What Is The 80/20 Rule In Marketing?

The 80/20 rule is one of the most powerful principles that exist. But does the 80/20 rule exist in marketing too?

Of course, it does. And you’ll be astonished when you’ll discover the power.

You can literally cut your costs in a half, and explode your results by 250%. Isn’t that awesome?

Or it can cut your costs by 1/4 and improve your sales by 500%! If you’re not excited now, something ain’t right.

But if you are, then let’s look at how does the 80/20 principle works in marketing…

What Is The 80/20 Rule?

The 80/20 Principle or Pareto’s law is one of the most widely used principles in business. and marketing.

It stands for only one thing – 20% of effort = 80% of results. 20% of causes = 80% of consequences.

In other words, you find out by measuring what is the minority that brings MAXIMUM results, and you double your effort on that.

The result? 20% becomes 40% and 80% results become 160% results. You almost doubled your results with less effort or costs.

Just imagine the power this has for your marketing. What would you change? If you have no idea, I am going to show you some amazing ways to use the 80 20 rule now…

How To Use The 80/20 Rule to MAX OUT Your Organic Marketing Strategy

If you are not familiar with the term “organic marketing”, it means marketing without any money costs – e.g. social media, blog, podcast, etc.

It has no barrier of entry, but of course, if you have no time to do that stuff by yourself, you are going to need a person that is going to help you with it.

And that costs money.

But let’s take a look at how to use the 80/20 principle in organic marketing to minimize your money (and time) costs and max out your results.

80/20 Rule In Social Media Marketing

The best way to use the 80/20 rule in social media marketing is to simply eliminate all of the platforms that you spend most of your effort on but don’t get you as many results.

For example, let’s say you run a blog and you are promoting it on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and TikTok.

Here are the numbers that you got:

Instagram = 60% of website traffic

Facebook = 5% of website traffic

Twitter = 10% of website traffic

Linkedin = 24% of website traffic

TikTok = 1% of website traffic

The most logical thing that you can do here is to check what platform you spend the least amount of time and money on but gets you the most results.

For example, in this case, you are managing Instagram for only 1 hour per day, and you spend $10,000 on ads and influencer marketing.

Then you are on LinkedIn where you spend 30 minutes a day and $500 on ads.

Lastly, you spend $20,000 on Twitter, TikTok, and Facebook, but get only 16% of the traffic combined.

What is the 20% that gets you the most results here? LinkedIn.

Why?

It has gotten you only 24% of traffic, but the costs and time spend are so low that less than 20% of the effort gets you 80% of the results.

Then of course you have Instagram, and because this is social media marketing and you just can’t rely on ONE…

…you would use the money you spend on Instagram to market on LinkedIn and you would keep marketing on the platform because you never know when they are going to ban or restrict you.

That is the only downside of social media marketing.

Well, and the result of the usage of the 80/20 rule in social media marketing?

Now you spend $10,500 on LinkedIn and you which means you 20X-ed the input of resources…

…and that would result in 8,000% higher returns. So if you got 5,000 blog visitors from LinkedIn before, now you will get 400,000 of them.

(Instead of 11,250 of them that you’d get if you would keep spending the money on Instagram – and I didn’t even count the costs of the other 3 platforms. That means the final number would be somewhere around 1,500,000 blog visitors.)

Do you realize the power of the 80/20 rule in marketing? It is CRAZY.

However, I have to add that these are probably not going to be the results you will get as the circumstances change all the time.

This is the ideal example.

But you can be freaking sure that the improvement is going to be massive.

80/20 Rule In SEO and Search Engine Marketing

Search engine optimization and search engine marketing look like totally similar things but they are not.

SEO is the organic way to get traffic from search engines by ranking in their results naturally, and SEM means paying for ads.

But what has the 80/20 rule to do in marketing using search engines.

Well, I assume that the example here is probably going to do the best job explaining it.

So, let’s say that you have decided to use Google Adwords and you advertise your page in the search results.

Keyword #1 costs you $3.50 per click.

Keyword #2 costs you $4.50 per click.

Keyword #3 costs you $0.95 per click.

That means you spend $350 per 100 clicks on keyword #1. You spend $450 per 100 clicks on keyword #2.

And you spend $90 per 100 clicks on keyword #3.

I believe that now you think you should eliminate the first two keywords and keep advertising only on the third one right?

Wrong. You also need to take a look at the CPA (cost per acquisition of a customer.)

From the 100 people who visit your page through keyword #1, 10 of them buy your $50 product.

From the 100 people who visit your page through keyword #2, 3 of them buy, and through keyword #1 only 1 buys.

What does that mean? Even a bull eye can see that the last two keywords need to be stopped advertising on because you lose money there.

That means the first keyword gets you the most results even though it is not the cheapest.

So, if you spend all of the money that you would otherwise spend on the other keywords you can double, triple, or quadruple your results just by switching your focus on a keyword that works.

It is as simple as that. (I know we do a lot of math here, but it is essential to understand it.)

And there are millions of other ways to use the 80/20 rule in your organic marketing. You just have to figure out how to use it for your current situation.

The Most Essential Part Of This Strategy

Now you understand how powerful it is to use the 80/20 rule in your marketing, but you also need to understand that 80% of businesses can’t use it…even if they would want to.

And that is because they don’t have the data they need to do that.

You have seen that I talked about results from keywords, results from social media platforms, and so on.

But all of that requires DATA so that you have something to act upon.

You can’t just terminate two keywords you spend money on if you don’t know the one that performs.

You can’s just get rid of 3 social media platforms if you don’t know the ones that bring you the most results and those that don’t.

It would result in a disaster.

So there is one requirement to use the 80/20 rule and you have to meet it to use it. COLLECT every piece of information you can.

Otherwise, things won’t get better but worse as you’ll be only guessing.