There’s a complaint I hear often from business owners and CEO’s, and it’s as common at the lower levels as it is up high, and goes something like this…

I know marketing is important, in fact, I know I NEED to be actively marketing my business every single day, the problem is, I don’t know what to do, why I’m even doing what I’m doing, and how to tell if it’s even working!

These same marketing questions have been asked since the time of the very first profession (yes, even they needed marketing)

We know that doing no marketing at all isn’t a viable long term solution, and we know that doing everything available is a quick way to broke and blow a years marketing budget in a month.

So what’s the solution?

Accountable Marketing.

Accountable marketing is as simple as deciding relevant and attainable business goals, choosing appropriate targets, and then working backwards to choose the tools and tactics that will help you achieve them and this all starts with knowing what a potential customer is worth to your business.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

A customers lifetime value is the amount of revenue a customer will generate (wait for it…) over their lifetime.

Simple right?

If a customer is worth $50 over their entire lifetime then you’re going to want to take a more moderate marketing approach (that is unless you’re mass marketing to millions or billions of people)

But if a customer is worth $1000, or $10,000, or even $100,000 over their lifetime then you know what you can afford to spend another customer.

Here’s an example.

If it costs you $500 in marketing to obtain 1 new customer, but that customer has a lifetime value of $1000 dollars, then you’ve just earned a 100% return! Next step, do it again (then again, and again….)

In today’s day and age we have an amazing supply of accountable marketing tools. These tools will tell you EXACTLY what your marketing dollars bought you, whether that’s in views, clicks, or actions. You can quickly decide what is working (so you can scale it up), and what’s not working (so you can discard it).

We know what increasing our websites rank will do for our traffic and sales, and we know how many people we can get in front of with a Facebook Ad for any given budget, and we can see, and track these metrics every step of the way.

Marketing CAN be accountable, and we’re able to make educated and informed decisions, rooted in strategy, and utilizing the latest and greatest tools and tactics thanks to the abundance of information available. Gone are the days of “spray and pray” advertising, buying ads at random and hoping for some sort of return, and here to stay are the days of accountable marketing.