Revenue Recovery: Strategies to Revive Your Marketing

Angela Frank: 00:00:00

Welcome to The Growth Pod. Today we're checking in one on one to learn about how revenue recovery efforts can dramatically improve your growth trajectories.

I'm your host, Angela Frank. I'm a fractional CMO and a founder with a track record of generating multimillion dollar revenue for clients.

In: 2022

So if you're like me and love learning about how to grow your business more efficiently, you've come to the right place.

Today we're chatting all about revenue recovery, which has been such an important tool in my tool belt to improve marketing performance for my clients.

Traditionally speaking, revenue recovery is when you focus on recovering lost or uncollected revenues due to operational inefficiencies, human errors, or fraud. However, you can also apply the concept of revenue recovery to your marketing.

Oftentimes, changes in advertising policies, algorithm or Google Core Updates can create a softness in a marketing channel that was once performing really well for your brand.

And when you look at that channel from a revenue recovery effort, there's really a lot you can do to right the ship and create a new and highly performant marketing strategy that gets you back into growth mode. So what are the signs that you need to start a revenue recovery effort?

Well, performance degradation is the biggest indicator that you need to implement a revenue recovery strategy for one of your marketing channels.

Looking at a few real life examples, one client of mine had about a dozen product pages that were negatively impacted by a Google Core update, and they brought me in to lead that revenue recovery effort. We knew that this was needed and what caused it, because immediately after the core update, the revenue from those landing pages dropped off a cliff.

On the other end of the spectrum, a client of mine had been advertising on paid search for years and over time their ROI was declining. This was really slow and gradual and ultimately it was caused by shoddy account maintenance.

So this client brought me on to create a comprehensive growth strategy, but I pretty quickly realized that their agency hadn't been doing the work that they said they were doing.

So part of my growth strategy included a new paid search strategy, which essentially was a bit of a revenue recovery effort since their increase in cost was due to poor account execution rather than a change in algorithm. And it happened slowly over time.

So those two examples really show both ends of the urgency spectrum where the Google Core update caused an immediate need for action, while the account maintenance issues happened slowly over time. Both of these examples, though, what they have in common is that the data told us what happened and where our attention was needed.

So if you're trying to determine if you need to undertake a revenue recovery effort, all you need to do is look at your marketing data.

If over time you're not seeing trends go up and to the right, meaning you're growing, it's probably a good idea to implement a revenue recovery strategy. So now let's look at how to diagnose the problem if you do need to undergo revenue recovery.

In the examples I've shared, it was really easy for me to diagnose the problem because I've seen how marketing is supposed to perform. But as a business owner, how do you know where the problem is and what you can do about it?

This is where your marketing dashboards become so critical. Dashboards are the quickest and easiest way to diagnose what's happening with your marketing.

Either what's performing well and why, or what's struggling and how you can begin improving it.

Every marketing channel has different key performance indicators, or KPIs, that help you better understand what could be causing a softness in your performance. And because every channel is so different, I actually have an entire chapter in my book dedicated to helping you understand each KPI.

What causes a dip in performance for that KPI, and how you can go about remedying it. You can get a free download of this book at your brand evolved.com freebook, and the chapter is called Maximizing Marketing Channels.

So to diagnose the problem, you're going to look at your dashboards, find the KPI that's struggling, and then this chapter will really tell you why that's happening and what you can do about it. Once you have that information, we can move on to the next step, which is creating an action plan.

So to create an action plan, you need to dig into your KPIs and identify that exact metric that you need to work on improving.

And then to begin getting that marketing channel and that KPI back into growth mode mode, you'll need to roll out an aggressive action plan that involves a lot of testing.

Usually when your marketing stops performing, it's because of a change in an algorithm, or what was once working for you is no longer working and you're not really sure why. So to get back into growth mode as quickly as possible, the best thing you can do is test like crazy and learn what will work for you now.

So what we're going to do is wipe the slate clean.

Just because something worked for you in the past doesn't mean it's going to work for you now, since something is impacting this channel and we don't know what it is. So what we're going to do is identify three to five highly differentiated ways that you could improve that KPI. And we'll call this your testing area.

So you're going to find three to five variables or testing areas that you can use to improve performance in that marketing channel. And then you're going to choose as many of those as are feasible for you to test.

And then within each of those testing areas, you're going to create widely differentiated components and test widely differentiated components within each of those testing areas. So, for example, let's say that your ads have stopped performing.

And so your testing areas could be you need to test copy, you need to test creative, and you can also test audiences. There's a few more things, but we'll just keep it simple and start with these three.

So within each of these three areas, you need to test as many highly differentiated components or deliverables as possible. So you have copy, creative and audiences. So let's take your creative, for example.

That's the pictures or the videos that show for your ad on paid social. It's that creative component.

You could test things like videos, carousels, static images, and each of these pieces of creative should be as different as possible.

So what we're not going to do is take a static image and then add a little bit of a movement effect in Canva and then call that your video, and then break up that static image and do a carousel and test that. That's really not differentiated enough to learn what's going to perform for your brand. So what you're going to do is you're going to use a video.

Maybe your video is using UGC content, and your carousel is very highly stylized product images. And then your static image is a completely graphic image with a lot of text. Now you're testing three highly differentiated ways.

Not only is video different from carousel, different from the image, but within each those you're testing completely novel and new things. Each creative should be as different as possible. And the same goes for if you're doing copy, right?

Test really short copy, really long copy, use different copywriting techniques like direct response, and try to use different hooks and things like that and calls to action. At the end, you want to try and make things as different as possible. So going back to the creative in Your ads.

What you'll do is you'll launch a bunch of new, highly differentiated creative and then you'll wait and you'll see if anything becomes an outstanding performer. If nothing in this first group is an outstanding performer, that's fine. Just wipe this slate and begin again. Test completely new things.

Nothing that you ran the ads on before. The idea is you will keep doing this until you find an outstanding performer.

Once that happens, once you have one ad that is performing well above the rest, then you can start testing creatives that are more closely aligned with that star performer to begin understanding why it's outperforming everything else.

So let's say that you ran a UGC style video, which is someone talking about your product or service in a way that's really organic, like they made it for TikTok. That's your star performer. What we're going to do now is promote the same product in a different way.

Maybe now you're going to do ugc, but you're going to take the person's face out of it and you're going to test an unboxing video. The other thing you can do is do a testimonial video. So now we're taking the product out of it, but keeping the person's face in.

And so we're picking really selective pieces of the video and changing them intentionally to try to see what's performing the best.

In this example, if we have someone talking about your product or service, someone not showing themselves an unboxing, and somebody talking as a testimonial, maybe the UGC and the testimonial showing someone's face outperform your unboxing. Now you're getting a little bit closer to knowing what's really performing for your brand.

And you can continue doing this until you have the most highly performant version of that ad.

Once that happens, you're going to say, great, we have a star performer, we're going to keep this one running, and you're going to now have a predictable way to generate growth for your brand. But we're not done there.

What we're going to do after that is start the testing strategy completely over, keep that one in the account, then test a bunch of new highly differentiated ads. Totally different now, taking these learnings to see if you can create something that outperforms what's already your star performer.

And at the same time that you're testing all this for your creative, the images and videos that go along with your ads, you're going to do this for your copy and for your audiences as well.

So you're going to be testing so many different things at one time, and this really helps you supercharge that testing strategy, quickly learn what's working for your brand.

And then once you have that, you're able to then double down and try to get even better and better and better performance out of what you're doing in your marketing. And that really is just using ads for an example.

But the same strategy applies to any marketing channel that you're trying to improve performance, especially when you're undertaking a revenue recovery effort.

So again, find three to five highly differentiated ways to improve that struggling KPI that's your testing channels, and then test as many of those as you can in a highly differentiated way. Let's look at some of the pitfalls to avoid when you're working on revenue recovery.

There's three main things to keep in mind to ensure that you're setting yourself up for success. The first one is giving yourself enough Runway to work.

And what I mean here is essentially just understanding how many people need to interact with your new marketing in order for you to tell what is performing well and what is not performing well.

For example, if you are a very small brand and you are trying to improve your organic traffic and you're only getting getting 10 website visits per day, you're going to need to test for a lot longer, and your Runway is going to need to be a lot longer to improve that channel than a brand that's getting a hundred thousand visits or more per day. It's just the amount of people that are coming through for your brand is much smaller in this example.

And so each marketing channel has different requirements, but there's tools that can help you determine how many people actually need to come through to decide if something's working or not. Something that I really like to use is the SurveyMonkey statistical significance calculator, which I'll link in the show notes for you.

It's a free resource where you can essentially just put in your traffic and the difference in the KPI that you're trying to approve, and then you can choose your level of statistical significance. If you're a bit of a smaller brand, you might be okay with a smaller confidence interval.

And if you're a larger brand, maybe you want to have higher confidence that what you're doing is a significant result. But by using a calculator like the one linked in the show notes, you will be able to easily tell if your KPI is improving or not.

The second thing that will set you up for success is giving your revenue recovery an honest effort. This might seem like kind of a silly point of advice, but I've seen a lot of brands, when something is underperforming, they cut budget in that area.

And if this is an area that's been performing really well for you previously and now it's not, I would not advise cutting budget instead.

If you're really trying to make this work, and you're trying to recover the lost revenue and get back into growth mode, you need to be able to have the appropriate resources, be it time, money or team effort, and the appropriate Runway for your revenue recovery efforts to actually have a meaningful impact for your brand.

So in addition to giving yourself enough time to make sure things are working, make sure you're setting aside enough resources for your revenue recovery efforts to work as well.

And the third tip that I have is to be aggressive not only with your testing strategy during your revenue recovery period, but with your drive to continually outperform your marketing performance to date. So even if you are finding something that is working better than your degradated performance, don't just call it there.

Because in six to 12 months, you'll find yourself in the exact same place and you'll be needing to redo this whole revenue recovery thing over and over and over again, which is really inefficient. So instead, try to find something that is performing really well for your brand and then continue trying to outperform that.

By having this type of mindset where you're continually trying to outdo yourself, you're actually setting yourself up to be extremely competitive in your marketplace.

But chances are, if you're doing that, you are going to stay ahead of any algorithm updates or changes that caused this revenue recovery effort, the need for that in the first place. So give yourself enough Runway, give it an honest effort her, and be aggressive not only during revenue recovery, but after.

When you follow this strategy, you'll be out of revenue recovery and back in growth mode as soon as possible. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Growth Pod. I look forward to seeing you in the next one.