Strategy development is the foundation of great campaigns, but it can be difficult to connect your marketing strategy to your planning and execution, ensuring you focus your resources on activities that deliver results and drive growth, eliminating the unnecessary and ineffective.
Watch our on-demand webinar ‘Developing a Marketing Strategy for Growth: Planning for 2023’, and discover:
- How to align your marketing strategy and business goals
- Tools to analyse the situation and help you plan
- Why you need to understand the audience
- Creating a framework for measurement
- How to prioritize when budget is limited
Register to view our webinar on demand by clicking here, and why not get in touch to let us know if our insights helped you.
Napier Webinar: ‘Developing a Marketing Strategy for Growth: Planning for 2023’ Transcript
Speakers:Â Mike Maynard
Good afternoon, and welcome to the latest Napier webinar. Today I’m going to be talking about developing a marketing strategy for growth. So this is really a webinar to talk about how you can start planning for next year for 2023. And explain what we can do, and how we can approach creating and delivering a webinar. So, the first thing to do is to explain what the objective is. And for us today, the objective is going to be to help you create a better, more effective marketing plan for next year. And I think you know, as you see by the picture, we’re all used to the the, the plans that sit at the bottom of a pile, they get rid of the start of the year, at the end of the year, they only get produced, just so you can have a look and see what you want to write for the year coming up. So what we want to do is produce a plan that’s going to be useful, something that you’re actually going to get benefit from, and you’ll be using and looking at throughout the year. So, quick overview of our agenda. I mean, the first thing is planning is never perfect. We’ll talk about you know, some of the reasons why planning actually is so difficult. We’ll discuss the biggest mistakes people make. And then we’ll talk about models and processes. And really, I think it’s about understanding processes as the way to improve your planning. And we’ll talk about why processes are important. And how you can create a process that really works. Well put it all together, explain how to build a marketing plan, using a funnel model that we use a lot at Napier. And at the end, I’ll invite you to ask some questions. So if you do have questions that you think of as we go through the presentation, please do just put them directly into the chat. And then what we’ll do is we’ll take a look at the chat at the end of the presentation. And we’ll take any of your questions and answer them then.
So as we go through, please ask questions in the chat. So planning isn’t perfect, I think it was Mike Tyson, who said everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the face. And planning really is a challenge. There’s lots of reasons for this. I mean, you know, some of them are your budget is going to be fixed by a lot of factors, you know, quite often by the finance team. And then you’ll have your boss who might be the VP of Sales and Marketing come along, unless the number of demands that marketing has got to you know, achieve certain results that are completely impossible within the budget, or at least feel impossible at the time. So you’ve got this issue that you don’t necessarily have control the budget, you don’t necessarily have control of the high level goals. So it’s really tough to create a plan when you’ve got that little level of control. But what we can do is we can implement a good planning process that will take what we’ve got the high level goals that we have to achieve, and also the budget and the constraints we have to work within, and will let us build a campaign that is gonna produce the best possible results at the end of the day, that’s really what we want to do is achieve the best possible results from our campaign. Now, I think some of you listening to the webinar, or clients will know that I’m actually an engineer, I love process. And I think you know, a lot of people when they start marketing plans, they try and look for, you know, marketing plan, templates and things like that. That’s not necessarily the best way to do it, I think the best way to do it is to have a sequence of steps, you follow that then generate the plan. So process is really, really important. And if we look at, you know, different processes, hopefully you’ll see how they can actually help you not only generate a really effective and comprehensive marketing plan, but also generate better strategies and better tactics. And ultimately, those are the foundations on which your marketing plan is going to be built. There’s certainly not one right way to plan campaigns, though.
So as I say, we’ve got some approaches that we’d like to talk about. But there are no right ways. If you look at, you know, the Google search of steps to create a marketing plan. I love this. The suggested searches are what are the seven steps? What are the 10 steps? What are the five steps? What are the six steps? Nobody can agree on? How many steps are even Google in terms of the searches. So there’s no magic number of steps. There’s actually no magic answer in terms of the best process. But there is some academic research that actually is really useful to see that will help you understand how to build plans, and the kind of a sequence you need to go for But of course, having said there’s no right way to build a marketing plan, there are wrong ways. And interestingly, if you search for marketing plan mistakes, Google has over 56 million matches. So one of the things we’re going to try and do with this webinar is we’re going to try to make sure that we’re going to help you avoid making those marketing mistakes, when you’re building your plan. And the biggest mistake, the thing that we see an awful lot of is not thinking strategically, it’s really common. And the reason is, it’s really easy to jump straight into what we’re going to do, rather than actually having, you know, a time to think about where we are, what the situation is, and what we want to try and achieve. So we quite often see people doing, you know, little or no situation analysis, perhaps not looking into the audiences they’re trying to target. And quite often, it’s because people just want to get these numbers done and get them back to finance. And so the budgets done.
And so you end up effectively doing what you did last year, plus a couple of changes. Now, we’re not suggesting you throw everything away from previous years. But certainly just assuming that last year was the right answer is probably not the best thing to do. And that’s particularly the case, because last year, probably you did the same as the previous year and the previous year, it’s it’s mistakes that are being compounded that you need to address. And so what you need to do is put work in upfront before you actually jump into developing what you’re going to do. And that is difficult. I mean, I get that, you know, as we approach the end of the year, we’re looking to planning now, or maybe you’re looking you know, in January and February to plan for a April to March financial year, it’s hard to find the time to put that effort in. But if you can put the time in, it definitely makes the rest of the year much easier. And here’s where I’m gonna put a plug in for agencies, I promise, this is the only sales bit of the webinar. You know, if you’ve got an agency and agency can often help you enormously with strategic planning, not only in terms of, you know, helping you do the work, that’s going to take time, the research, and, you know, building models and things like that, to understand where you are in terms of the situation, and the audience. But agencies can also help you with generating ideas and things they’ve seen from other clients. So often, it’s not just you that has to sit there creating the plan, get a team involved, and, you know, make what is a big project, you know, slightly less challenging. Okay, so we talked about processes. There’s a guy called Ronald Smith, who literally wrote the book on strategic planning for public relations. And he produced what’s generally used in academia, as the seven steps of marketing planning. I feel now, you know, it’s important to say sure, what he what he felt there were only three steps to heaven.
But clearly, marketing is a lot more complicated. And there’s seven steps, according to Mr. Smith. Now, he put those steps in two phases. And the first phase is around research. He called it the formative research, and it’s looking at the situation, looking at your organisation, and also looking at the audience. So you’re really trying to find out where you are. The next step is strategy. And that’s around selecting goals, determining your action and response strategies, and developing the messaging strategy. And we’ll talk a little bit about action response strategies in a second. The third phase is tactics, this is what you’re going to do. So you pick what you’re going to do, and you actually do it. And then the fourth phase is evaluation. And that’s really evaluating the plan, did you succeed, did you not what worked, what didn’t, and that’s going to give you information to then bring through to your plan for the following year. So I think this is, you know, really interesting. The steps are quite detailed. And they also don’t always work, we find that this is, you know, somewhat idealistic, because actually, what you’re doing is you’re not really selecting budget, the tactics until phase three. So there’s some issues around doing this. And also actually, you know, a lot of the work in terms of time actually is around this research stage.
So at Napier, we use a version of this seven step process, we simplified it down to four steps. So the first step is determine which is your situation analysis. So that matches the analysing the situation analysing the organisation. We also set goals typically at this stage. Now this is interesting because the academics will say, Well, you got to do all the research, look at the audience you know, before you start setting goals, but in reality once you analyse the organisation, once you know what your company needs, you’re then very, very quickly understand what the goals are. So typically, we find goals are set, you know, pretty early on in most campaigns and most marketing plans that we work on. The next step is focus. And that’s about analysing the audience. And this is about, you know, looking at not only who you’re talking to, but also what you need to do to get the audience to engage and respond in the way you want them to respond. And within that, you’re also setting the messaging strategy, what you say to them to actually generate those responses. The next stage is deliver, that’s like find the tactics and implement the plan very much again, like the seven step process, and the last stage is enhance now, what we tend to do at Napier is we tend to try and find metrics that we can measure during the campaign, rather than leaving all the evaluation until after the campaign is complete.
And the reason for that is, and particularly when you’re looking at things like digital campaigns, but this also can apply to things like PR as well. If you can continuously evaluate whether what you’re doing is actually generating the results you look for, you can actually make changes and course corrections mid campaign, if you can cause correct mid campaign, and you’re just missing, you know, the optimum campaign by a little bit, a slight course correction can generate significantly better results. So we strongly recommend where you can setting metrics that can be measured in real time, rather than those that could just be measured at the end of the campaign. So we’re going to have a look at some of the different steps and talk through them. So the first step is determine here, it’s really interesting. So with a determined phase, what we find is that actually, there’s a lot of tools you can use, that are really helpful. If you’ve done a marketing degree, you might have covered things like SWOT or Porter’s five forces or pesto pesto, or perceptual maps, there’s many different tools you can use to understand the situation. And it’s amazing when you use these tools as sort of frameworks to write down where you are it things become much clearer. And so quite often this is, you know, a really, really helpful thing. I actually sat in on a webinar this morning, that was amazing talking about and promoting agencies.
And they produced a perceptual map. So this is literally, you know, it looks like a graph, it’s got two axes. And in this case, one axes was what makes the agency different. And one axis was what matters to clients. And the simple message was, you know, if you want to promote an agency, you want to talk about what makes you different, and that benefits clients. So you want to talk about things that not only are your differentiators, but things that are actually useful to clients? Well, it sounds really obvious. But when you start expressing it like that, a lot of the things that maybe are perhaps really interesting, exciting to you as an agency, but really don’t impact clients then become very clear. So perceptual maps are great. And typically in b2b, you know, the classic perceptual map was price performance, you know, how much it cost, how much performance deliver today, I think, you know, things have moved on, particularly in technology. And so now, it’s not just price performance, it’s about the whole offering. So you might be looking at things like performance against ease of use, and things like that building those perceptual maps is really useful. We also need to understand what requirements are being dictated you know, I mean, most CEOs want to double sales in five minutes, right.
But actually, you know, maybe the CEO does have a real sales goal, they want to get a certain sales increase in a certain time period. If that’s a very short term goal, then that’s going to impact how you plan your marketing for the next year, because focusing on awareness and top of the funnel activities, is not going to generate the results that you need in the timescale you’ve got. So maybe you want to focus on things that are all around, converting the people already interested and engaged. And that’d be more bottom of the funnel. So we often find requirements dictated. But normally, we can not only clarify those organisational requirements, but we can also clarify goals as well. And so, you know, an organisational requirement might be sales, a goal might, for example, be number of leads that you generate to drive those sales. And clearly there if you’re asked for a certain number of leads, we need to clarify, you know, whether it’s a marketing qualified or a sales qualified lead, and what marketing qualified and sales qualified means, you know, how do you define whether someone’s ready to engage with sales? One of the things we find really, really useful and this is a really simple tip is just to break down the goal. So let’s say your CEO, has relaxed and said they don’t want to double sales in five minutes. They’re happy to double sales over the next year. Then you’ve got to start thinking about some questions that are going to break this down to make it easier to create marketing KPIs that you can use to show that you’re moving Moving towards this ultimate goal.
So, you know, one question might be a prospects easy to convert if prospects are very difficult to convert, sales might need help, you might actually, as a marketing team, you spend time on what might be more often regarded as sales enablement, to help sales close a deal. You know, we could ask whether we got enough prospects, if we don’t have enough prospects to double the sales, we need to drive more prospects. If we need to drive more prospects, how are we going to generate those leads? And if you’re going to generate leads, and you’ve got a lead generation tactic, do you have enough people are actually aware of your company and you’re offering and have, you know, reasonably positive perception, so they’re likely to respond to a lead gen campaign. So you can start working back up the customer journey on the marketing funnel, to find you know, what you need to do. And at each stage, you can then set objectives. And it lets you generate these marketing metrics that show that you’re moving towards achieving your goal. And generally speaking, when we talk about goals and moving people through, we talk about funnels. You know, this is the classic marketing funnel, people now, I think, you know, have a more sophisticated view, and they start talking about marketing journeys, rather than funnels. But actually, the funnel model can be very helpful. And the reason is, is because people do go through certain phases. Now, they may not flow through quite as linearly as we’d like. And they may, you know, take diversions and, you know, move around. And I think it was Forrester that produced an amazing collection of pipes instead of a marketing funnel to show how complex it is. But generally speaking, people need awareness of a product before they become interested. They need to be interested before they actually want the product and have desire and then ultimately, they will take action if they want the product. So awareness, Interest, Desire actions, that is probably one of the simplest customer journeys or funnel models you can get. It’s interesting, there’s also many other funnel models as well.
So we see awareness evaluation purchase delight, we see what HubSpot used to love, which was top of the funnel, middle of the funnel and bottom of the funnel. And they used to love their tofu, Mofu and Bofu. Or you could talk about awareness, consideration and conversion. So there’s lots of different ways to look at these stages. Ideally, what you’ll do is you’ll build proper customer journeys, and look at moving people from one stage to the next. But you know, in times where everyone is pushed for time, maybe just simply looking at and trying to understand, when you do a situation analysis, do you have enough people aware of your product? You know, is that the problem? Or have you got lots of people, you know, moving through this customer journey, or moving through the funnel, and is it all about closing sales, creating people who are interested and want the product to have desire, and creating them to causing them sorry, to take action, and actually become customers. So marketing funnel models can be very, very helpful. And then one of the things we very often do is create models around funnels. And they’re really interesting, because what you can do is you can build a model that shows what you need to do at each stage. And here you can see in the slides, we’re working from a number of Google searches that we’re doing Google ads against, we’re getting a click through rate, in this case, 4% that’s generating website visitors are those visitors 10% are converting to become leads, they’re filling in a form of those 40 leads, maybe half a potential customers and half, you know what used to be called Time Wasters in my time in sales, but people who maybe aren’t likely customers YT prospects. So we might create. So these 50% generate 20 marketing qualified leads potential customers that meet requirements. So for example, we might take out students who wouldn’t buy a b2b product at this stage.
Once we’ve got our marketing qualified customers, some of those will be ready to buy, some of them might not be ready to buy, they just bought from a competitor, or they’re not into, you know, if you’re selling a component, they’re not starting a new design cycle. Or if you’re selling a you know, large system, for example, a baggage handling system, they’re not building an airport at the time, so many of them won’t be ready to buy. Let’s say it’s 50%. So now our 20 marketing qualified leads become 10 sales qualified leads. Once we got sales qualified leads, it’s down to the salespeople to convert, let’s say they can get 50% to actually buy that will produce five sales. And in our example, we’re saying our average customer value is 1000 pounds, leading to 5000 pounds that is generated. So obviously, if we can run our Google ads, and generate 400 clicks, and make it profitable, then that’s going to sorry, that’s going to mean it’s a profitable campaign. Of course, what we tend to do with this is we don’t tend to run from the top of the funnel backwards, we tend to run from The bottom of the funnel upwards. So we’ve got a sales target, we know a customer value, we can then work out the number of customers, we know how many people sales can convert from a sales qualified lead to an actual customer. So that’s the conversion rate. And again, we step back up the funnel.
And then that will give us the number of Google searches that we need. And that will drive you know things like how much we’re going to spend. It could also be, you know, for example, the number of display ads, we put on a trade publication, or it could be the number of LinkedIn ads, again, all of this is very, very similar. And where you have a process that is predominantly online, you can actually get quite an easy step by step conversion, and very clearly measure each step. Once you’re running the campaign, you’ll then see whether your conversion rates at each step, actually match your targets when you started. And if they don’t, it’s then that real time feedback, you know, did you set the wrong goal? In which case, is the budget wrong? And we’d spend more money? Or maybe if we’re doing better, less money?
Or alternatively, are we doing something wrong on the landing page, which means that visitors aren’t registering. So we’ve built this model. And we’ve also been able to estimate a budget to some extent, we then talk about, you know, the audience and the messaging, this is our focus stage. And here’s where we really, really dig down deep. So, you know, we’ve looked at maybe you know, how funnel model might work. We said, Yeah, roughly, we need to do this, this and this. But we haven’t done anything about, you know, how do we persuade the customer, for example, when they come to a landing page to fill in a form, you know, what’s the messaging, what’s the content offer. And so this is where the audience and the messaging analysis becomes really important. And in this stage, we focus a lot on personas.
So building buyer personas, and customer journeys. And obviously, the messaging should be built upon how we intend to change behaviour. And changing behaviour is from the academic world was referred to as an action and response strategy. So you do something that creates a response in the audience. So that might be a brand ambassador, advertising, technical literature, something like that. And typically, what you’re doing is you’re looking at your persona, for your potential customers. And you’re looking at the motivators, the drivers that make them do things. So what do they care about? What makes them look good? What are they worried about a work. And I think the biggest indication of how to do this is Kim Kardashian.
So you know, here I am revealing myself a massive Kim fan, she’s actually created a venture capital company, she’s able to create a venture capital company, because it’s a very simple action response strategy. And if Kim says a beauty product works on social media, lots of people go out and buy it very simple brand ambassador recommending a product then causes a response in the audience. And that is so powerful, that she’s actually been able to build a venture capital company, targeting beauty companies, that we’ll help startups grow and will grow them very quickly. Because she’s got this, you know, ultimately powerful action and response strategy. We could see other things so we can see, you know, customer journeys example, customer journeys, and typically, they’re quite complicated. So let’s say I was looking for a new car.
And I see some TV adverts for companies, one of them might be cinch this is a company that sells used cars in the UK, I might go to the Isle of Wight Festival and see cinch because they sponsor the Isle of Wight Festival. I actually love cricket, you know, England is sponsored by cinch. So, you know, I see that I may have an England cricket show that even advertises this company. I think on the internet, and maybe search, you know, look for it, see some Trustpilot reviews? And then, you know, click on Google and click through and find cinch and go by car. You can see this is very difficult. It’s very difficult to track. How do you know I went to the Isle of Wight first? And the answer is you don’t. And this is one of the challenges of marketing. We’re talking a little bit later about attribution. But typically, during a journey, some things have to be judged based upon whether you feel they’re making a difference or not. It’s very hard to know, for example, whether sponsorship, whether it be music, or of sports is going to make a difference to your sales, the only way you can do it is run some sponsorship and then stop, and then see if stopping actually causes sales to fall. However, at the same time, we might have entered a recession, the price of secondhand cars may have changed.
So all of this can kind of impact things. It’s very, very, very difficult to actually determine whether something makes an incremental improvement or not. And this is something we’ll talk about later when we talk about planning it because ultimately your marketing plan is going to rely on a lot of data that you produce and some of your intuition as well and really having intuition and understanding how your customers behave. That’s great personas and great customer journey. He is going to help you make better marketing plans and better campaigns in the next year. delivers pretty simple. It’s selecting tactics, you need to make sure that they’re selected to achieve the goals. They will determine your budget allocation, not say your total budget amount, but where you spend the budget. And, obviously, it’s important that things should work together. You know, and a great example might be that sports and music sponsorship we spoke about before, you know, if someone sees cinch at a music festival, or you know, at an England cricket game, they’re much more likely to click on a Google ad for cinch when they’re searching for a used car.
So the deliver stages is pretty straightforward. And hopefully, selecting the tactics becomes clearer, because you’ve built this model, not only of the situation and what you want to change, but also the model of how the audience, your customers, will move through their journey to become purchases.
So a couple of considerations, really, really simple stuff, you know, I mean, firstly, make sure your tactics effective, make sure it works for your particular goal. You know, a great example would be if all you’re focused on in a year is lead generation, perhaps PR is not the right place to be. You know, it’s great for awareness, it’s not great for lead gen. Think about whether your tactic will reach your audience. I mean, CEOs of large enterprises, they quite often have other people reading their emails, they have assistants sending marketing emails, almost certainly are not going to reach CEOs. Equally junior engineers got very small networks on LinkedIn may not be that active at the other end of career. And then finally, you’ve got to make sure that your tactic engages the audience at the right time. And of course, this is why Google search ads are so powerful, is because there’s a level of intent being shown, you know, someone’s searching for something, they probably want to buy it. So if your tactic can engage you and at the right time, that’s crucial. So you need the audience in the right mindset. And you need them to be thinking about purchasing. And that is a very tricky thing to do. And something I think we could maybe cover in a future webinar. We then get to enhance.
Now, I’ve talked a little bit about you know how the journey can be complicated and hard to monitor. I think a lot of people feel once you get to digital marketing, it’s really easy to get all this data, the data has got to be accurate, you know, but it doesn’t necessarily provide the information you need. And there’s lots of metrics that, frankly, are vanity metrics. If we look at what’s happening today, for example, in the world of email marketing, there’s a whole range of different reasons why your email will appeal. It’s open when it’s not, not least if somebody’s on Apple Mail, then Apple hides whether people open the email or not, by effectively opening all the emails. And also we see a lot of bot clicks on emails, typically around anti malware bots, checking out to make sure the links are safe. But both opens and clicks on emails have very unreliable statistics. So be very careful about these fairly simple, easy to retain, but frankly, ultimately vanity metrics. And the important thing to say is that attribution is not incrementality. I think this is probably something I’d say, you know, when I was lecturing to impress students, it’s actually a very simple thing, just because you allocate some value from a sale, or an action, somebody’s taken maybe an email newsletter sign up. That doesn’t mean you’ve increased sales. So incrementality is increasing of sales.
So I don’t know if people are sports fans here. But if you look at certain stats, you’ll get very interesting results. So Mike, bossy was clearly a better ice hockey player than Wayne Gretzky because Mike scored more goals per game than Wayne. In fact, Wayne actually was very poor in terms of his goals to assist average, but actually happened to be the greatest ice hockey player ever. Lionel Messi, you know, generally regarded the greatest Soccer Soccer player at the moment, actually isn’t the highest scoring international player. And he died from Iran is the International with the most goals. And a lot of that is driven because Iran play very different level teams to the level that Messi is playing. And if you’re American, quite clearly, Jerry Rice couldn’t have been a good wide receiver because the 40 yard dash which, you know, seems to be beloved of American football fans, Jerry Rice did in about 4.8 seconds, which wouldn’t have even got him close to the top 20 for this year’s draft. So, you know, you can look at different stats. And stats are always useful. You know, if you look at American football, how fast you run 40 yards when you’re wide receiver is important, but it’s not the only thing.
So attributing everything to one action is normally a very bad idea because most customer journeys are much more complex. If you remember our customer journey, let’s imagine I clicked on a Google ad, when I put cinch cards into Google, because all the other activities I’d done that had, you know, created this positive perception about cinch, we’re not trackable 100% of the value of any purchase, I make a cinch will be allocated at Google ad. That’s completely wrong. And I think you gather from our discussion of sport, you know, the most important thing is probably the England sponsorship. But it’s almost unmeasurable. So attribution is not incrementality. So we’re about 30 minutes, I think it’s time to wrap up. If anyone does have any questions, then please do, let me know. But let’s put it all together. You know, let’s have a look at you know, something we’re doing. Let’s say, for example, we’ve got a client that’s looking to sell development kits for a new processor, that’s now means we’re better than competitor x. And the biggest lack of of a biggest problem, sorry, is a lack of awareness. Because nobody has actually seen the press release that we issued, that talked about the new product. So we’ve got a problem to overcome.
And we’ve also got two audiences, current customers and non customers. So if we built something together, we might take this very simple funnel model and say, well, awareness is the problem. Sorry, we might firstly say we’ve got current customers. And so we can email the current customers and tell them about the new products, and therefore they’re using old products, they probably love to use a new product, we can then look at the awareness issue. And we can say we’re going to do PR, we’re going to trade out media advertising, we’re going to raise awareness. And that’s quite useful, because we can actually look at things like searches and web traffic that will help us measure that. So we’ve got some measurable activities, we might you exhibit at trade shows, you know, let’s assume this as an automotive product, then we can exhibit a automotive shows this will generate leads, salespeople will have, you know, either MQLs, or even sales qualified leads direct from the exhibition. So that would jump a number of stages very quickly, we might run Google ads against the competitors brand searches. So if they were, you know, selling processor A, we could run a campaign recommending our processor, processor, B. And that could generate leads as well. And we could perhaps work with channel partners if we’re in a situation where we sell through a channel and generate sales, qualified leads, and maybe even customers. So this is all the different things we could do. Now, where do we spend our money. And this is a really interesting challenge. Because we’ve got two things to do, we know we need to spend quite a bit of money at the top end, because awareness is really a problem. And if awareness is low, it’s like the cop channel with a co op campaign with channel partners won’t be very effective.
But there’s some realities, PR is quite expensive. Trade media is really expensive to have the impact. So if we’re going to spend money, we need to allocate a large amount of budget to trade media. Trade shows can be extremely expensive, particularly if you do them well. And particularly if you take into account the time that’s involved. So again, there’s no point saying trade metre is going to be a second tier tactic, if you’re gonna go for it, you have to spend a large amount of money so that you can’t just scale money up for each tactic. Google ads, on the other hand, if it’s against competitor brand searches, you know, even if it’s quite a, you know, a well known brand is probably not going to cost a lot of money. Because Google ads are relatively cheap. So there is actually a limit as to how much you can spend on that Google ads campaign. Because ultimately, you’re saturate the people who are actually searching for the competitor’s brand because they want to buy. And you’ll end up having some spurious searches that maybe feel like they’re close to the competitors brand, but actually aren’t going to influence your sales.
You know, come up campaigns, that’s typically quite scalable, depending on the tactics, but then emailing current customers, actually, that might be your single most effective way to sell this new product. But you can only allocate a relatively small amount of money to it, because you can only run a limited number of emails to your database. Otherwise, you’ll end up with your database, just getting swamped with emails, feeling spammed and opting out. It’ll be counterproductive. So this is really interesting. You know, we’ve talked about you know, the importance of different things modelling, what influences each step of the funnel, but then actually, when it comes to allocating budget, you have to allocate budget, both on the importance and also on the inherent cost of the activity. So you can’t just allocate the majority of the budget to the most effective tactics sometimes because if that’s emailing current customers, that’s probably not going to be something you can scale indefinitely. So in summary, I mean, the most important thing is strategy thinking about strategy thinking in advance of what you’re going to do. While this is Situation is what you want to change, and who you want to change whose mindset you want to change. So that’s our determine and focus stages.
And you know, at this stage frameworks, tools and models are very, very useful. Funnel models are, you know, to be honest, very simple, but they can actually really help in terms of determining investment and where you put money, and also how much you need to spend on the campaign as a whole. But ultimately, the problem is, is reality is very complex. It’s not a simple model. And even Google with a, you know, infinite number of services that appears, they can’t accurately determine whether the Google ad for cinch was the most important, or the least important factor in me deciding to buy a car from them. So there’s many different factors, it’s almost impossible to attribute revenue accurately. And, you know, different tactics have different costs. So you may not necessarily have the same cost per value.
For different tactics, you may decide you need to do advertising, because you need to raise awareness, otherwise, nothing else will work. And you have to put a disproportionate amount of funds in there. So thank you very much for listening. I now open it up. I don’t know if anyone has any questions that I’d welcome if you just type them into the chat bar. And we’ll go ahead and start answering them. Okay, so the first question I’ve got is asking about the model was I mentioned I talked about perceptual maps, and SWOT and it’s asking that says, I know what a SWOT is, but I don’t know what a perceptual map is. And we do we have some information to explain. The answer to that is perceptual maps. As I said, as a simple to access model, what we might do actually going forward is run at a another webinar, and we’ll talk about some of these models. And so you can understand how to use some of the models. And we’ll work through some examples to show you how to use them.
So maybe that’s the best way to answer that question. And I’m just checking if we’ve got anything else. So either I’ve been very clear, or everyone has now gone to sleep because I don’t have any other questions. So I’ll finish off by saying, Thank you very much for listening. We will be putting a copy of the webinar up as an on demand copy. So if you want to review the webinar, or if you’ve got, you know, anybody you’d like to share it with we very much welcome that. And I hope you find this useful if you have any questions you think of. After we finished the session, please do feel free to email me. My email is on the slide Mike at Napier b2b dot com. I’d be really help. Happy to answer the question and help you. Thank you very much for your time this afternoon and have a great rest of your day everyone.