By How do you know whether a B2B marketing strategy is reaching its full potential? Are the KPIs and industry benchmarks you've set the ones that matter?
If you're feeling pressure to perform from other departments but feel you currently lack the resources to meet KPIs without ballooning spend, leverage these tips to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of your marketing budget.
Start With Strategy
If you fail to plan, plan to...overspend on everything. You spend money in one direction. Then, you may abandon that major initiative before it realizes its potential and go the other direction.
It happens to the best of us. But in doing so, you act reactively rather than proactively, which is detrimental to marketing ROI.
The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Your marketing plan helps you, your team, sales, customer service, and all stakeholders orient themselves in a direction that leads to B2B marketing success.
Begin with a customized marketing plan built around your unique market position, audience, challenges, and goals.
See Where Your Money Goes
Here's what a typical marketing budget might look like:
- 10% software / SaaS (marketing automation, CRM, marketing analytics, multi-touch attribution tools, etc.)
- 40-50% campaign planning and content creation
- 30% paid ads
- 10% investing in your people (team building, incentives, education, marketing-sales alignment, morale, etc.)
The above is just a starting point, as your unique needs may differ. But we'll use this breakdown to take a closer look at how marketers are getting the most out of their budget.
Make Your Money Work Harder
Around 10% of the typical marketing is going to software. To get the most out of this portion of your budget, that software should help you work smarter. How can software accomplish this?
Consider marketing automation to pass more qualified leads to sales.
It solves the "lack of time" and "lack of human resources" problem. Many tasks that once took hours, you can now automate. B2B marketing automation eliminates many monotonous, repetitive tasks that cause the epidemic of employee disengagement. This frees your staff up for tasks that humans exceed at and tend to like about their jobs:
- Managing the exceptions
- Thinking creatively and creating
- Problem-solving
- Interacting with customers
Furthermore, 23% of companies using marketing automation are using it to deliver content. They're aligning it with marketing analytics to achieve the perfect timing of the right message for better results. B2B technology like this ensures you get more out of every dollar in your marketing budget.
Build Your Brand with Inbound Marketing
What does every successful brand have in common? People come to them. Their target audience doesn't need to see an ad every time to seek them out when they're ready to buy. Inbound marketing turns your brand into an online magnet by making it visible when your target audience asks questions and seeks solutions your B2B company solves.
As you can see in our earlier marketing budget breakdown, marketing departments are spending significantly on content and the campaigns built around them. In fact, 91% of B2B businesses now use some form of content marketing. Of these, only 43% of B2B businesses have documented their content strategy. And strategy matters because 80% of customers like to learn about a company through custom content.
You must have a strategic and scalable process for generating content and evaluating its effectiveness, which goes back to the importance of that marketing plan.
To increase the efficiency of your budget, combine marketing automation, marketing analytics, and inbound marketing. But remember: you must have a clear and detailed plan for how you'll use them together to improve marketing effectiveness.
Leverage the Power of Ads
Analysts expect mobile ad spending to exceed $240 billion in 2022. Don't underestimate the importance of advertising in your B2B marketing plan. Inbound marketing alone will not deliver the highest ROI on your marketing budget.
You have to get your target audience’s attention first. Then, you can connect. But you could waste a lot of money on ads if you do the former, but not the latter. That's why smart marketing plans combine advertising with inbound marketing.
There's more. This is your opportunity to turn that one ad click that you paid for into many customers. Marketing automation and analytics help you engage and re-engage that original "ad clicker."
When potential customers see others interacting with your B2B technology brand, it provides social proof. This increases the ease of customer acquisition while lowering advertising costs. Marketing automation and marketing analytics help you engage and re-engage that original ad clicker.
Now, you're getting a lot more out of your B2B marketing budget. Download this case study and see how we helped this B2B technology company get 20X marketing ROI by applying these tips.
