How do you generate the maximum return on investment from your marketing budget?
The first thing to remember is to treat your marketing function with the same analytical scrutiny that you would apply to your balance sheet, the well-being and safety of your staff or the satisfaction of your customers. Too often brand marketing is undermined, marginalized or labeled as a luxury item that we can pick up or put down whenever we like. A misunderstanding that we are dealing with a vague and unscientific proposition brings about the misapprehension that marketing is a non-essential component of your business strategy. Moreover, that marketing offers only varied levels of success and is almost impossible to quantify. This is untrue.
Marketing should be a constant that, if handled correctly, becomes simple to manage, provides a consistent level of new business enquires and presents your company to the marketplace in an appropriate and engaging way. Your marketing strategy should enable you to test the effectiveness of your message/offer, check that the channels for delivering that message are reaching their target and measure your ratio for converting enquiries into sales. By implementing all of the above you will be able to test and measure your strategy and continuously refine and improve it.
Part 1. Define Your Offer
What is it that you offer to your customers that sets you apart from your competitors? It might be your unique product or service, but more likely, in today’s crowded marketplace, it’ll be more about the quality or price of your product, the amount of experience or expertise you have, or your location. Think about your business from your customers’ point of view – why do they like working with you?
Identifying what sets you apart from the competition also needs to take into account who your customers are – and therefore who your target audience is. We can further refine and filter at this stage by segmenting our customers and evaluating which segment/type of customer is the most attractive i.e. which generates the most profit or which is the least labour intensive. By making the connection between what you do, what your potential customers want and what type of customer you prefer, you have defined your offer.
Part 2. Locate your marketplace
The next step is to work out how best to reach your audience. Can you categorise your target audience? There are many ways of doing this, for example, geographically, industry sector, their position within a company, turnover etc. Once you have categorised your potential customers you can then start to determine what channels will best reach them.
So, for instance, is there a common publication or online resource that your typical customer is looking at, is there a database you can buy which gives you access to a pre-defined client base relevant to your product or service, or is there an industry-specific conference you could attend which would give you access to potential customers? Focusing on where you are likely to find your audience enables you to ascertain what channels are going to best reach them.
Part 3. Determine how you’re going to convert interest into sales
If we understand what our offer is, we know where our customer is located and we have determined which are the most targeted channels to deploy to reach them, we can now focus on conversion. The first thing to do here is calculate your current conversion ratio. This figure is the average number of enquires it takes to generate a sale. Knowing this figure at the start of the process is very useful as it sets a benchmark, which you can then use to measure future success.
Placing an advert in a publication, attending a conference or undertaking some pay-per-click advertising is only the start. If the message is correct and media is hitting the right target it will generate interest in your business, but then what? How are you going to handle that interest effectively in order to convert it into sales?
At this stage it is extremely important to measure your feedback accurately. This means you need to engage with the people making enquires. Ask them some quick and simple questions that extract the relevant data. For instance, an email marketing exercise that generates 10 replies, from people who do not become clients, does not constitute a zero response rate. It is proof that 10 people read your email and were motivated enough to call or email you. If you sent that email to 5000 people, it’s also proof that 4990 people did not feel motivated enough to make contact. You need to find out why.
Measuring the response to your marketing is critical to how you refine your ongoing approach. For example, if it is stated that they expected your price to be lower than you quoted – they are telling you that you need to add more value to your marketing message. Measure everything and then, when you test the next time, use that feedback to improve your results.
B2B Marcomms can help you get the best ROI from your marketing budget. We believe that every business and organisation is unique; with its own individual challenges, its distinct goals and aspirations, and its own cherished philosophy and values. We offer our clients insight, intelligence and an effective strategy that addresses their specific needs. That’s what makes us different. We listen, we understand, we plan and we execute.
