Differences Between Traditional and Pay-Per-Lead Marketing

 

What is Traditional Local Marketing

Traditional marketing is a category that encompasses many forms of advertising methods. The most recognizable method of traditional marketing is what we see and hear every day on television, radio, newspapers, catalogs, mail, and events. Traditional marketing as described by this article falls under one of four categories: broadcasting (radio or television), snail-mail, print, and telephone.

What is The Cost of Traditional Marketing?

Planning a local marketing budget is really similar to setting up any other financial budget. You want to be organized, provide detailed steps, gather the information, and put everything down on paper. The more detailed the local marketing spending plan is, the more it will help eliminate unexpected expenses. Just as important though, drawing up your spending plan will reveal where you might be overspending and what expenses can be removed early on. A detailed regional marketing budget plan may also show you where funds might be more effectively utilized.

In this section, we describe a process and structure for how to plan out your regional marketing budget.

Goals and Milestones

The initial step, when setting a local marketing budget plan, is to evaluate your objectives– or set goals if you do not have them.

Step 1. Clearly define at least 5 to 10 achievable objectives or goals.

If you currently have a strategic plan, sales forecast, or total marketing plan, use the objectives from your strategy or forecast. If you don’t have a strategy or forecast, you’ll need to establish goals.

Example of objectives and goals:
Many local services are wanting to increase their number of customers and sales revenue.

• How many leads or sales are you trying to make daily or monthly?
• How much site traffic do you wish to generate?
• How much foot traffic do you want to get?

These can become your goals, and the steps to get there are your objectives and milestones toward your goals. Start by figuring out how many regional customers you desire for the day, month, and year. Then find out the amount your typical consumer is willing to invest over these exact same periods.

Other factors to consider when establishing a set of objectives for a regional marketing spending plan includes determining where your target customers need to come from (demographic area). Are they driving 2, 5, 10, 50 miles to visit? Are they from down the street, a 1-mile radius neighborhood, across town, from surrounding neighborhoods, or simply from the exact same zip code?

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Type of Marketing And Advertising Budget

When developing your regional marketing spending plan, consider the objectives you are trying to reach and select the kind of advertising accordingly.

For example, a regional television ad may reach a million viewers. However, it might cost as much as $5,000 to do so, with production fees beginning at $2,000. So figure on a budget plan of $7,000 to begin for the very first month. For a bigger company– a car dealership or a big dining establishment– this might be worth the expense, but for a small coffeehouse, most likely not.

How to Calculate Your Regional Marketing Spending Plan

With all these choices, you’ll want to think about how much capital you’ll need to commit to your regional marketing efforts. As discussed earlier, television advertisements can be costly. Social network websites are complementary to use, but you might need to hire a freelancer or company for a couple of hundred or a few thousand dollars a month to handle your social media management.

These are just a few alternatives!

As a general rule of thumb, for new business, plan to reinvest 12 to 20 percent of your profits into regional marketing. For established businesses, where the brand is already known, a scale that regional marketing budget plan to 6 to 12 percent of income. Why the difference? Well, arguably you’ll need more regional marketing capital when establishing your brand, and get the word out to clients. If you are not sure what your profits will be at first, use your predicted earnings as a guide.

Simplifying by Month-to-month Spend

When you choose how much you can invest overall on regional marketing, it’s time to get more specific.

 

Step 2: Calculate Monthly Marketing Cost

Initially, you’ll need to calculate the regular monthly investment based on your predicted regional marketing budget for the year and write that number down in your plan. Make calls to get quotes for typical month-to-month expenses. Get a wide array of regional marketing possibilities, at first– including television and radio advertising, newspaper advertising, social media, mobile marketing, mailers, local conventions, and more. Be creative and find situations where you can reach a large audience. Don’t worry, you won’t be budgeting for every marketing possibility. We just want to get this list created and add to it as ideas and knowledge of them are obtained.

Next, pick the marketing channels you feel will be the most cost-effective in reaching your customers, and then work backward to remove some until you’re within the expense range for your month-to-month budget plan. I cannot express enough here that you will want to do thorough research and find bargains without sacrificing quality.

Step 3: Track ROI and Fine-tune

Lastly, after creating your local marketing budget plan, you’ll want to track the ROI religiously, whatever that investment winds up being. As consumers call or come into the store, ask them where they heard about your products/services. Consumer feedback is free data and just takes a few seconds to collect. Customers may say ” I saw your vehicle wrap” or “I heard you on the radio” or “I googled you”. Record every answer and log it in an excel sheet or your preferred method. After a couple of months, you’ll begin to see where your marketing dollars are working for you. If there are too many clients to speak to on an individual basis, then incentivize them to visit your site for a 10% discount by participating in a 2-minute survey.

As you study what’s working and what’s not, adjust your spending plan accordingly. Discontinue marketing efforts that are not providing an ROI. Reinvest in those with better returns. Also, continue to explore new marketing avenues to expand your audience reach. And again, monitor closely, and add and remove new marketing financial investments accordingly.

 

PAY PER LEAD (PPL) MARKETING

Now let’s look at another marketing method. The below marketing method is better suited for services where customers may not take into account a brand right away, and most prospects may simply google the nearest service provider from their location. While learning about PPL, keep in mind that every successful business is paying per lead, one way or another. In traditional marketing, PPL is often called Customer Acquisition Cost or CAC. CAC is calculated by dividing the total monthly or yearly expense for acquiring new customers (marketing expenses) by the number of customers acquired for that month or year. Again, every profitable business or service provider in today’s market is paying on a per “customer acquisition” basis regardless of what it’s called, whether it’s PPL or CAC.

For example, if you run a small to medium-sized orthodontic practice, you know that generating new clients is essential to growing the practice. With a lot of competitors, you have the option of outsourcing marketing to an experienced agency. A reputable digital marketing agency will assist you in reaching your audience and get your phones ringing. Partnering with a digital marketing agency requires a bit of research and you’ll want to partner with one that has a proven track record. A simple but cost-effective digital marketing method is Pay Per Lead marketing. Whereas traditional marketing is like broadcasting advertisements to people who may or may not be looking for your services, pay per lead, on the other hand, targets people who are specifically looking for your services via the internet. That’s why it makes sense for some businesses to consider a credible marketing agency that provides a service on a Pay Per Lead basis.

How does Pay Per Lead (PPL) work?

PPL is a marketing method in which a service or product provider simply pays for each online lead that performs a specific action while on a website or ad. There are a few PPL methods available, but the one we’ll focus on here is where you only pay when a potential customer calls or emails your business. The potential customer may visit the agency’s specially-designed landing page and then call a number that ported directly to your business phone. The service provider and the agency come to an agreement on how much each lead will cost, and the projected number of weekly/monthly prospects. Leads are determined as conversion events, such as signing up to receive emails, send an email message, or clicks to call the website number. This marketing method can simplify your marketing budget. The digital marketing agency only makes money when they deliver interested visitors to your phone and/or email inbox. Sounds simple right? It is a very simple agreement.

So Why use Pay Per Lead?

The most obvious advantage to PPL is that it guarantees conversions with lowers financial risk. By partnering with a Pay Per Lead agency, you get rid of the guesswork and streamline your marketing efforts into one simple plan. Since you only pay for quality leads, you get a better return on investment than you would from traditional spray and pray marketing, which can take a long period of time to begin delivering a return on investment. If your company is struggling to find enough clients or customers, PPL is a proven technique to increasing prospect phone calls, all without spending anything in advance.

Other Benefits of PPL marketing

Apart from the expense savings and results associated with Pay Per Lead marketing, your company will also acquire important insight into the demographics and online activities of your prospects. This information enables you to reach brand-new clients more effectively. It helps you to decide exactly what a quality lead looks like, which will help us adjust landing pages and other components that drive conversions. PPL as provided by a digital marketing agency is a mutually beneficial partnership. Both partners will profit from their hard-earned investment.

So How Do We Get Started?

First, determine how much you are investing in customer acquisition with your present traditional marketing plan. Earlier, in the traditional marketing section of this article above, we provided ways to estimate what a traditional marketing plan budget will cost you. If you discover that leads are prohibitively costly or your CAC is not bringing in an ROI, it might be a strategic choice to change to the PPL model. An example may be that you’re currently spending on average $45 per customer acquisition in your traditional marketing efforts whereas by switching to a PPL model, you may only spend $25. If that is the case, you may want to seriously consider partnering with Ratel SEO Digital Marketing. Ratel SEO is a reputable PPL service provider with a proven track record with one goal in mind; get the phones ringing. Visit https://ratelseo.com/qualify-PPL to see if you qualify for a free consultation.