Creating a Marketing Dashboard

This is one of the things I'm actually going to try to figure out. Tell me about what marketing is actually working. Well, can we just do more of the things that are working? Oftentimes we get away from the things that are working, or the business owner doesn't have insight into what is and what isn't working. Hey everyone, all right, for the last couple weeks we've been talking about marketing, and the reason is, is because we've got a above the business marketing workshop coming up. If you go to blueprintos.com/assets, you'll see the link to be able to register totally for free. You get the replay, you'll get any assets, workbooks, GPTs completely for free. Just go to blueprintos.com/assets. Okay, 2 weeks ago we talked about marketing plans. What's your budget? What's your strategy? How much money are you going to invest in money and invest in money? Well, you kind of are investing money. How much money are you going to invest in marketing? And it's going to be a percentage, typically between 5% and 10%. The more you want to grow, the closer you're going to be to that 10% number. I think 5% ends up becoming kind of the minimum that you want to invest. If you're actually serious about growing. The other thing is, what is your strategy? In other words, where are you gonna put that money to work? But then also, admittedly, there are some marketing strategies that don't actually cost a lot of money. So where are you gonna give effort and energy into? Basically, what— where are you putting the money? What are you actually going to do from a marketing perspective this year? So we've got a marketing plan. Here's the budget. Here's the strategy that goes along with it. Step number 2, there's a handful of metrics we need to know. Now, there's a lot of different, a lot of different marketing metrics that you could certainly have, but you need to know your cost per lead. You need to know your customer acquisition cost, and you need to know the lifetime value of a customer. We're looking for a lifetime value to customer acquisition cost ratio of at least 10 to 1. If we can get 10 to 1, there's just not many businesses that we can't scale with a 10 to 1 ratio. So next, creating a marketing dashboard. Look, there's— I love automations, but it really is such a value if you just use an Excel spreadsheet or a Google Sheet. On the left-hand side, kind of running on the first column, it's where you're going to put all of the different strategies of where you're putting where you're investing money. And then it's going to be January through December. In the column right before January, what we want to do is we want to set some targets. In other words, we want to set our monthly budgetary target. So are we investing, you know, $36,000 in Google PPC? Well, then our target monthly spend is $3,000. Next, what do we expect some of the main key performance indicators to be? In other words, as an example, if we're doing Google PPC, what do we want our target cost per lead to be? And one of the businesses that I have, we are actually investing in Google PPC at about $3,000 a month. And in that business, the target cost per lead is about $250. Now you may say, what, that, that is a lot of money. Let's just say you're spending $2,500 a month, and if it's a $250 cost per lead, you're only going to get 10 leads. Yeah, well, we only need really 1 or 2 of those leads to close in order for us to hit our lifetime value customer acquisition cost ratio. Just because of the value of a customer in that business. And so what you're going to do is every strategy that you have is effectively a marketing channel, and you want to be able to measure each one of the channels to the best of your ability. And at the end, you're going to have down at the bottom, how much did you spend in marketing in total for that month? Let's just say we invested $2,500 in Google PPC, $2,000 a month in SEO, $2,000 in a lead provider, and $2,000 in Meta ads. Hypothetically, we invested some money somewhere else. So we invested, let's just say, total for that month, $10,000. So our total marketing investment's 10, but per channel, This is how much we invested in each one of those channels. Then we can see, well, what was our total investment, but also how many leads total did we get for this upcoming month? All right. So let's do some math. So we invested $10,000 and we got 100, 100 leads. That means our cost per lead was $100. Well, how many customers did we get from that $10,000 in marketing investment? Let's say that we received 5 new customers. So $10,000 divided by 5 customers, that means our customer acquisition cost was $2,000. Well, we don't know, is that a— was that a good return on investment or was it not? What we want to do is we then look at and say, okay, Each customer cost us $2,000 to acquire, but what was the value of each one of those customers? Well, let's say hypothetically each customer was worth $10,000. So therefore we have $50,000 worth of value and it cost us $10,000 to get it. So $50,000 divided by $10,000, that was a 5-to-1 return. Is that good? Well, it's certainly not bad, but it's not the 10-to-1 ratio that we were hoping for. If we invested $10,000 in this hypothetical Acme business, we were hoping to receive $100,000 worth of new customer sales. So we go to the next month and we continue to measure that throughout the rest of the year. The importance here is not around the actual numbers. I was just making up numbers. As we went. The question is, what did your marketing performance look like? I was with a really successful business owner recently doing several million dollars in revenue, a couple million dollars, low, low millions in revenue. And I said, what, how much did you invest in marketing last year? It was a guess at best. Come to find out it was about $200,000. I said, great. Do you know how many leads you received out of that $200,000 marketing investment? No clue. Okay, fine. How many new customers did you receive last year? Uh, to be honest with you, I really don't know. And so you can see that you don't have to have these numbers to be successful, but boy, it's so important to be able to know what is working so you can do more of those things. You know, in business, a lot of times whenever things aren't going well, we can kind of reverse engineer and look at what isn't working so that we can try to begin to fix things. But it's just as important to know what is working. One of the almost secret weapons that's not a secret weapon is anytime I'm talking to a new business owner that maybe I'm personally coaching, this is one of the things that I'm actually going to try to figure out is, well, tell me about your marketing. Tell me about how many new customers you received last year. Tell me about what marketing is actually working. Well, can we just do more of the things that are working? And oftentimes it has been— well, it was surprising at first, not as much anymore— that oftentimes we get away from the things that are working, or the business owner doesn't have insight into what is and what isn't working. And that's what a marketing dashboard gives to you. It helps give insight. And the last bit of advice I would give around creating a marketing, a simple marketing dashboard is this. You don't want to make decisions based on one month of data. As a matter of fact, you want to track it over time, month over month. You want to begin to see the trends. I would encourage you to give all of your, you know, your marketing strategies at least 90 days. To have some uptick, to at least have enough fuel in it. I was working with a business owner that had a lot of success last year with Meta paid ads, but they didn't know it until we went back and we did the math. And once we did the math, they needed to 10x, literally 10x. I don't mean that figuratively. I mean that literally. Literally, they needed to 10x the amount of money they were spending in Meta ads. They were spending like $1,000 a month. They needed to be spending closer to $10,000 a month if they really wanted to scale that business. Why? Because it was actually working. So here's my question for you. A little bit of thinking time, a little bit of above the business thinking time for you. When you look back over the last 12 months in your marketing, what worked? What didn't work? Next, what's your marketing budget for 2026? Next, what is your marketing strategy? Where are you actually putting the money? Next, do you know your marketing metrics? And lastly, are you measuring it? I hope this little mini marketing series has been helpful to you. If you want to go deeper into things like that, come to my free workshop. It's the Above the Business workshop. Go to blueprintos.com/assets, blueprintos.com/assets, and for 2 hours, we'll help you not just work on it or in it, but actually get above the business so you can begin to think like an architect. And what do architects use? They use blueprints, and we think you should as well. Until next time, lead well and go be great. [MUSIC] [MUSIC]