I’m reading another great book, “Data-Driven Marketing” by Mark Jeffery. In it, Jeffery cites some revealing stats. He looked at marketing budgets of hundreds of companies and found something really interesting. He defined different buckets or categories as to where each company’s marketing dollars were going. Here are the buckets:
- Lead Generation
- Branding and awareness
- Customer Relationships
- Shaping Markets
- Infrastructure
What’s interesting about his findings was that the leaders (those companies that had better results) spent more money on their infrastructure and creating systems that allowed them to market more effectively. The point here is that businesses that were short-term focused vs. long-term focused suffered. It’s like that classic quote, “you never have time to do it right, but always have time to do it twice”.
To take your business to the next level of growth, takes more than just spending more money on marketing. It takes spending money in the right areas.