How Much Should You Invest In Marketing To Drive Growth?

Predicting future performance is one of the most difficult things to do in marketing, especially when you’re trying to figure out how much to invest.

Sure, you can create a forecast based on a number of assumptions, but it’s probably not the best approach when you’re looking at scaling up.

So what’s a better way?

Hey, my name’s Alex Cleanthous. I’m the director of strategy and innovation at Web Profits, author of the Growth Manifesto, and the founder of the crypto arm of Web Profits, Zage Marketing Group.

And today I’ll be sharing what I believe is a better way to think about how much to invest to really scale up your business.

Here’s the challenge…

If you want a company to tell you what results you can expect if you invest X dollars into marketing, I’m sure you’ll find a lot of them.

But, most of the time those predictions will be wrong because everything changes when you start executing on a strategy … and is that what you REALLY want?

Because here’s the thing … future prediction of performance does not take into account things like the competition, the capacity of your sales team and the different levels of lead quality, and the challenges that inevitably happen when you scale.

So, what’s a better approach then?

Well, at Web Profits we use the north star metric framework for every client we work with.

And rather, trying to predict what will happen each month—we identify just one metric that will have the biggest impact on growth for our clients.

That means we do everything that we can to grow that metric month-on-month.

Now it doesn’t mean we don’t have goals – because goals are what help us understand how we’re performing overall – but we’re not trying to ‘predict’ future performance… we’re trying to create it.

So what’s a better conversation to be had then, when it comes to how much to invest in digital marketing?

I’d start with defining your goal and then go about understanding what resources you need to achieve that goal.

Because the more you invest in your marketing team, the more time you’ll get invested in your campaigns, and the more time that team can spend on improving your north star metric.

So when you ask, what will I get if I invest “X’ vs ‘Y,” it’s a conversation about resources vs goals. It’s not about predictions.

And this is something that is important for every business to consider before they choose to invest in digital marketing to drive growth.

Over to you, how much should you invest in marketing to drive growth?