Would you spend $75 to keep a customer with a total gross lifetime value potential of $6,500? This blog was inspired by my experience with MSI, a gaming laptop brand who chose the $75.
In the past, I’ve written about how cost per acquisition (CPA)—what you are willing to spend to get a new customer—can be a powerful tool in your marketing, but we should also take into consideration what we are willing to spend in order to keep a customer.
Yes, you read that correctly. If your content is well-developed and well-executed, it should drive some people away. Intentionally. By design. On purpose.
This is not me being hyperbolic for the sake of getting clicks. As much as that sounds counterintuitive, I genuinely mean it, and if you think this way, you can actually make your marketing content much more impactful.
Recently, we had the opportunity to run a condensed strategic planning workshop for the Washington County Watershed Alliance, a local nonprofit that serves as the mother-support-ship for the individual watershed organizations working across our county. I’m proud to say I’m an At-Large Board Member, so that makes me biased toward the organization, but the work was a reminder of just how easy it is for even the most passionate organizations to lose sight of their true direction.
This is why the most successful businesses and organizations use strategic planning. For the sake of clarity, here is the Wikipedia definition of strategic planning: “Strategic planning is an organization’s process of defining its strategy, or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy.”
The internet marketing world collectively panicked when Mark Zuckerberg announced changes to how Facebook would display content to users. You should read the post in its entirety, but this paragraph is likely what triggered worried phone calls and emails:
“As we roll this out, you’ll see less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media. And the public content you see more will be held to the same standard — it should encourage meaningful interactions between people.” (emphasis is mine)
For many businesses, social media marketing—and therefore Facebook, given its size—is a key element of their marketing mix. The idea that an algorithm change would automatically make your Facebook marketing less effective is naturally alarming, but the unbridled panic may not be justified. Your business can still leverage social media marketing to drive retention, acquisition, and revenue, but your social media strategy is going to have to change.
Content marketing is a broad term that can describe everything from television shows to email campaigns. For someone working in this space—hello, that’s me!—this makes content marketing exciting and interesting. The variety makes each marketing mix unique and opens the door to a huge swath of creative potential.
For clients, the folks deciding whether or not use content marketing, that same broadness can be confusing and crippling. Many times, when there are so many things that you could do, the response can often be to do nothing. Analysis paralysis, feeling overwhelmed—however you describe it, more choice is not always a good thing.