Building your marketing platform can be exhausting work. Growing your list of social media followers and email subscribers can take years, leading many to question the value of their investment.
While building a marketing platform will help you promote your product or service in the short term, there is a bigger reason to grow your marketing platform that should give you the motivation to keep building: It just might be the most valuable part of your business in the eyes of an acquirer.
The Hidden Value of Your Marketing Platform
Look at the story of Laura Roeder. In 2007 Roeder started curating a following of people interested in improving their social media skills. Through her efforts, she built an email list of over 70,000 people, from which she grew a thriving business selling online courses.
Roeder realized her list was a potential goldmine if she could come up with other products marketers might need. She launched MeetEdgar, a social media scheduling software, in 2014. To market MeetEdgar, she sent a series of emails to her audience and got almost 2,000 customers to pay around $600 per year for her new software product. As Roeder mentioned to John Warrillow in a recent episode of Built To Sell Radio, the success of her email campaign enabled MeetEdgar to hit $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in its first year of business.
Roeder’s successful launch also garnered the attention of SureSwift Capital, an acquirer of small software companies, which made a seven-figure offer to buy MeetEdgar.
Focusing Your Effort
Building your marketing platform can be a great way to increase your company’s value. Key metrics to focus on include the following:
- The overall size of your platform (email subscribers plus social followers)
- Open rates on emails
- Engagement/click rates on social posts
- Click-through rates on emails
- Purchase rates on offers
These data points, tracked over time, will give an acquirer a good sense of your platform’s value and will go a long way toward driving up the value of your business.
