Bonus Material: Download the Cloud Clicks What If Calculator and finally figure out how to grow your business.

Do you feel like your business is throwing money and time down the drain with ineffective marketing strategies? 

It’s a common problem that plagues many businesses. But what if you could pinpoint the exact levers driving your business growth and identify the marketing channels that would generate profits, not just expenses? 

Say goodbye to wasted resources and hello to a stronger, more profitable business with the Cloud Clicks Business Forecast Calculator.

Are you tired of blindly throwing money at marketing strategies without seeing any real results? 

It’s time to take off the blinders and start looking at the numbers that will truly make a difference in your business’s growth. 

Starting work with a marketing agency without getting a proper diagnosis first is like getting a prescription from a doctor without a full examination – it’s simply foolish. 

But that is how most marketing agencies work these days. 

How can you grow a business if you don’t know the numbers?

How can you set realistic KPIs?

How can you quantify the return on ad spend?

You can’t.

If you want to grow your businesses consistently by 10,20, or 30% per year without wasting your time or money, then this post and calculator are for you.

This strategy is meant for established businesses with at least $500K+ revenue per year wanting a consistent marketing strategy that actually grows their business.

What does the What If business calculator do?

If you’ve been in business for any length of time, I am sure you’ve seen some kind of version of this calculator.

The basic premise is that there are only a few levers that grow your business. 

The first strategy anyone comes up with when wanting to grow their business is: I need more leads.

But there is a total of 5 levers that may be better suited for you

1. More customers
2. Less customer churn
3. Higher average order value
4. Increase transaction frequency – Get customers to buy more often
5. Reduce expenses

The first thing we gotta do is get a snapshot of where your business is at. 

Sample business snapshot ☝️

How many customers do you have at the beginning of a 12 months period?

How many at the end of that period?

How many customers did you lose during that period, and how many did you win?

What were the costs of delivering your product or service?

And once you put all those numbers in, you should see your profit for the year. And hopefully, it matches up to what you’re actually pulling out of the business 😉

Now, most people get seduced by large numbers and aim for more sales. More revenue. But I’d rather have smaller top-line revenues and larger bottom-line profits.

Let’s say you double your top-line revenue but only marginally increase your bottom-line profits. You’ve increased your headaches exponentially while not gaining much.

No Bueno!

Now we can look at the second part of the business growth calculator

What would happen if you played with the levers?

E.g. what happens if you decrease your customer churn by 10% or increase your new customers by 15%?

What would happen if you increased your transaction frequency or your average sale?

And, of course, what would happen if you saved costs?

Now, in an ideal world, you want to improve all 5 levers, and you can. But it might make the most sense to pick one or two and then review this calculator every few months. 

Then depending on what areas you land on, we need to find a way to make those forecasts a reality. 

This brings us to the marketing forecast tool. 

Marketing forecast tool

Once we’ve identified the levers we want to improve, we need to find ways to do so.

Each lever has different strategies that will improve its performance.

More customers:

• Improve website conversion rate
• Paid traffic
• SEO
• Referral Outreach campaign

Reduce customer churn:

• Improve customer service
• Build community
• Build a customer retention program
• Loyalty program

Higher average order value:

• Increase your prices, duh 
• Add additional services
• Create an upsell, cross-sell process
• Increase perceived value

Increase transaction frequency – Get customers to buy more often

• Subscription model
• Reminder autoresponder
• Loyalty programs
• Stay in touch once a customer has made a purchase and create relevant offers.

Reduce expenses. Generally, reducing expenses is not the best strategy to grow a business. But there is always fat that can be trimmed.

Generally speaking, most businesses have three lead sources.

Referrals, inbound leads and cold traffic.

For this exercise, we’ll just focus on referrals and inbound leads, but you could just as easily run the numbers on cold leads if you wanted to.

Referrals are by far the best source of traffic, as they are pre-sold on your product or services. Hence they are easier to get on the phone and more likely to buy. 

There’s a good chance that your business relies mostly on referrals. And you might get a shock when you realise that leads from your website don’t convert as well as referrals. 

This is something that needs to be considered, as otherwise, you might be in for a rude awakening and then blame your marketing agency 😉 It happens all the time.

The calculator lets you put in your current metrics and your current close rates. If you’re not sure what they are, how do you know if your marketing is working? 

You’ll only know when it is too late. You want to keep a tab on your leading metrics. 

The problem: focusing on the wrong metrics 

Let’s break this down a bit. 

Let’s say, on average, you pick up 2 new clients a month. 27 new clients per year. Some months it is 3 or 4. Other months it’s only one or none at all. 

And let’s say that is the only metric you’re tracking. 

Month 1: 3 new clients
Month 2: 2 new clients
Month 3: 1 new client
Month 4: 2 new client
Month 5: 1 new client
Month 6: 2 new clients
Month 7: 0 new clients
Month 8: 1 new client
Month 9: 0 new client
Month 10: 0 new clients
Month 11: 2 new clients

Probably around month 7 or 8, you’d get nervous, but it might take you a few more months before you start investigating.

But, let’s say your website is getting 3000 visitors a month, generating 30 inbound leads each month.

3000 website visitors – 1% conversion rate = 30 leads

30 leads – 30% conversion rate = 9 phone calls

9 phone calls – 50% conversion rate = 4.5 proposals sent out

4.5 proposal – 50% conversion rate = 2.25 clients per month on average

Now, let’s say your website visitor drops off or your conversion rate drops within 1-2 months. You’d know. 

But only if you keep an eye on those metrics. 

Reality is, most business owners check their bank account more often than their website traffic or conversion rate. And rarely anyone tracks the number of sales calls made or proposals sent out. 

Sure, those things get tracked somewhere, but if you don’t know where to find them or you don’t look at them regularly. Like once a week, or at the very least once a month, you might as well not track them at all.

The second part of the calculator helps you create a baseline to track those numbers. 

The solution: getting more traffic?

Now, as I said earlier, the first instinct of anyone needing more sales is: I need more leads, which means I need more traffic, which means I need to run Google or Facebook Ads.

And for some that don’t like the idea of “wasting” money with Google Ads is to do SEO. Whatever that means. 

But the reality is that that is usually the wrong place to start, and you wouldn’t know unless you looked at our traffic return calculator.

So let’s say we have a business that generates about $940K in revenue per year. At the moment, they win 27 new clients per year and lose about 15. Their average order value is $700, and clients buy every month, e.g your typical retainer service business. And the business owner makes about $200K a year in profits. 

The website and lead metrics are the ones we discussed earlier.

What would happen if we invested $2500 a month into Google Ads?
With a $2 cost per click?

Well, for starters, part of your money would go to an agency like yours truly. We charge from $850 per month for Google Ads management, which would leave you $1650 in ad spend. 

Which would get you around 800 clicks and seven new clients per year. Not bad, hey?

Or is it?

Well, it costs you $30,000 a year to get those new clients, you have to service them, and you now also have to meet with the agency, and summa summarum, you make an extra $998 in profits. 

Not worth it if you asked me. 

What a waste of time and money. 

Unfortunately, that is what happens over and over, which is why marketing agencies have such a bad reputation. 

But is it their fault? Or is it something else? 

Let’s say that on top of the Google Ads spend, we also work on your website, messaging and landing pages. 

We invest $5000 upfront plus $750 a month, and in exchange, we double the conversion rate from 1% to 2%

What do you get? 

That’s right, and an extra $130K in profits after you’ve paid for the marketing cost. 

Do you want to know how this works and if it could work for your business?

Now, let’s imagine, for a moment, that you also invest a little bit of money on email marketing, which reduces your customer churn AND increases your lead-to-sales call ratio.

Now within a few months, you’ve made enough money to invest in SEO and increase your organic website traffic. And you still only need to spend one hour a month with your agency. 

Wouldn’t that be nice?

It is doable, but only if you take a holistic approach to your marketing and your whole business. 

If you want to see if this could be your business that reports numbers like this, download the calculator and then schedule a call with me to discuss the specifics of this. 

Success Stories

Since 2012 we’ve worked with hundreds of businesses. And refined our process to deliver outstanding results, such as the gems below. 

Look Cabinets: Added 2.5 Million 

I’m Dave from Look Cabinets. I would definitely recommend Cloud Clicks for the pure fact
we’ve picked up somewhere around two and a half million dollars worth of work that we didn’t have previously.
They don’t talk IT mumbo jumbo. They’re just easy to relate to, and talk to.
Google Advertising has been definitely the best thing for results for us.
Value for money

Dean Ind: Getting exceptionally good leads

I’m getting exceptionally good leads coming in. I’m totally happy with their services and I highly recommend using them.

Australian Direct: Sales, Sales, Sales

Cloud Clicks have done a fantastic job with our Google Ads and Facebook campaigns. I have worked with several agencies over the years, but since partnering with Cloud Clicks, the results have been amazing. Sales, Sales, Sales. 

In the past 12 months, Cloud Clicks added an additional $3 Mio in revenue to our bottom line.

Click here to download the What If Calculator

And start growing your business.

Over the past 10+ years, we’ve generated over $100 Million in revenue for our clients from our ad campaigns, and we’ve developed what we call the one-hour marketing method. 

This means that once we’ve got you set up, you only need to spend one hour a month with us, and we’ll build and run this business growth machine for you.

But we can’t help everyone. 

The first step is to run you through the Cloud Clicks Business Growth Calculator assessment. 

We want to make sure that we’re a good fit. 

Click here and book a What If Session. 

It’s a non-refundable payment of $97, and we’ll spend at least 45 minutes with you going through the calculator. 

After the session, you either have the tools you need to implement this on your own or decide to work with us. In that case, we’ll put together a strategy for you that will take the hassle out of marketing for you and take your business to new heights.