How to Double Marketing ROI in 2021

Elite Window Cleaning
December 6, 2021
3 Comments

There are two things that you need to do to double marketing ROI. First, narrow the scope of the marketing activities you have chosen to participate in. Second, widen the amount of marketing efforts you are participating in.

There is the perception that these methods are at odds with each other. The truth is they are 2 sides of the same coin. Just look at this excerpt from our blog post talking about growing marketing revenue in 2020.

“Lock down revenues with proven methods, improve those methods consistently, then use that success to allow you to operate in unknown territory. Cover your bases so that you can have the freedom to express your creative ideas, without worrying about the security of your position.”

By putting your proven methods under the budget microscope, you can find funds that allow you to scratch the proverbial itch in the back of your marketing brain. If you can keep this within the same budget as the previous year, you get a “free experiment” out of your own frugality. If you’re particularly cunning, you may even realize that your job is to run experiments all year round.

Narrowing & Widening Scope

But what does “narrowing the scope of activities” really mean? For Elite, it meant polishing all of our online advertisements. All Google and Bing search ads were evaluated on a regular basis. Specific changes were being applied to bidding, keywords, locations. competitors and ad content itself. By doing all of this on a consistent basis, Elite was able to drop the average CPA by almost $3 in just a single year. Without reducing the results, Elite has decreased cost, therefore increasing ROI.

As an example of how “narrowing” and “widening” are two sides of the same coin, look at Radio advertising.

Radio was an activity that Elite had not put significant budget behind before 2021. This meant that the activity itself was widening the amount of marketing efforts Elite engaged in. But if we get into the nitty-gritty of the radio purchase it becomes clear how Elite narrowed the scope. These are the factors that Elite focused on during negotiations: cost/spin, time of day, frequency and station. By narrowing down to exactly what was wanted (and how much to spend) it meant the risk associated with this new strategy was calculated.

Pareto Principle

Spend 20-30% of your time maintaining and refining the current “heavy hitters” in your marketing portfolio. Per the Pareto Principle, you can expect these efforts to yield around 70-80% of your marketing revenue. This is disproportionately favourable for you (the marketer) but you better not rest on your laurels now. The next part is where the real gains are added.

The remaining 70-80% of your time should be spent trying to scratch the itch at the back of your creative brain. This is when you get to try out the wacky idea you had right before you fell asleep. You have remaining budget and you have a lot of time, what are you going to do with it all?

Look wide to get inspiration, then act narrowly to drive results. One of the biggest successes from this year was the “Tip Your Technician” initiative. And the idea and principles were simple.

Here’s a quick summary: for every review received, Elite pays out $10 to the technicians that completed the work. Give back to the technicians for doing amazing work and leverage the rule of reciprocity to engage customers to take the action of leaving a review. We do this by giving customers the opportunity to give back in a meaningful way to the window cleaning technicians that just helped them. By clicking a link and leaving a review, customers are able to tip the helpful technicians who just cleaned their windows $10.

Closing Thoughts

And “Tip Your Tech” was a smashing success in its inaugural season, growing our total reviews by almost 500%. Because of this success, Elite will actively narrow the “Tip Your Tech” program in 2022. This could mean increasing overall budget, while decreasing cost/per result.

There are a lot of ideas that Elite comes up with that look just as good on paper. What matters: Do They Work? A lot of them don’t. And that is completely normal. Which is why it’s important to spend 70-80% of your time looking to widen your marketing horizons. It also highlights the importance of undertaking actions that you can measure.

And that’s the rub on how to double marketing ROI. It’s roughly 20-30% narrowing and 70-80% widening efforts. Then take the successful widening activities from the previous year and roll them into the coming year narrowing activities.