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For this post, I picked the brain of our CEO, Leigh Simpson, who shared his extensive knowledge and thirty-years' experience of helping businesses grow in the building products and construction sector.
A lot of companies tend to underestimate (or wrongly estimate) their investment figures in order to achieve their goals. But, through a systematic, data-driven approach, you’ll be able to calculate realistic and achievable targets, allowing you to invest the correct capital in the correct places.
So, where do we start?
Firstly, Understand Your Gap
What do we mean by ‘gap’? Let’s say, for example, you’re at £5 million and you want to get to £6 million, you have a £1 million gap.
This is an overly simplistic definition, however. Taking on the above approach could mean that you wrongly calculate your gap. There’ll be many factors which might affect the gap. Below, we’ll pull this apart even further.
Look At Your Current Trajectory
If you’ve moved, quite comfortably, from, say £4 million to £5 million, with a gestation period in specification of twelve months, you may find that your sales pipeline has grown. Therefore, based on the last year’s trajectory, you’re likely to hit more than your initial goal of £6 million. This means that your gap will be smaller than your previous £1 million calculation.
Factors Affecting Your Gap
As useful as metrics are, they can’t always predict things that are out of your control, or changes in your industry. Will the government follow through on their £3.6BN new Towns Fund? What will happen with overseas manufacturing after Brexit?
Maybe you recruited another salesperson? Maybe you lost a salesperson? Maybe one of your competitors went bust? Or maybe there’s a new competitor on the market? All these factors could either shrink or open the gap.
When calculating your gap, you need to account for these instances. Once you’ve understood the factors affecting the gap, you’ll start to form a realistic idea of what your gap actually is.
What Does The Research Tell Us About Growth Investment?
So, Let’s say that you’ve taken all things into consideration and your gap is quarter of a million. To bridge that gap, you need to ask yourself, ‘what is a sensible figure to invest in growth?’
This very much depends on your individual circumstances, but research from the likes of Harvard Business School and MIT suggest that businesses should invest around 10% of their gap on growth and innovation.
For example, you’ve identified that your gap is 250,000, so you’d be aiming to invest £25,000 in growth, as 10% seems to be the benchmark figure.
Understanding Your Competitors
This doesn’t mean that a 10% investment in growth is fixed in stone. If your sales and marketing are effectively aligned; if you’re following an inbound marketing approach; if you have a secure content strategy, you will have a competitive advantage. You might be able to hit your figures with less of an investment.
On the flipside, if you’re playing catch-up with your competitors who are already investing heavily in digital marketing and the strategies highlighted above, it might mean that you have to double your efforts for 6 months, costing you more money to achieve your targets.
What Can Insynth Do For You?
Like digital doctors, we get to the source of your confusion, issue or problem. This involves a thorough-yet friendly consultation process, with a marketing performance questionnaire. Here we can evaluate your marketing funnel and where there are opportunities to improve performance in the funnel.
Using this information, we try to understand your gap. Once this is nailed, we can then-using a data driven approach-pull together the most cost-effective ways of achieving your gap. This might be something as simple as a 5% improvement in conversion on page from traffic to leads. It might be a 2% improvement in lead nurturing to generate a specification or a quote. It could also be a 2.5% improvement in close rate through targeted sales training. As growth specialists, we help in all areas of business strategy.
Read more:
- Construction Marketing Strategy: What is TAM?
- Construction Marketing Strategy: What Is Your Mission?
Traffic? Promotion?
It’s not all about traffic. It’s not all about promotion. It’s not all about top of the funnel activity. Insynth looks at the whole funnel, assessing where things are broken, where there are inefficiencies.
Sometimes it’s a bit of consultancy; sometimes it’s a bit of internal work which could generate substantial results. We don’t utilise all your investment in gaining more traffic to your website.
With 30 years of being involved in senior teams within the building products and construction industry, we know where to look. We can get under the bonnet of any sales and marketing process and find out where and why it’s not working as well as it could (and should) be.
We get the data. We understand the metrics. We understand where the opportunities are.
Focus your energies in the right place. Talk to one of our experts today.
About Insynth
As the only HubSpot certified agency to major on construction marketing, we bring together construction marketing strategy, digital strategy, website design, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, sales automation, marketing automation and HubSpot CRM implementation to produce successful campaigns and great results for our clients.