How to Cut Out Bad Marketing to Save Cost

Marketing is seen as a cost center, when it should be a revenue center.

(Shoutout to Kevin Bobowski for this great insight!)

That means good marketing is ROI positive: it should bring in more money (in terms of leads, contacts, customers, etc) that’s greater than what you’re spending to execute it.

And as we run into the recession, companies are thinking about cutting costs.

One obvious cost item is marketing, reducing marketing spend, reducing ad spend. What we need to be doing is not cut marketing, but cut bad, underperforming marketing.

But how do you practically do that?

Ask your salespeople. If they ask good questions during their sales calls, they will know what marketing is working and what isn’t.

Because good marketing supports your salespeople. It should help them in the closing process.

So, they’ll tell you.

For example, we keep producing these videos because I’m on sales calls with our prospects and they tell me again and again that they found us through our content (either on LinkedIn or YouTube), that they watched my videos before they reached out, that what really convinced them was when I talked about topic X, etc.

Even when our prospects come through another channel like the cold emails we’re sending, where we’ve integrated our videos, they often tell me, “I saw your cold email, it was interesting, I went to your website, but what really got me interested was your video about the 7-hour rule / your process video / your video case study with Philip / etc”

Although the prospects came through a different channel, our content played a massive role in building trust and inspiring action.

And that’s a good indicator that our marketing is working.

Similarly, if your salespeople tell you, “keep posting on LinkedIn because I get people mentioning your posts”, that’s a good sign.

Now, marketing takes time because it takes a while to build trust and credibility. It is compounding, so it starts slow and ramps up over time.

That’s why, if you’ve just started posting 3 months ago, it’s difficult to see prospects coming through your content consistently. That’s the caveat.

But if your PR agency has been publishing articles in Forbes for a year, and your salespeople say, “No, never heard anyone mention the articles, no one ever came through them, or said anything positive about them.”

Then that’s a sign that it’s just not working. It’s not buying revenue or playing a support role for your salespeople.

So, marketing should be a revenue center. And as we run into the recession, we need to think about how to cut bad underperforming marketing, not marketing in general.