By Every investment delivers measurements that reveal the amount of return on a particular one, some positive (15:1) and some negative (1:10). Then, there are some that are so slim (2:1, 4:1) the slightest misstep could tip the scales into negative territory. If your B2B ROI is lingering in that latter range with no longer-term plan to get beyond it, your marketing department can be in trouble.
To achieve long-term success and increase profitability, you must achieve a positive marketing ROI. If you don't, you may not be working efficiently. You're not achieving what you could be with the same manufacturing budget. You'll struggle to meet your monthly KPIs. And you'll be walking into C-suite with poor quarterlies more often than you would like.
How Will Measuring It Help You Succeed?
Measuring ROI gets you out of the transactional, short-term way of thinking of cost per click. It forces you to look at your trends over the long term. And it helps you make the case in C-suite for initiatives, campaigns, and technology efforts. As you streamline, optimize, learn to attract the right customers, and build trust, customer acquisition costs decrease. Revenues should go up.
This isn't just speculation. Linkedin researchers analyzed decades of B2B companies. They found that the companies who measured long-term ROI metrics (branding metrics) regularly impacted the bottom line 4X more than those who didn't. And it gets even better. They were also 50% more likely to be meeting short-term KPIs.
In other words, measuring manufacturing ROI gives you short-term success with which to waltz into C-suite. And it helps you increase it. It enhances your company's health and growth potential — not to mention that C-suite career boost you're shooting for.
How Inbound Marketing Helps
Inbound marketing is a long-term-focused and B2B buyer-focused strategy that delivers high-quality leads, helping you meet short-term KPIs while growing into the future. You accomplish this through several inbound strategies.
1. Magnetize Your B2B Manufacturing Company
Inbound marketing turns your B2B manufacturing brand into a magnet online. But just like a magnet, you don't attract everything or everyone. You attract your most ideal customers. When you magnetize your brand, you create an online presence that builds trust, authority, engagement, and promoter activity among these ideal customers.
2. Create Buyer Personas
Use real customer data to create a fictionalized and personified composite of your ideal customers. Work to understand this persona's motivations, challenges, professional goals, and how they make decisions. Then speak directly with them--not at them-- through useful online content. 70% of B2B decision-makers prefer to learn about your brand through content vs. an ad.
3. Map Out the Buyer's Journey
How do strangers become your new B2B manufacturing company clients? They go through a Buyer's Journey, which is simply a more customer-centric approach to the sales funnel:
- Awareness – A manufacturing leader becomes aware that they have a problem. They want to learn more about what's causing it and whether anyone has found a solution?
- Consideration – The B2B manufacturing buyer begins exploring solutions and the companies that offer those B2B solutions. They're looking at benefits, pros/cons, customer reviews, social presence, and more to develop an understanding of who you are and the value of what you offer.
- Decision-making – They begin to narrow down their options and are ready to buy.
With inbound marketing, you'll create content around each stage to guide the contact through the journey. Mostly because, if you're not actively attracting people early and guiding them, your competitors will.
4. Deploy Marketing Automation
Marketing automation helps you achieve perfect timing to get the optimal result. And it lets you do it with less work and more precise results. Consistently deliver high-quality SQLs to sales when they're ready to buy.
Cut the sales cycle by engaging your contacts with email and social media content. Provide them with ample opportunities to reconnect with you, learn something new, and experience value from your brand.
5. Consistently Track KPIs and Measure Marketing ROI
Measure content, campaign, and channel performance through marketing automation and analytics. Continually optimize to improve how well you connect with customers, build trust, and guide them through the buyer's journey.
Inbound marketing cuts waste and focuses on delivering the right message at the right time to cut acquisition costs while increasing the number/rate of leads moving through the funnel. Year over year, this increases your B2B ROI, so you can confidently enter C-suite and show the value of your team's work.
If you want to learn how to improve your ROI tracking and reporting, then start with an assessment. Relequint’s B2B Balanced KPI Scorecard will help you align your overall business goals with your strategy to increase your manufacturing ROI. Click here to learn more.
