B2B buying cycles are like complex feedback loops and with each passing day they keep on getting more complex. In general, the longer duration a customer spends in his/her buying cycle, the tougher it becomes for marketers to convert them or do justice to their marketing budgets.
Many businesses make these common mistakes and it is quite easy to fall prey to these mistakes. To optimally utilize their marketing budgets, marketers need to learn how to optimally utilize their marketing budgets.
Here's a look at the things marketers can do correctly to make the optimal utilization of their marketing budgets:
1. Include Both C-suite and non-C-suiters in Your Marketing Strategy
As marketers, you need to market to both C-suite or Executive-Level managers as well as non-C-suite decision-makers in your marketing strategy. This gives you targeted reach and maximizes your opportunities.
According to a study by Google, 64% of C-suite or executive level holders don't have a final say in making the buying decisions while 24% of the marketers who play a role in the buying decisions are the non-C-suite employees.
While targeting specific businesses, marketers need to tailor their messages to the head of each factory location and not just the CEO. The marketers marketing only to the C-suiters need to re-evaluate their marketing strategies.
When you include the non-C-suite decision-makers in your marketing strategy it helps you in broadening your targeted reach and maximizes your conversion opportunities.
2) Prioritize the Millennials
According to Google, millennials make up 46% of all B2B buyers and those in between the age group of 18-34 comprise almost half of the B2B researchers.
As more and more millennials are influencing buying decisions, ignoring them can be a bad choice for marketers.
Marketers need to allocate a portion of their funds to research the content and media channels that several age groups might be using.
3) Focus on Generating New Leads
Acquiring new leads is critical to actively grow your customer base to sustain your business. Sometimes the marketing efforts of the companies are entirely focused on growing the customer base and generating new leads. However, alongside generating the new leads, nurturing the new leads is also important for the businesses.
Remember that generating the new leads is only half the battle and the leads have to be nurtured if one wishes to risk losing them.
In the B2B world where the sales cycle is longer, the marketers need to align their lead generation endeavors with other major objectives such as brand awareness, reputation management, lead nurturing, and client retention.
4) Develop An Agile and Resilient Marketing Plan
Change is the only constant in the marketing world. Trends emerge and fade away. In such a situation, your marketing budgets might be shaken up if you don't develop an agile and resilient marketing strategy.
The recent COVID-19 crisis has disrupted the status quo of millions of businesses across the globe. This has also compelled businesses across the globe to rethink their agile and resilient marketing strategy to adapt to the constantly changing marketing scenarios.
5) Split Test Your Marketing Strategy
Split Testing or A/B testing is an essential part of every marketing strategy for marketers to optimize their marketing games.
If one doesn't test the variables in their campaigns it becomes virtually impossible to determine what works and what doesn't for their marketing games. As such it also becomes difficult for marketers to optimize their marketing strategy.
To increase the efficacy of marketing campaigns, A/B testing plays an essential role.
6) Be Mindful of Your Social Media Strategy
Getting the social media strategy right is imperative to the success of every marketer. Social media isn't a channel that should be used just to advertise or brag about one's achievements.
Social media should rather be used as a channel to educate, entertain, inspire, and provide value to the customers.
To maximize the referral traffic and conversions through the social media channels social media should be used to project your vision and voice and not a channel that you use to brag about your achievements.
7) Measure & Optimize Your Marketing Endeavors
According to Bluecorona, 52% of marketers admit that their companies have negligible ability to measure and analyze the impact of their marketing endeavors.
Defining and measuring your key marketing KPIs is an essential pre-requisite to improving and optimizing your marketing strategy.
In order to measure the effectiveness of their marketing strategy, marketers need to determine the metrics applicable to their campaigns, including ROI, traffic, leads, engagement rate, time spent on page, and CTR among the others.
Wrapping Things Up
By opting for the right approach for building a marketing budget, B2B companies can clarify their business development goals, gain organizational direction for marketing and position themselves for exponential growth.
Annual budgeting and planning have always been a substantial undertaking for most marketers.
In the post-COVID road to the new normal, amidst a topsy-turvy environment, marketers need to take some time out to reflect on their marketing strategy, and review, refine and optimize it before getting into detailed budget planning mode.