I am often asked by salespeople, “How do you know which is the right digital capability to pull into a solution?” or, “What is the right budget to recommend for a prospect or client?” The answers to both of these questions stem from the same place – understanding the client's challenge and their goals.
Consider the Client's Objectives
Let’s begin with deciding on which capabilities are best to pull into a solution. In order to determine which capabilities are right, you need to first understand what your client is trying to accomplish and what type of results they are looking to achieve.
- Do they want generate more leads?
- Do they want to increase awareness?
- Do they want to drive sales?
- What do they want to see during the campaign?
- What metrics will they use to determine if the campaign is successful?
The more you know about what is important to them, the easier it is to determine which of your capabilities will drive the type of results they want to achieve.
Putting together a solution without understanding what the client is trying to accomplish is like trying to hit a moving target in the dark. All digital capabilities work differently and have a different set of expectations based on the best uses for each capability. The results from a search campaign, for example, would not yield the same results as a geographically-targeted display campaign.
Consider the Target Consumer
You need to consider the target consumer and the action that the client wants the consumer to take. Then determine which of your capabilities or combination of capabilities would be best able to reach those consumers where they are and drive the type of result that the client is trying to achieve.
Consider the Budget
As for knowing what's the right budget to recommend, again you need to know what the prospect or client is looking to accomplish. You need to get specific. It is not enough to know that they want to grow sales — you need to know by how much, over what period of time, and with what type of consumer.
You also need to know where you are starting from so that you know how big the gap is that you need to overcome. A growth of 20% of 100 vs. 1,000 is a very different campaign and will require a different budget to achieve the desired result.
Conversion Rate
Lastly, you need to determine or understand what the conversion rate is for the desired action. In other words, you need to know how many potential customers you need to drive to them in order to achieve their goal. For example, if they need 20 new customers, and in order to get to those 20 new customers, they need to have approximately 200 visitors to their website, they would have a 10% conversion rate. So you would need to drive a minimum of 200 new visitors to their website to achieve that goal. Now you can calculate the budget to get to their goal a little easier. If your average CTR is about .1%, you would need to run a minimum of 200,000 impressions to get about 200 clicks.
You might find that the average CTR for the type of targeted display you are recommending is higher or lower, so you would need to recommend more or less depending the average CTR for your campaigns in your network. A tool that you can use to help you determine the math and if you are recommending the correct number of impressions based on your client’s goal is our ROI calculator.
Ultimately, you need to have a strong understanding of your client's challenge and the outcome that they are looking to achieve with their campaign. Remember that your capabilities are simply the vehicle to execute the ideas you have developed in response to your client’s challenge. Understanding the road that you are taking to get to your destination and how long the trip is expected to take will help you determine what car you take and how much gas you need to get there!
