Home featured Economy Editor's Choice Expert Economy How to navigate a tough economy Darrell Hardidge April 26, 2019 Ask any established business owner/manager if they have a marketing budget and you will hear a resounding “Yes”. It’s an essential part of their growth strategy and keeping connected to their market. The average marketing budget ranges from 3-8% of revenue, however, many forget the employment costs of marketing managers and sales people which adds considerably more to the marketing budget. All of this is primarily invested in customer acquisition and the costs of obtaining a new customer can be significantly different across the many strategies used in the sales process. Know your facts As W. Edwards Deming said, “Without data you’re just another person with an opinion”. Most businesses cannot provide accurate customer acquisition data. That is the actual cost of buying a new customer. It will vary across the different lead generation strategies and the lag time they take to convert a new customer. It’s vital to know what marketing strategy influenced a new customer to buy from you and what the most successful to the least successful strategies are. This ensures you allocate resources to the most effective strategies. Most business cannot provide the data to track the ROI of their marketing strategies and which ones are the most successful. The reasons are usually no time or process to do it. This in itself is crazy as there is so much time and money wasted on dud marketing and