A couple of years ago, I was working with a client who was struggling with serious cashflow issues. I had to somehow increase the number of sales without increasing the ad spend.
So the first thing I did was audit the business. I looked at everything from the pricing strategy to the positioning to the marketing and everything in between. I took a number of steps to fix this problem:
- Where’s the low hanging fruit?
- What expenses can be eliminated?
- Where are the holes in their marketing?
- Where are the opportunities to promote in a better way?
Here’s what happened:
Low Hanging Fruit – I changed the discount structure for non-buyers from 50% to 30% and changed the messaging to sell based on VALUE and NOT the price. We were able to maintain the conversion rate, meaning we were charging more for the same people we were previously offering a deep discount to.
Eliminating Expenses – I did an audit of all the expenses in the business, culling what I could and changing the working structure of the team. This immediately resulted in saving almost 1k per month which dropped to the bottom line.
Fix The Holes In The Marketing – This was huge – I changed the messaging from general to avatar-specific and built out avatar-focused campaigns. The result? Just this change alone saw an additional £1800 of sales coming in at the very LEAST per month (£2k at best), meaning I was able to add an average of 23k to the business over the course of a year WITHOUT an increase in ad spend. Knowing your customer can pay you very well!
Opportunities To Promote – The business was spending a LOT of money on Google Ads, so I worked on creating more content and sharing videos, podcasts, webinars and blog posts via social media. The result? While of course, there is an associated cost with creating content, the content lives on the Internet forever. I was able to acquire leads at less than a £1 from content marketing (compared to Google Ads which was costing almost 5 times as much).
When your business isn’t working the way it should, it’s easy to go into panic mode and start offering discounts out of desperation, start running after the next shiny object… or even to give up altogether!
Sometimes, just taking a step back, assessing the situation and asking yourself the right questions can save you a ton of headache, stress and money.
But by far the biggest lesson I learned from this is the power of understanding your customer. When we changed the discount from 50% to 30%, we worked on the messaging and focused on the pain points of the audience and the outcomes they were looking for – and this meant we maintained our conversion rate despite offering a smaller discount.
And creating the avatar-specific campaigns might have been a Herculean undertaking (it took almost 4 months for me to build out 9 separate campaigns), however, it resulted in an immediate and significant increase in sales without a single extra penny being spent on ads. This one move alone was responsible for turning the business around from failing to profitable!
So the next time you’re hit with cashflow issues in your business, see where the holes and the opportunities are before you do anything else!
