Welcome to Episode #2 of the Fractal Startup marketing podcast.

In this episode, I discuss calculating the cost of your customers – thanks to writally.com for the question

We also cover the other common direct marketing variables and how to calculate them.

We then move onto more complicated offline and long sales cycle tracking  – thanks to BenchOn for the question

And finally, we look into the power of animation as a video medium – take a look at Big Fish & Biteable.com

If you would like to have your questions answered on the podcast, please add your question in the comments section here http://fractal.com/au/questions

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Below is a transcription of the podcast:

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[music] Hi, and welcome to the Fractal Marketing Podcast. My name is  Gerard Doyle. And on this show, I take marketing questions from listeners to provide answers so that everybody who tunes in can learn a little bit more about marketing and hope they find some ideas for their business. [music] So in today’s episode, we’re going to look firstly at calculating the cost of acquisition of your customers and other marketing variables like ROI and ROAS and discuss the differences between those two. After that, we’re going to spend a bit of time talking about more complicated tracking models where it might require an offline sale or a long sale cycle and how to relate that marketing money that you’re spending very early on back to that end sale and the customer value. And finally, we’re going to spend some time looking at animation and the power of animation in video marketing and how we can deliver clarity of message through an uncluttered interface. So our first question this week comes from Cass from [inaudible]. And her question is, “How do you calculate the cost per acquisition if your primary acquisition method is profitable?” Good question, Cass. And I think it speaks to one of the problems with marketing is that and like all industries, I guess, is we have a tendency to create a lot of our own words, a lot of our own acronyms, initialisations, and things that just make marketing generally confusing when it need not be. I think back to some of the rules that people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk employed in their companies. And they just started stopping people from coming up with new acronyms inside the company because it just made life really difficult. But we are where we are [laughter]. And to answer your question, look, it is still possible to have a cost of acquisition particularly even if you’re profitable because it’s only the cost of acquisition is only the denominator in the ROI calculation. So what I’m talking about there is if you’re looking at the ROI of your marketing,