The holy grail for many marketers is being able to show, closed loop ROI on their programs. To be able to say with confidence – if we spend $1 here, we’ll get $2 there.
And once you’re there, it’s tempting to boil things down into this black and white story. Focus on the efforts that double your dollars. With the goal of finding all those channels that make the numbers work, and keeping them running.
Of course, most of us are dealing with finite budgets and finite time. There’s only so many areas we can invest, and some of those areas can hit diminishing returns the more money we throw at them. All of a sudden, $1 only buys you $1.50. or $1.10.
This is all ignoring the fact that there are efforts out there that have the potential to 3x or 4x your investment (or much more). It might be a new channel altogether, or it’s a different way of executing what you’re already doing. Better targeting, or perhaps better personalization.
It’s easy to draw an analogy between a factory assembly line and the allocation of marketing spend. That it’s about optimizing one area, and then moving on to the next. But the reality is that every time you think something is perfectly optimized, the game has changed on you. There’s new competition, or a new channel dynamic. Or your efforts are just getting stale.
Optimizing marketing spend and return is a constant game of finding new angles and retesting and rethinking what worked in the past. There’s no “done” in this game, and the sooner we recognize this, the sooner we can get back to work.