By B2B manufacturing companies are investing in marketing innovation left and right. Martech can certainly help you meet your KPIs. Few leaders now find themselves having to justify investment in digital transformation. But we have to be smart here.
Throwing money at a technology that promises to solve all your problems has never been the way to go. In order to get the most out of any investment, you have to know how to measure your manufacturing ROI, understand what a good one is, and be able to communicate with management about the many fully measurable and less tangible forms that ROI takes.
And nowhere is this more true than when you're trying to measure marketing ROI.
Importance of Knowing Your ROI
Marketing innovation is expensive. Whether we're discussing automation or marketing analytics. No doubt the right innovations pay for themselves – increasing B2B ROI. But finding out that specific marketing innovation isn't paying off is devastating.
If you're investing in technologies that don't drive growth while lowering customer acquisition costs and padding the bottom line, what's the point? You're spinning your wheels.
Here's the secret to ensuring that your investments do pay off. Know your ROI. Track it now before you invest in something new. Analyze that ROI after implementing technologies. Be absolutely sure marketing innovation is working for you. Be able to prove it to management.
As a bonus, knowing your ROI shows you where to put your money. You can see clear pathways to increasing that ROI, a little now and a lot over time. With that said, you have to look at the whole picture.
Getting the Full Picture of B2B Manufacturing ROI
Some ROI is crystal clear. You improved a widget's function without significantly increasing the manufacturing costs. Now you can sell it for more. You've increased your profitability now and likely over the lifecycle of that product. But if your manufacturing costs went up to produce that better widget, that return might not be there.
Divide total revenues by the improved product revenues, and you have your increase.
But MROI is rarely this straightforward. If we're looking at the marketing built around this new and improved widget, we need to measure our before, after and ongoing ROI, which takes many forms:
- Market share
- Awareness (social media following, search visibility, website traffic, etc.)
- Engagement (shares, reviews, mentions, and user-generated content increase social proof and conversion rates)
- Customer acquisition costs (CAC)
- Lifetime value
- Average order size
- Number of leads generated
- Lead-to-close ratio
- Revenue
- Profits
- Marketing-sales alignment (and the improved productivity and morale that comes with it)
When you see the above moving in the right direction (increase or decrease), that's directly increasing your ROI. Therefore, an adequate manufacturing ROI assessment must include these. It must measure your returns over an adequate amount of time.
As you know, it takes time to move the dial of some of these assessment areas. But once you start getting that ball rolling, you can maximize your marketing efforts to generate much higher marketing ROI. You have before and after numbers to communicate the value of a technology strategy. At the same time, you build trust in your ability to make ROI-driving decisions, so management is willing to invest more in marketing and sales.
How Inbound Marketing Maximizes Marketing ROI
Inbound marketing is an ROI-generating machine. It allows you to build a brand online that attracts your ideal customers. Inbound marketing generates brand awareness and active engagement through helpful, buyer's journey-aligned content. This promoter activity acts as social proof, building trust that you can turn into conversions through a clearly-defined personalized sales funnel.
Inbound marketing focuses on segmentation and automation to deliver the perfect message to the right person at just the right time. Combine this with lead scoring automation that hands that lead off to sales with precision and sales-enablement content, and you have a well-oiled machine for maximizing ROI.
We help B2B manufacturing companies maximize their ROI through methods like these. Align your marketing-sales teams. And get extremely efficient.
Are you struggling to measure your true marketing ROI or communicate it with management? Relequint’s B2B Balanced Scorecard will help you align your overall business goals with your strategy to increase your manufacturing ROI. Click here to learn more.
