Growth is key for all business longevity and an essential part of any marketing strategy is identifying how to improve your marketing ROI (return on investment) on your B2B lead generation. It doesn’t always have to mean huge changes to make a difference. Often small changes such as website loading times can have a big impact on success rates.
We’ve identified five best practices derived from the approach we take, explaining how marketing can utilise data to identify the areas for improvement.
1: Set measurable targets for your marketing
Align your marketing goals with the commercial KPIs for the business. Social likes are a great vanity metric, but how does that translate into the bottom line?
Having this conversation potentially with the sales team and ideally MD, will ensure marketing and sales are aligned to the same goals.
Ensure your targets are measurable, and keep an eye on progress. Even if performance is below par, you can do something to address it. Remember some of your marketing should be around measured bets, testing and should it underperform, moving on quickly is a key skill in managing your marketing plan.
2: Conduct an audit of activities
You need to understand where you are right now.
An audit helps you identify both strengths and weaknesses in your marketing campaigns. It should show any areas that worked better than others, and if you have the data aligned with sales, it will reveal where you’re getting the best return on your investment.
• Are you utilising IP look-up tools to analyse website visitors?
• A speed test to identity load times?
• What is your lead to conversion numbers?
• Email open rates and clicks? What was the control subset in comparison?
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator In-mail opens?
All of this will give you a good idea of where to go next, letting you set budgets, key targets and metrics to ensure your strategy is moving forward.
3: Set a plan
In B2B data is critical. Ask yourself some simple questions:
• Who is our ideal prospect business?
• Where are they?
• Who do we want to engage with in the organisation?
• How are we going to engage with them? What channels would be best?
• What are we going to say to them?
• How often?
• What budget can we assign as a cost per acquisition?
Once this information is clarified, set it against a minimum 6-month marketing plan with channels, frequency and measurable data clarified in detail. And remember the biggest thing… just do it! Most companies get stuck not making a decision and delaying activity which can be detrimental for long term growth.
4: Building trust takes time
In today’s era of “fake news”, trust has never been such a highly valued commodity. But in the world of B2B marketing how can you build trust when you ultimately want to encourage consumers to buy your products and services?
The answer is it isn’t straight forward, demonstrating:
• The value your business provides,
• Setting a clear value proposition,
• Case studies
• Culture
• Video
All delivered through high-quality content, with quality – rather than quantity – being the operative word.
Content creation helps to show who you are as a company, positions you as a leader in your sector, and helps bring together other elements of your overall digital marketing strategy.
The overwhelming majority of marketers (89% of B2B) include content marketing in their digital strategy.
5: Regularly review your results
You can’t assess or improve your campaign if you don’t analyse the data and results.
To be a successful marketer, you need to plan, launch, review and test. And you need to follow the mantra that you can always improve campaign performance.
Marketers have more data to hand than ever before, and we need to utilise it. Not only to ensure we are targeting consumers with engaging content (which will ultimately lead to campaign success), but also to keep track on how our ever-more complicated campaign plans are performing.
Collect every data point your campaigns generate: you don’t know what’s important until you start to analyse your data. Don’t rely on ‘best guess’ only to find you don’t have the data to back it up.
Test, adapt, and correct against a marketing plan. What works in one campaign might not work in the next. Maintaining a competitive advantage takes time and expertise: if you lack either then look for help.
If you’re struggling with your marketing strategy, speak to Fireworx. We can help improve your understanding of customers, create quality content and measure performance — things you’ll need to master for the future.