free up more time so you can get involved in solving the harder problems.

4. Take ownership

Take ownership of your attitude and leave your ego behind. Having a growth mindset is about being open to admit you can and will fail. Failing is a part of the learning process and the more you get used to sitting with these experiences and growing from them, the more your identity will develop.

Adopt a perspective of being in a constant state of becoming and evolving. Everything that happens serves as a test to teach you what works and what doesn’t. You must be versatile and embrace change as inevitable and beneficial. You don’t have to be the best in everything, but curiosity and being open to learning new things constantly will help you connect the dots and see the big picture. It is important to understand how things fit together, so you see the opportunities for connections inside and outside of your company.

5. Celebrate the success of others

Noticing and validating the success of other people and validating partnerships and collaborations will shift your mindset to a more positive and abundant perspective. There is enough pie to go around for everyone. Once you understand this and practice it, you can enhance your collaborative relationship with your team while also maintaining space to pursue your own individual goals.

At the end of the day, you need to think big to achieve big results. Scalability has to do a lot with your mindset and building from that place makes a difference.

Become a Successful Scaleur

I hope this blog will prove to be helpful in your endeavor. After all, Scaling is a strategy that can only be mastered by a scaleur who is an ardent learner and considers real-time business priorities.

Marketing Scaleurs is a scaling company helping entrepreneurs scale their marketing efforts. To accomplish this, we help businesses strive and succeed with growth marketing, product development and more. How do we do it? We create custom growth plans to startups, entrepreneurs and scaleurs in order to help them gain traffic, generate leads and increase their revenue. If you want traffic, leads and sales, send an email to Marketing Scaleurs today, and you will start getting results in no time

12Aug

The Scaleur’s Mindset

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Just as it takes a certain entrepreneurial way of thinking to embark on the challenge of founding a business, scalability is a mindset, too. You need to think big to become big. Having a scalable business means that you are free to unleash your dreams, make a lot of money, and have fun doing it. Once you get your mind in the game, scalability becomes way easier.

Being a scaleur means being an entrepreneur who also has the perspicacity, confidence, and dedication to scale their business.

In the early stages of an incipient marketing business, most owners are focused on growth—growing your lead base, increasing revenues, and bringing on more employees to perform various functions.

Growth in marketing can take you from one lead to 100, but to get from 100 to 100,000, you’ll need to scale. Growth depends on individual decisions made in the moment, but scaling is built on predictable, repeatable processes designed with efficiency in mind. If you have strong processes, you can hire a new employee, provide instructions on how to perform a task, and get consistent results within days instead of months.

The scaleurs think differently about their own business: they don’t merely want to expand by working proportionally harder. Instead, they look for smart processes that allow for a huge bump in productivity and profit with a comparatively smaller uptick in labor and resource expenditures.

We can divide these scaleurs into two groups, the ones with a fixed mindset vs. the growth mindset.

FIXED MINDSET

“Believing that your qualities are carved in stone—the fixed mindset—creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over. If you only have a certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality, and a certain moral character—well, then you’d better prove that you have a healthy dose of them. It simply wouldn’t do to look deficient in these most basic characteristics.”[1]

This group has a defined identity and often uses labels and affirmations. They see situations and qualities as unchangeable and their skills and capabilities as fixed. The strengths and behaviors that allowed them to successfully navigate the early stages of their business won’t be sufficient for scaling or could even work against them in the process.

As much as fixed mindset thinkers would have you believe that people are born with an innate ability for certain skills and that’s it, you can build your skills and abilities extensively. You just have to dedicate yourself to the process.

GROWTH MINDSET SCALEURS

In this mindset, you possess an inborn set of talents, abilities, and interests, but you have the capacity to cultivate and expand them. Everyone is capable of changing, growing, and learning through sustained effort.

This group is constantly evolving. They never view themselves or their businesses as static, finished, complete. Instead, they’re constantly on the lookout for ways to serve a larger market and innovating and adding to their products or services. Entrepreneurs with a growth mindset seek ways to add to their skillset by not being afraid of confronting a challenging situation.

Data and feedback, negative or positive, is welcomed and only reinforces their intellectual and professional curiosity. That way of thinking enables continuous innovation and improvement. Change delivers more chances to evolve. Growth mindset entrepreneurs see the bigger picture of the journey, are more resilient, and have a better chance for a long-term success. Read more how to e mulate this mindset.

At the end of the day, you need to think big to achieve big results. Scalability has to do a lot with your mindset and building from that place makes a difference.

The key to scaling yourself is to understand yourself first. Not just your skills but also your energy! Energy management is the hidden key to getting more done. Energy management is the combination of physical, emotional (how you are feeling at a given moment), and mental energy. What drives you, how do you recharge, what are your ambitions, what do you take from your past, what is going on in your brain, and so on. Get a grip of who you are, what you want to achieve in life, and understand where your energy is coming from. The Gingerbread Tool is a great tool to find your seven main attention points in life. Read it here.

Become a Successful Scaleur

03Aug

Sales Scaleur

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Not sure where to start with sales? No clear sales strategy? Dealing with imposter syndrome or just not comfortable with selling? Check out our sales partner designed to start up your sales, work on your sales strategy, increase your (sales) confidence, set up your pitch and brining in new customers.

03Aug

When is the Right Time to Scale Your Marketing Business?

3 August 2020 MarketingScaleurs 320

There is no magic formula to identify exactly when is the right time to scale your marketing business. However, there are many things you should have figured out before you decide to take that step.

Scaling is all about using rapid growth strategies to add new customers and grow your revenues. Scaling a marketing business mainly depends on two factors: capability and capacity. Ask yourself:

is your business capable enough to grow?
does it have the capacity to accommodate growth?

In the context of business, scalability describes the ability of the business to grow without being hampered by limited resources when production increases.

Technology is an important component of the equation, and we’ll talk extensively about it in this book. You need to assess your current technological capacity and technological needs in the future as you scale.

Technology has facilitated scalability in recent years as it has made acquiring customers and expanding markets much easier, opening up unprecedented opportunities for businesses to go global. The latest user-friendly apps and tech tools have changed how people used to think about interacting or purchasing with a business. Today, you can link to and purchase from businesses all over the world, just by viewing an Instagram ad. With any web search, ads trigger you to buy the things you are searching for.

Entrepreneurs work long hours and dedicate their lives to their ventures. When success finally comes, it is certainly a cause for celebration, but it also brings new challenges! After all, if the marketing business starts to scale without truly understanding who the customer is or whether the demand is sustainable, growth can derail quickly.

Other main indications that will help you figure out when it’s time to scale and take that next step include:

employees are unable to handle the workload.
long-term marketing goals are unachievable.
leads continue to increase.
your numbers say you’re good to go—specifically, when your income shows steady growth rather than extreme fluctuations or no growth at all
you have a steadily growing income stream, not going up and down every month.

Other than that, you should also ask yourself these questions:

Do you know your plan to move forward? What is your end-of-year goal? Which are the main KPIs you will use to determine that the year was successful? What does success look like two years from now? Determine them with our DashIQ
Do you have any marketing processes in place, and are they the right ones? Marketing processes take many different forms. It is essential that no matter how you plan on scaling your marketing business, you have documented systems in place to accommodate your marketing’s structure. Work with a playbook. Do your sales team know what to do when a lead comes in? Explain to salespeople where the lead comes from and what you expect from the sales team.
Does your business have the right technology in place? Both technology and connectivity play key roles in the growth of your marketing business. You’ll need to have a clear vision of what your marketing business needs before scaling it forward, both in terms of functionality and cost. Know where you want to go on the longer term. Check out the great Tools already exist.
Do you have the right team in place? Rarely can marketing businesses scale up without hiring talent in some capacity. You will likely need to let go of some employees while hiring new people to support you as you grow. Your team must be open to do new things and experiment! Scaling your marketing is an ongoing change process. Read more about how to assemble a scalable “A-team.”
Your business have enough demand? Just because your marketing business may be booming now doesn’t mean it will be sustainable moving forward. One of the biggest challenges marketers faces when scaling up is being able to attract enough customers and clients to support their growth. Before you scale, you need to understand your market trends and forecasts by undertaking a rigorous analysis. Don’t just base your direction off of emotions or assumptions.
Are your finances in order? Uncertainty comes with change, and having a financial plan in place to accommodate the immediate “what ifs” that may occur mitigates the unknown. Put together some projections and simply see if your marketing budget can pay for business essentials moving forward. Make a blueprint outlining what your company has and what the roadmap would be. Your budget must be made on the must haves but can include some nice to haves for experimentation.
Do you know your customers’ expectations? When considering expansion, it is imperative that you keep your customers and their expectations at the forefront. Your marketing tactics should revolve around their wants and needs—not yours. Spend less time worrying about day-to-day logistics and more time on connecting and innovating with your customers. Involve your customers in what you are doing: ask them questions, make a dedicated survey for them, and remember to reward them for their loyalty and feedback.

By scrutinizing all these aspects of your business and answering these questions candidly, you’ll be ready to scale your marketing business successfully on time and set yourself up for the growth you’ve been looking for. At the same time, you’ll be highlighting weak areas need to be developed before undertaking the mission. Scaling your marketing business means creating a foundation that can serve more customers with the same resources. It’s not something you do once. It’s something you’ll do regularly throughout the life of your business.

Become a Successful Scaleur

Marketing Scaleurs is a scaling company helping entrepreneurs scale their marketing efforts. To accomplish this, we help businesses strive and succeed with growth marketing, product development, at the right time to scale. How do we do it? We create custom growth plans for startups, entrepreneurs, and scaleurs in order to help them gain traffic, generate leads, and increase their revenue. If you want traffic, leads and sales, send an email to Marketing Scaleurs today, and you will start getting results in no time

03Aug

Scaling vs. Growing

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After the technology boom of the past decade. The most successful companies have shown that the path to success isn’t all about growth. It’s about scaling (scaling vs. growing). They’ve learned how to create business models that easily scale to generate massive revenues without adding massive costs and resources along the way.

Many entrepreneurs are often confused by the difference between scaling vs. growing. Growing means a marketing department adds new resources (capital, people, or technology), and its revenue increases as a result. For instance, a marketing department may gain $50,000 in new revenue, but in order to do so they had to hire a new marketing person with a $50,000 salary. The company’s gains and losses are evened out, so even though the company is growing—by one new employee and a corresponding uptick in revenue—it really hasn’t gained much value.

Scaling, on the other hand, is when revenue increases without a substantial increase in expenditures. Processes “that scale” are those that can be done in a cost-effective manner. Scaling is the process of growing exponentially. A marketing department that spends $5,000 on marketing automation tools to allow more efficient marketing to a wider audience, gaining $50,000 in new revenue as a result, is scaling. The company’s gains outpace its losses, allowing it not only to grow but also to scale. Other examples are being able to go from handling 5 clients to 500 or sending out emails to 10 people or 1 million, without a major increase in cost or labor.

Your marketing business scales when it can cope with an increase in work while maintaining or increasing its efficiency.

Scaling vs. Growing: Scaling benefits

When it comes to scaling your marketing business, here are some great predictors of success:

Predictable revenue – do you have a standard outbound and/ or sales process and systems in place? Having a playbook that describes what you have to say on your first call versus your third call if you want to reach out to new customers. The same goes for LinkedIn messages or emails. Make a playbook.
Subscription-based services – do you have systems in place so every year you start the year with money in the pipe? One example is a yearly or monthly subscription of your service/tool, conform the DashIQ
Having diverse income streams – don’t bet on one income stream only. You can get money from a product you offer, a service/consultancy, or providing a training/academy, etc.
High customer retention rates – know that 20% of your customers produce 80% of your sales. Repeat customers spend more, generate larger transactions, and bring in business by word of mouth.
Creating a value ladder of products for your customers – this allows you to cater to your customers’ needs. E.g., at the very bottom of the value ladder, create free content in exchange for customers’ email addresses. As clients ascend the ladder, the value level increase as does the cost to play. E.g., you give a free PDF download about the 5 biggest mistakes scaleurs make when scaling their marketing team. Then you go for an eBook – How to Reach the Scaleur Mindset for $19. Further up the ladder, you can market an online training course – How to Scale Up from 1 to 1 billion for $99. From there you can go for the one-year program for $999, ultimately end with coaching for $2,500 per year.
Having dedicated KPIs that you can track on a dashboard – this is your visual success panel for the company. Focus on key indicators instead of tackling everything at once.

Companies scale their marketing business when their revenue increases and their marketing and operating costs remain static. If a company increases their revenue but increases their costs at the same rate, then that business is not scaling.

In order to find scalable aspects in your marketing model, you must first locate the aspects of your marketing business that can be replicated quickly and cost effectively, while still building a strong marketing organization.

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Become a Successful Scaleur

I hope this blog will prove to be helpful in your endeavor. After all, Scaling vs. Growing is a strategy that can only be mastered by a scaleur who is an ardent learner and considers real-time business priorities.

Marketing Scaleurs is a scaling company helping entrepreneurs scale their marketing efforts. To accomplish this, we help businesses strive and succeed with growth marketing, product development, and more. How do we do it? We create custom growth plans for startups, entrepreneurs, and scaleurs in order to help them gain traffic, generate leads, and increase their revenue. If you want traffic, leads and sales, send an email to Marketing Scaleurs today, and you will start getting results in no time

15Jul

Build an agile marketing funnel

15 July 2020 MarketingScaleurs 627

PLAN – Create a scalable digital agile marketing strategy

You need a roadmap of where you’re going before you start gassing up the car. Your map needs to include the milestones that you want to achieve at reasonable intervals: here’s when we hire a digital marketing manager. So when we expand our agile marketing efforts it should also be flexible enough to accommodate the unknown.

Keep your scaling roadmap at the forefront of every decision you make. Because If a new move or decision doesn’t contribute to hitting your strategic milestones, don’t spend the money just because you can. So Remember: every decision you make while learning how to scale your agile marketing business should be towards building long-term growth. And keep checking in monthly to evaluate if revenue is on track, your operating costs are staying low, and if teams are achieving key initiatives

Questions to ask:

– Did you select your niche target market segments ?

– Do you have your marketing budget in order?

– What is your competitive differentiation?

– Do you delight your customers & understand their needs?

2. REACH – Grow your audience online & Maximize your online presence

Along with making it simple for existing customers to spread the word, you also want to be easily found by new customers. So one way to ensure a positive, ubiquitous online presence is to complete and update your social media profiles. Because the more comprehensive they are, including specifics on your location, hours, and prices, the more likely your business is to surface higher in search results.

Some clever ways to repurpose your content:

– Turn blog posts into podcasts, white papers, video

– Make an infographic from existing content

– Hold a webinar based on your blog

– Answers questions on Quora & Reddit

– Make an audio version of your E-book

– Optimize Google Adwords

– Work with affiliate and partner marketing to boost your content

Key Measures:

– Unique visitors

– Value per visit

– Fans / Followers

3. ACT / INTERACT – Encourage brand interactions and leads

It is about persuading site visitors or prospects to take the next step, the next action on their journey when they reach your site or social network presence. So develop a content marketing strategy, that will integrate your online communications to fuel lead generation and power inbound marketing to grow your reach.

Actions to take:

– Create campaign plan, editorial calendar, and outreach plan

– Create content creatives like video marketing

– Improve landing pages and personalize onboarding

Key Measures:

– # of leads

– Time on site

– Shares / Comments / Like

4. CONVERT – From lead to sale.

Increase your conversion rate and understand where the leads are coming from or how they moved through your marketing funnel?

Find out which marketing initiatives are creating value in order to improve results, boost ROI, and deliver mature leads to your sales team. Being able to properly attribute revenue across each of your marketing activities is key to knowing where to place your resources to fuel growth.

Basic metrics like lead volume and website traffic are important. But failing to dive deeper means you’re missing out on key insights into your marketing performance, and valuable opportunities for improvement. MQL to SQL ratio, unengaged subscribers. And other advanced marketing metrics will give you deeper insight into what’s driving your success and where you should focus your attention.

Actions:

– Define which key online communications (search, email, social, mobile) drive sales

– Implement a lead retargeting program using site personalization. As display retargeting and behavioral email program

Key Measures:

– Sales

– Revenue / Profit

– CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)

5. ENGAGE – Build customer loyalty & Delight your raven fans

Develop a long-term engagement to build customer loyalty. And to build advocacy or recommendations through ‘word-of-mouth’.

Actions:

– Create customer engagement plan

– Create customer onboarding plan, incl. event triggered personalized emails

– Manage social media for customer engagement

Key Measures:

– Repeat Purchase

– Satisfaction / NPS score

Become a Successful Scaleur

Marketing Scaleurs is a scaling company helping entrepreneurs scale their marketing efforts. So to accomplish this we help businesses strive and succeed with growth marketing, product development, and more. How do we do it? We create custom growth plans for startups, entrepreneurs, and scaleurs in order to help them gain traffic, generate leads, and increase their revenue. So If you want traffic, leads and sales, send an email to Marketing Scaleurs today, and you will start getting results in no time!

15Jul

Scaling Tools Every Marketing Scaleur Should Know

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One of the biggest misunderstandings about scaling marketing efforts is that it requires you to do more marketing. And it’s not about more marketing; it’s about more effectively using your scaling tools.

In this blog, I want to give you an overview of what your toolkit should look like if you want to start scaling your marketing business. Select and use these scaling tools that offer the biggest return for the least cost and effort.

LEAD GENERATION TOOLS

Building a predictable lead generation machine is challenging. Once you crack this challenge, though, it’s extremely rewarding as you can scale up faster. And afford to be more selective with who you work with. So in the B2B world, most customer relationships today begin with content offers, then continue on with lead nurturing through the sales funnel. Therefore you must understand the full nurturing model and have various types of content (from eBooks to webinars). And serve specific audience needs throughout your funnel.

1. Leadfeeder. A website visitor tracking tool that tells you which businesses are visiting your website. Even if the visitor does not fill out a form or download a resource. Using a website visitor tracking tool (which is similar to analytics, but with the ability to identify which individual companies visit your website) is an effective method of lead capture. By identifying the businesses visiting your site and monitoring the pages they visit and the content they read. So you can develop outreach and engagement opportunities based on their actual site engagement.

2. AppSumo. A multi-app toolkit built to increase the ROI of your website. It offers a variety of pop-up tools designed to drive lead captures on every page of your website, including newsletter sign-up, special offers, and lower cart abandonment rates through timely pop-up reminders during checkout. Sumo integrates with most email service providers to ensure your leads go straight to your lists. Alternatives are Sleeknote or Hello Bar.

3. Fomo. Leverage the power of social proof to increase conversions. While customers and prospects are browsing your website, Fomo displays small notifications alerting your prospects about other visitors on the site as well as some of the purchases those other visitors have made. By showing prospects that other customers are viewing and purchasing, you instantly give your website and business credibility through social proof.

4. Drift. To capture more qualified leads on who visits your site, use Drift and create conversational bots that interact with your website visitors. By setting predetermined questions and answers to commonly asked questions and tailoring these questions to different pages on your site, you can help potential new leads find the information they’re looking for quickly and boost conversation on lead generation pages. This tool also gives you the ability to connect with your support team directly for any interactions that require a more “human” touch.

ANALYTICS TOOLS

Data visualizers help reformat valuable, insightful data into visual graphs, charts, and graphics that make those numbers easier to digest. You have to know your numbers — if you don’t know, down to the penny, how much it costs you to generate leads and sales, you will crash and burn.

1. Google Analytics. To keep a pulse on how users are interacting with your pages and products, take the time to set up Google Analytics on your ecommerce website. With Google Analytics, you can track sessions, users, pageviews, conversion events, time on page, bounce rates, and more. You can also set up reports that can help you identify problems or opportunities in real-time.

2. MixPanel. A granular data collection tool that allows you to analyze each customer interaction across the entire user journey. By capturing each user interaction, you can start to build touchpoints and customer journeys based on actual customer interaction history, leading to a more personalized customer experience and increased conversion rates.

3. Autopilot. Captures new leads from your website, app, or blog and then nurtures them with personalized messages. You can also use it to automate repetitive sales funnel tasks, such as lead assignation, appointment setting, and customer onboarding programs.

4. Zapier. An automation tool that allows you to move data between your web applications, meaning lead generation flows and alert notifications can be seamlessly automated between your marketing tools.

CONTENT AND EMAIL MARKETING TOOLS

Email marketing isn’t new. As long as you’re using it correctly, email is still one of the most valuable and targeted channels for reaching your audience. Understand open rates, A/B testing, and email lead nurturing.

1. Medium. A popular blogging platform and an effective tool for generating valuable inbound content and growing a community. Most importantly, you can have your own hosted blog.

2. HubSpot. Manage your leads pipeline. HubSpot also integrates with most lead generation and email marketing platforms, so your lead generation efforts can be amplified through serious automation and easy actioning. HubSpot’s free CRM platform is also the foundation for their Marketing, Sales, and Service hub product sets, providing an end-to-end platform for lead generation, sales funnel management, and retention.

3. Verify Email. A simple service that verifies your email marketing lists. It connects to the email server and checks if the email exists or not, which is useful if you are re-engaging old leads or contacts.

WEBSITE TOOLS / SEO / PPC

SEO is foundational to any marketing strategy, but it’s tough to do effectively, especially in a crowded market, as everyone jostles to rank among the top search results and stay one step ahead of Google’s periodically shifting algorithms.

1. Unbounce. Build high-conversion landing pages for campaigns and events. Using a simple drag and drop editor, you can easily build landing pages optimized for data capture and lead generation. You can also run AB tests to test out landing page copy and layout to ensure your pages are always optimized for lead capture.

2. Olark. Live chat applications for businesses. If offers a no-fuss approach to live chat software, and has improved its design and offering over the past couple of years. Olark also offers an extensive integration portfolio to ensure chat leads captured on your site are sent to the right tools in your marketing stack.

3. Moz – An all-in-one digital marketing tool, a comprehensive workflow tool for SEO. The platform allows you to audit your SEO performance, track position for keywords, generate ideas for gaining traffic, as well as monitor competitors.

4. Google Adwords. To increase brand and product exposure, you can use Google AdWords to create campaigns that drive more customers to your website. With Google AdWords, you can target specific audiences based on location or keywords, and you only pay for actual results. What makes Google AdWords extra special is that you don’t have to create the demand—you simply need to satisfy it. Your audience is already looking for your products and keywords.

DESIGN TOOLS

Posts that contain image and video content increase engagement because of its visual and aesthetic appeal. With these tools, you need not be a design expert to make it work.

1. Visme. A simple online interface to generate images to accompany marketing campaigns. Whether you’re creating images for social media, printed brochures, websites, product mockups, business cards, or online display ads, Visme is a tool anyone can use for marketing images. Alternatives are Canva, Gimp, Photoshop, and Indesign.

2. Lumen5. Create engaging video ads and start publishing high-quality video content to social media. With a stock image gallery and over 2000 video templates, Lumen5 gives you the ability to create professional-looking videos through their drag and drop builder. You can also perform multivariate tests to see which videos connect best with your audience.

3. Fiverr. Fiverr is an online marketplace for freelance services. The company provides a platform for freelancers to offer services to customers worldwide.

Become a Successful Scaleur

Marketing Scaleurs is a scaling company helping entrepreneurs scale their marketing efforts. So to accomplish this we help businesses strive and succeed with growth marketing, product development and more. How do we do it? We create custom growth plans to startups, entrepreneurs and scaleurs in order to help them gain traffic, generate leads and increase their revenue. If you want traffic, leads and sales, send an email to Marketing Scaleurs today, and you will start getting results in no time

15Jul

Scaling Strategies for Scaleurs

15 July 2020 MarketingScaleurs 310

Scaling strategies has literally become the “buzzword” for most of the startups / scale-ups these days. It is said to be relatively a new segment in the domain of marketing. It is focused on growth and every other tactic that can help an organization. As grow in terms of business, client retention, and return on investment.

Starting a company is only half the battle. The real challenge comes when you reach a point where there are more customers than you can serve. Growing is part of the answer. But scaling is not only about growth itself but about improving the ability to handle growth.

Now, in case you too are an aspiring scaleur / entrepreneur and looking for essential scaling strategies that can be implemented in order to take your business to the next level of success?

I hope it is useful for you to learn about 4 successful scale strategies for your business:

1. Ensure that you have Scaling Strategies

Growing to scale will put your marketing business under more pressure than ever before. It’s not the time to gloss over things and assume the kinks will work out as you grow. Take a closer look at every variable: your team, infrastructure, operations, product, systems, services, and especially your budget.

If there are any weaknesses in the way your marketing business runs today, scaling will only magnify them. Set aside the time to turn your business inside out and make sure you can truly support sudden growth. Before you even consider how to scale, your marketing should already run like a well-oiled machine. If not, scale back before you scale up.

Questions to ask:

– Do you have a sufficient lead flow to generate the desired number of leads?

– Are your marketing systems to track and manage leads?

– Do you have enough sales representatives to follow up and close leads?

– Do you have a billing system and a receivables function to follow up to ensure invoices are collected timely?

2. Start using digitized standardized, automated marketing SYSTEMS

You cannot scale your marketing business unless you’ve established processes and procedures that facilitate streamlined operations. By aligning and standardizing your core functions, you’ll be able to quickly build a solid foundation for the long haul. Instead of focusing on short-term fixes, you will be able to accomplish larger business goals with ease. Scaling strategies arent easy, but once you implement scalable processes, you can focus on increasing your leads. Without wondering whether your marketing department can handle it. Focus on simplicity and keep customer needs at the core. If you can check both of those boxes for each scalable process, you’re on the right track.

Embrace automation. It’s the central puzzle of marketing: sending the right message to the right person at just the right time. But as you ramp up your marketing machine, launching simultaneous, complex campaigns. It becomes more and more difficult to do so. In order to keep up with the complexity and volume of customer and campaign data, you need the right technologies and tools to track, analyze, and optimize your marketing efforts.

So how do you scale without losing the personalization that’s resonated with your customers and fueled your current successes? Leveraging marketing automation tools allows you to send highly targeted messages to leads and shorten the marketing cycle. Automated lead nurturing helps you build relationships with customers through helpful emails, follow-ups, social media engagement, etc. To determine when they’re truly sales-ready. And by automating your creative workflows, you streamline repetitive tasks, cut down on errors, and execute faster.

Actionable Systems:

– Use marketing tools such as Visme, Canva, AdobeSpark, Piktochart, Unsplash, Medium, and Buffer. They will help you keep an eye on the latest social media trends and design tools.

– Get the hang of the SEO scene with marketing platforms. Such as Google Analytics, Moz Check My Listing, SEO SiteCheckup, Sumo, Google Search Console, and more.

– Master the art of Email marketing with tools like Hubspot, GetResponse, and MailChimp.

– Set up automated training processes for new recruits.

– Establish an automated bill pay process for faster withdrawals and automate your office invoice system

3. Go for people with the right SCALEUR MINDSET

Growth in marketing can take you from one lead to 100, but to get from 100 to 100,000, you’ll need to scale. Growth depends on individual decisions made at the moment, but scaling is built on predictable, repeatable strategies designed with efficiency in mind. If you have strong processes, you can hire a new employee, provide instructions on how to perform a task, and get consistent results within days instead of months. It is important to employ the right people with the necessary skill sets to make scaling strategies successful.

Actionable Points:

– Know if your employees embrace challenges as growth experiences, do they come up with innovative and relevant business ideas?

– Recruit employees who hone more than one skill.

– See if they take ownership and are they capable of handling pressure without hampering his/her productivity at the workplace.

4. Implement a SUCCESS PANEL

How can you grow your customer base and revenue streams when you don’t know how leads are coming into or moving through your marketing funnel?

When you’re tracking the right things, growth becomes a much simpler task. Focus on metrics that make you a customer-centric organization, so you get actionable data and timely user feedback that pushes your company forward. Find out which marketing initiatives are creating value in order to improve results, boost ROI, and deliver mature leads to your sales team. Being able to properly attribute revenue across each of your marketing activities is key to knowing where to place your resources to fuel growth.

Basic metrics like lead volume and website traffic are important, but failing to dive deeper means you’re missing out on key insights into your marketing performance, and valuable opportunities for improvement. MQL to SQL ratio, unengaged subscribers, and other advanced marketing metrics will give you deeper insight into what’s driving your success and where you should focus your attention.

Track Key Metrics:

– Lead Volume: it’s important to measure how many leads your marketing efforts are generating, and additional look at how many leads actually turn into customers.

– Analyze acquisition by tracking the number of people visiting your website, what is their engagement time

– Look at the customer cost of acquisition (CAC)

Become a Successful Scaleur

I hope this blog will prove to be helpful in your endeavor.

After all, Scaling is a strategy that can only be mastered by a scaleur who is an ardent learner and considers real-time business priorities.

Marketing Scaleurs is a scaling company helping entrepreneurs scale their marketing efforts. To accomplish this we help businesses strive and succeed with growth marketing, product development and more. How do we do it? We create custom growth plans to startups, entrepreneurs and scaleurs in order to help them gain traffic, generate leads and increase their revenue. If you want traffic, leads and sales, send an email to Marketing Scaleurs today, and you will start getting results in no time!

15Jul

The Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

15 July 2020 MarketingScaleurs 326

Once you’ve reached around $1 MM in ARR (annual recurring revenue) and want to accelerate your growth. Then you need to think about how to scale your marketing team. But many companies are scared to do this. Because adding the salaries of new marketers into your budget can cause your customer acquisition cost (CAC) to skyrocket.

The strength of the marketing team in a growing company is invaluable. Every marketing strategy shapes the way customers will perceive and eventually interact with your product. But the salaries of team members who work to acquire customers are a huge factor in your customer acquisition cost. This is why new marketing hires can be a hit to your customer of acquisition cost (CAC) metrics. You need to reconcile the cost of scaling in order to make this investment in your company’s future.

Hot to calculate the Customer Acquisition Cost

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the total cost of sales and marketing efforts that are needed to acquire a customer. It is one of the defining factors in whether your company has a viable business model that can yield profits by keeping acquisition costs low as you scale. Managing these new costs is all about maintaining balance, optimizing efficiency, and scaling up customer lifetime value so you can get the maximum return on this investment in your company. You can’t make smart business decisions if you don’t know the full unit cost of each customer. Calculating CAC is theoretically straightforward

= divide the total expenses to acquire customers in a certain time period by the number of customers acquired during that period.

But the miscalculations—and the fatal underestimations—of CAC happen when you don’t account for all expenses to acquire customers. As you scale, the salaries of your marketing team members become prominent components of your CAC that you cannot forget to include. If you don’t account for team members in your CAC, you won’t really know how much it costs to acquire each customer and you won’t be able to determine how to earn back those expenses.

Simply put, the CAC formula is as follows:

CAC = (total cost of sales and marketing) / (# of customers acquired)

For example,

if you spend $36,000 to acquire 1000 customers, your CAC is $36.
CAC = ($36,000 spent) / (1000 customers) = $36 per customer

This increase shouldn’t prevent you from scaling, because with a larger team you have more power to generate revenue. If your new hires own some of these processes and metrics, you can leverage the power of their addition to improve the quality of your marketing and, ultimately, increase your revenue.

Putting it in another way:

– you’ll spend $50,000 on an individual marketing team member’s annual salary, that’s an additional $4,166/month in total expenses to acquire customers.

– Hypothetically your other costs might total $11,000/month ($1,000 in paid advertising + $10,000 in marketing tools and software). Adding $4,166/month increases monthly CAC by over 37%.

– Adding two new marketers at that salary means over 75% increase in your monthly CAC, given these other monthly expenses.

Need more questions? Feel free to contact me!

Marketing Scaleurs

What Scaling KPIs

Why

When

How

Who

In Conclusion

Become a Successful Scaleur

1. Give up control and delegate

2. Embrace challenges as growth experiences

3. See the bigger picture by breaking it up into tactical steps

4. Take ownership

5. Celebrate the success of others

Become a Successful Scaleur

FIXED MINDSET

GROWTH MINDSET SCALEURS

Become a Successful Scaleur

In the context of business, scalability describes the ability of the business to grow without being hampered by limited resources when production increases.

Other than that, you should also ask yourself these questions:

Become a Successful Scaleur

Scaling vs. Growing: Scaling benefits

Become a Successful Scaleur

PLAN – Create a scalable digital agile marketing strategy

Questions to ask:

2. REACH – Grow your audience online & Maximize your online presence

Some clever ways to repurpose your content:

Key Measures:

3. ACT / INTERACT – Encourage brand interactions and leads

Actions to take:

Key Measures:

4. CONVERT – From lead to sale.

Actions:

5. ENGAGE – Build customer loyalty & Delight your raven fans

Actions:

Key Measures:

LEAD GENERATION TOOLS

ANALYTICS TOOLS

CONTENT AND EMAIL MARKETING TOOLS

WEBSITE TOOLS / SEO / PPC

DESIGN TOOLS

Become a Successful Scaleur

1. Ensure that you have Scaling Strategies

2. Start using digitized standardized, automated marketing SYSTEMS

3. Go for people with the right SCALEUR MINDSET

4. Implement a SUCCESS PANEL

Become a Successful Scaleur

Hot to calculate the Customer Acquisition Cost

Putting it in another way: