Do You Think of Marketing as an Investment or an Expense?

For over 20 years, I’ve been helping distributors and manufacturers generate more leads, sales and profits from results focused B2B online marketing. And, I’m here to say that if you think of marketing as an expense, chances are, you’re doing it wrong.

Marketing needs to produce a measurable return in the form of qualified leads and bankable sales. Just as you would evaluate all the different investments in your retirement portfolio (stocks, bonds, mutual funds, etc) based on the return on investment that they are producing, that’s how I want you to evaluate the different elements of your online marketing portfolio.

What kind of return should marketing produce?

Marketing should produce return in 4 different ways:

 1. It should help you get new customers.

That’s where companies spend most of their efforts and that it unfortunate because your marketing should help you get your existing customer base to do the next 3 things:

2. Buy more often from you.

3. Buy a wider product offering from you.

 4. Refer new business to you.

So make sure when you’re looking at the different returns that your marketing is going to produce, that you are looking at those 4 different areas.

Now get out there and start producing results!