5 Steps to Prioritize Your Top Marketing Activities in Business

Your ultimate goal as any business owner is to increase sales and brand awareness by employing every strategy at your disposal. These strategies include the generation of qualified leads. Now, a lot of us who have been in business for a while tend to get stuck in a certain rut when it comes to generating qualified leads. Sure, sometimes we do need to stay in that zone, but other times we need to think outside of the box and step away from our comfort zone. Thus, you will need to engage in marketing activities.

What are marketing activities?

Marketing activities consist of the strategies and methods that a business needs to reach and persuade returning and potential buyers to make a purchase. They also include activities like market research that aim to gain a deeper comprehension of customers.

I want to take you through a little process where the end goal is to determine the top marketing activities you can focus on in the business. This 5-step exercise will get you there.

Step 1: Brainstorm 

The first thing we want to do is brainstorm. Make a list of the top marketing activities that you can think of. Some examples include joining a networking group, offering referral incentives, taking on public speaking gigs, leveraging social media, blogging, SEO, email campaigns, and so on. The possibilities are endless. If you end up with more than 20 marketing activities, that’s fine. But it’s important to not limit yourself based on the financial outlay or the length of time required for the activities. Similarly, don’t worry if you don’t know anything about how to perform an activity, for now.

Step 2: Identify your top marketing activities

Once you have that list created, go through and identify the top 4-6 marketing activities that would best fit your target market and give you the best-projected return on investment (ROI). We won’t have time to cover target markets in this article, but hopefully, you know who you’re going after. So choose the top 4-6 from your list.

Step 3: Calculate the cost of every marketing activity

This is the step that almost everybody forgets about. Here, you want to estimate how much time it’ll take to complete each activity, whether you’re doing it yourself, leveraging another person on your team, or using an outside resource. Then, figure out how much the cost will be for each marketing activity.

For example, let’s say that you join a weekly networking group that meets every week for one hour, and the cost is $150/month. Now, you must figure out how much your time is worth. To keep it simple, we’ll assume that you value your time at $100 an hour. Your monthly time investment of four hours would come to $400. Or, maybe you’re paying someone $20/hour to attend the meetings. Then your cost in terms of time would be $80/month. It’s important to know the monetary value of time, be it yours or your employee’s.

So overall, if you attend meetings yourself, your total investment would be $400 (cost of your time) plus $150 (cost of the networking group itself) per month. With this information, you can clearly understand what you need to get out of the networking group to make it worthwhile.

Step 4: Calculate your ROI

This step involves estimating the return on investment for each marketing activity (ROI). Going back to our earlier example of joining a networking group, we’ve calculated that you’ll incur $550 in expenses per month if you attend the meetings yourself. What does the return need to be? $5,000? $3,000? Or do you just want to double your investment, at least? Think carefully about what your goal is. Also, be sure to look at both the short-term as well as the long-term value for each client.

For example, if you own an accounting firm and you get a new client, how many years on average will they stay with you? If it’s, say, 10 years, then it doesn’t make much sense to only think about what fees you’ll earn from them in the first year. So, depending on your industry, you may choose to use either short-term client value or lifetime client value to calculate your ROI.

Step 5: Review and optimize your marketing activities list

Once you go through this process, there will invariably be some marketing activities you don’t want to do, and you might have to go back to your list and decide on which marketing activities actually make sense for you. Finalize those top activities, eliminate the ones that aren’t a good fit, and add new ones that are. Moving forward in the short term, these marketing activities will be your focus.

Final thoughts…

Obviously, there’s a lot more that goes on with the entire lead generation process, but I just wanted to look at the marketing activities specifically. What I’d encourage you to do now is go out and start making that list of possible marketing activities for your business. Go through this blog post as many times as you need, until you have real clarity on what you need to do to help generate qualified leads for your business. More leads will translate into more sales, which means you’ll have more clients who will benefit from your products or services. You’ll be able to help more people and make more money in the process.

For more advice, reach out to our team and share your questions about marketing. Please feel free to bring them up, and we’ll address them in upcoming posts. Until the next post, go out, take action, and have a better than amazing day!

Podcast –

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