Most businesses hit a ceiling when it comes to marketing. What worked for ten customers doesn’t work for 100. What got you to $10K won’t get you to $100K. This is not a function of a lack of hustle or creativity. This is what happens when your marketing system is not designed to scale.
Scaling is the magic ingredient that separates the companies that glide through their growth phase from those that are always in crisis. A scalable marketing system is one that creates an infrastructure that does not force you to reinvent the wheel every six months.
Start With Multiple Traffic Sources
The single biggest mistake most businesses make is designing their entire customer acquisition system around a single source of traffic. There’s no such thing as a free lunch or a traffic source that you can rely on for all of your traffic in perpetuity.
A scalable system has resilience from day one. It doesn’t have to be complex, but you should consider multiple sources of traffic to be part of your growth plan. The most resilient businesses use between three and five different sources of traffic, and they usually complement one another nicely.
To make your system resilient, you might want to rely on the following sources of traffic: social media, referrals, and paid ads. You don’t have to overcomplicate things. Use a mix of organic and paid sources of traffic. Use direct response marketing techniques as well as traditional brand building techniques. If you are looking for scalable replacements for traditional sources of advertising, you might want to have a look at pop ad networks. They might help you reach specific market segments when they are in a crucial phase of their purchasing journey when other types of ad formats cannot.
You don’t have to spread your resources too thin. You just have to make sure that you are not overly reliant on a single method, source or system for traffic acquisition. If you experience a failure of one source or method to perform well one month, the others can pick up the slack.
Build in Measurement From the Beginning
Many companies approach measurement as an afterthought and try to add it to their marketing systems after they have launched their campaigns. This makes it virtually impossible to determine how much each of the channels they are using contributed to their success or failure.
A scalable marketing system builds measurement into the system before you even run a campaign. When you measure the performance of your channels, make sure to set them up correctly so you can do this accurately. Determine what the conversion metrics for your business before you even start running campaigns.
The businesses that scale best know their metrics intimately. They know the cost of acquiring customers and how valuable those customers are over their lifetimes. They know the conversion rate of their leads, and they know which traffic source delivers the most valuable qualified leads.
They can tell you about their stats at every point in the sales funnel without hesitation. This level of knowledge is only possible if measurement systems actively inform the decisions that the company makes as it operates. They also include routines for reporting, benchmarks, and templates that allow scalable companies to know what works and what doesn’t on a constant basis.
Create Repeatable Processes
What worked once can work a hundred times if you measure it and repeat it properly. Scalable companies create standard operating procedures for everything they do: writing ad copy, writing product copy, onboarding customers – you name it.
This is not about killing creativity. This is about ensuring that the creative work that your team does incorporates all of the unique elements that made previous campaigns successful.
Create standard operating procedures for what worked about Facebook Ads when they were successful. Create standard operating procedures for any winning email sequence and any winning landing page.
These processes become your roadmap when your business has expanded, and your marketing teams have new members.
Plan for Increased Complexity
There’s something beautiful about small-scale marketing systems. You might run a campaign, track it using a spreadsheet or two, and rely on gut feeling and intuition to guide you.
This system doesn’t work when you try to scale your marketing efforts to a much larger scale.
A scalable marketing system plans for complexity. The tools and platforms that worked for you when you started your business usually can’t deal with much complexity as your efforts scale. You can avoid the problems that they create by planning for complexity before your business starts to grow.
This means planning your platforms properly so they can deal with the demands of a system that is designed to scale. Build in structures to allow for specialization as your teams expand. Expect things to get bottlenecked when inquiries, requests, and resources become stretched.
The email service provider you are using might work when you have 500 subscribers. It won’t work when you have 50,000 subscribers. The project management platform that might work for you when your team is five people strong will seem chaotic and overwhelming when it expands to a twenty-person team.
You can avoid dealing with the fallout of having to find suitable replacements at the last minute by planning for complexity long before signs of healthy growth begin to appear.
Test Constantly But Systematically
Growth is all about working out what works best so you can do more of it. If you do it methodically, testing gives you the opportunity to do just that.
A testing program measures the performance of certain things so you can determine what to optimize and repeat. Testing also accounts for variations in populations or target markets. Good testing delivers insight that you can trust rather than having to rely on gut feel and instinct.
A scalable marketing system builds systematic testing into its strategy from the start while still allowing for controlled experimentation once there is reasonable confidence in well-performing strategies.
Companies that scale successfully allocate budget for experimentation and testing before the fact when they launch their campaigns. The tests that they execute when they are operating on a shoestring budget not only provide them with limited resources but also become the scaling strategies of tomorrow as they achieve healthy growth while avoiding wasteful practices.
The marketers who manage to thrive in oversaturated markets are not always the best equipped. They have simply created a marketing system that is built to withstand the test of time.
