When servicing your clients, it’s essential each client has a clear strategy.
When it comes to your own service costs, it can be challenging to allocate funds and organise accurately, especially when it’s based on specific goals. As your business’ success and profit is based on your clients’ marketing strategies, you’ll need to ensure you’re creating plans with high return on investment (ROI).
Here’s our top tips for effective campaign quoting:
- Determine clear objectives
Without a clear understanding of what your clients hope to achieve from their campaigns, you won’t know when your work is done. These goals can be short-term, long-term or a mix of the two, but they’re always the foundation of your clients’ marketing strategies.
For example, your client could be looking to increase brand awareness, generate new leads or boost sales. Whatever the objectives, understanding this will help when determining quotes and budgets.
Ensuring your clients have a clear set of objectives enables your team to prioritise tasks that need to be focused on.
- Analyse competitors
Conducting competitor analysis for your clients will give you an idea of how your service can help them to stand out from their competitors. This research enables you to have a clear understanding of which strategies are working, and how they can be applied to your clients’ marketing campaigns – enabling effective quoting and optimised budgeting.
- Allocate your finances
Competitor analysis will establish which strategies you’ll need to offer your clients in order to reach you’re their business’ goals.
The 70-20-10 rule ensures you have a clear structure when charging your clients:
• 70% of their campaign quote should go towards usual marketing activity and strategies
• 20% of their campaign quote should be spent on programmes, such as automated planning and scheduling
• 10% of their campaign quote can be used for experimentation, for example, to explore potential platforms or any opportunities that may occur. Marketing is always evolving, so it’s important to adapt your clients’ strategies to keep up with new trends.
From this, you can then work out how much each strategy will cost you and allocate your service costs accordingly.
- Optimise your budget
By reviewing your clients’ past results, you’ll be able to pinpoint which areas need improving. With campaign insights, data analytics and KPIs, you’ll be able to evaluate which areas needs altering for next time, therefore better allocating your service costs based on success and profitability. For example:
• Which strategies generated the most leads?
• Which strategies increased website traffic?
• Which platforms resulted in increased brand awareness?
Helping your team to stay within budgets
When working as a team, it’s important to make sure everyone is on the same track. Using an integrated system allows you to streamline all your processes into one place, ensuring all campaign data is accessible to everyone. This can help you to manage:
• Financial organisation
Organisation is essential in any part of a business, but even more so when it comes to quoting and budgeting.
An integrated system encourages your team to keep their timesheets updated, allowing you to analyse time management and finance control. You can also set time guidelines for each campaign task, ensuring your team stays on track and within campaign budgets.
• Campaign data and insights
Time and data analysis allows you to evaluate job costs, with financial reports and statistics enabling you to measure your clients’ campaign effectiveness.
Calculating ‘fee vs time spent’ based on your team’s timesheets can help you to determine whether a specific job is taking more time than anticipated, allowing you to adapt what was quoted for future campaigns.
By obtaining insights into timescales for each campaign strategy, you’ll eventually be able to create a campaign costing with high ROI.
• Documentation
To stay within timescales and budgets, your team needs to be spending less time on administration, and more time on campaign tasks.
An online system allows you to streamline clients’ campaign documents into one place, ensuring easy accessibility and reducing time spent searching in multiple systems.
Integrated systems provide you with the ability to adapt your campaign strategies based on team data and insights – enabling you to optimise future campaign quotes and budgets that reflect success, productivity and client overservicing.
Want to find out more? Book your free demo with Concept: https://conceptintegratedsystems.co.uk/book-a-demo/