A new client said to me yesterday, “A website is a living, breathing thing. Not a painting.”
I love it when clients get it.
They are absolutely right.
If you expect to produce significant results with your site by investing into it one time every couple years, you’ll be very disappointed. It’s because your website IS a living, breathing thing. It’s a constant reflection of your business, your products/services, your customers, your marketplace. All of those change and change often. So how can you expect your digital marketing to keep up if it’s not adapting as well?
Well, it doesn’t.
For one client, we decided to focus on the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) of spend as a % of revenue near the end of July 2016. We did the math and noted that June’s year-over-year (YoY) performance for this KPI went from 14.5% to 12.5% and July went from 12.9% to 12.6% YoY.
While overall YoY performance was/is great, we set a target of achieving 10% spend-to-revenue % while maintaining our top line revenue. Because mathmatically, spending less to generate the same amount of revenue typically means more profit.
Here’s what the client has experienced so far:
- August 2016: 8.7% spend-to-revenue %, YoY revenue increased 23%
- September 2016: 8.4% spend-to-revenue %, YoY revenue increased 24.6%
And then came October 2016…
- 7.7% spend-to-revenue %, YoY revenue increased 44.1%
As a team, we couldn’t be happier for the client and I couldn’t be prouder of the MINDSCAPE team for absolutely killing it with this client.
Now to bring this back full circle to my comments that started this post. We’ve been working with this client for many years. Over the years, and typically several times in a single year, the KPIs we focus on to achieve results will change. That’s because everything in and around the business changes and our digital marketing efforts must reflect that.
Had the client considered their site a masterpiece of a painting in June 2015, they would have missed out on millions of additional revenue dollars over the last year.
Yes, some paintings are worth millions of dollars, but that doesn’t happen while the artist is actually alive.
Please, please, please. Don’t treat your site like a Picasso.
