Compiling your marketing data can be like putting a puzzle together. All the pieces are in front of you—scattered on the floor. You keep a reference beside you and look back at it every few minutes to remind you what the big picture looks like.
Like any other person, you start in one area and find that corner piece important to anchor your direction. Now that you’ve focused on it, it has taken too much of your time because you’re trying to imagine the entirety of that specific space.
Hours later, you realize that you should’ve strategized and gathered all the similar colors first or pieced together all the edges first.
Today, as a business expert, working on your B2B marketing strategies requires steady structures and creativity shared inside and outside of your office. Look back and identify if there are any challenges that you can improve on your end to better everyone’s experience—both your teams and the audience.
Marketing Vulnerabilities and How to Win Them
Marketing has a lot of obstacles. It could be the budget, not reaching your clients, or your shareholders being too hard to please. Whatever the case may be, all marketers only have one goal in mind—to make the business successful. Let’s take a look at common marketing hurdles and how you can champion them!
1. You think you should measure quickly.
Don’t limit your metrics to ROIs. Instead, gather data from multiple active sources.
ROIs help you determine your past performances. Seeing the results sooner can make you anxious—or even paranoid. There is a budget involved and the market can shift without warning. This goes without saying that looking at the bigger picture is better than focusing exclusively on any part of your business.
The same goes for 77 percent of digital marketers who said they try to prove their ROIs within a month—even though B2B sales usually run on an average cycle of over 6 months.1
42 percent of digital marketers with a lead gen objective mix up their metrics. They end up using cost-per-click as their ROI metric and leaving out other significant factors in determining the success of their campaign.2
View it differently by understanding your impact on the resulting numbers. Be confident in covering the results of your cycle’s full length and avoid drawing conclusions according to your marketing activity’s short-term performance metrics.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
This helps you decide how much money to invest in your upcoming and current customers. CLV identifies the average value of a purchase, the number of times the customer will buy the same item or service each year, and the average length in years of the customer relationship.3
Marketer Productivity
This measures how efficient your campaign is. It revolves around these metrics: input (content and traffic), quality (conversion rate, engagement), cost (includes hiring, customer acquisition, and tools cost), and output (revenue, leads).4
This helps you identify the exact details of what you can improve in your campaign. No guesswork, just specific results. However, unpredictable changes such as customer buying patterns and new legal regulations may affect productivity tracking. What remains critical is the time or season and business model you have.
Total Revenue
Your total revenue is all the income you created from your total sales.5 It helps you identify if an additional product is necessary or if you should discontinue. This opens up possibilities for new products and services that could better improve your market growth.
Cost Savings
Cost savings are the amount you save as you reduce the cost to run your business or, in this case, your marketing activities.6 This is a financial strategy that you can measure on a yearly or occasional basis.
An example of this is lessening the amount spent on a social media campaign or completely stopping it when it is ineffective.
Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction measures whether your offers meet your customer’s expectations or not.
Based on the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report of 2022, 61 percent of customers quickly choose to switch to a competitor after just one bad experience.7
2. You bend to internal pressure.
Present your idea clearly and trust the process.
Part of creating marketing campaigns is the pressure of having your budget approved. 58 percent of marketers say they need their ROI to justify their campaign spending and get approval for future budgets. 90 percent also say that they are pressured to show results and decide on optimizations within the short span of a month.
You aren’t translating the true value of your efforts very well if you lack confidence in it. 40 percent of marketers do not vigorously share their ROI metrics with stakeholders due to their lack of assurance in the exactness of their measurements.
When getting your budget approval, share your results with confidence by itemizing the highlights and the improvements you wish to implement to reach your goal on your next activity. Be specific on why you think things worked and how they will work better.
Believing that what you’re doing is right is all the reason you need to push through a certain campaign. Share your insights with your shareholders and inspire them that greatness takes time.
3. Your brand reach is very limited.
Involve content creators and influencers.
Prioritize collaborating with influencers for it is expected that the creator and influencer economy will grow up to $47.2 billion over the next 10 years.8 Influencer Marketing delivers to businesses a return on investment that is 11 times higher than what traditional digital marketing can provide you.9
Non-celebrity creators are more likely to inspire purchases for your brand than celebrities. 30 percent of consumers say they are more likely to buy from them or from brands they advertise. This is due to people wanting to see what they can become or attain for themselves. Relatable people make your services look more authentic to your audience.
Be sure to choose not only those who are popular. Prioritize the individuals who share your values. If your team values the staffing of minority groups, you can pick an advocate for women’s rights or someone who speaks for neurodivergent individuals.
Discuss with them how they think you can help the people they are representing. Their input is as important as yours for they will be the ones to put your story out there to their audience.
4. Your community doesn’t engage with you.
Invest in your brand advocate’s experience.
Brand advocates are your loyal customers who have been with you for a long time. They keep coming back to you and they are very vocal about what they love about you.10
Sometimes customers would even avail themselves of your services even though they don’t need them at the moment. They come to you and stay involved in your brand because it resonates with them.
You can cultivate their experience by always being welcoming and understanding. Respond to their concerns on time when they reach out to you. Show them that you care about the world around you by being transparent about your values.
These simple things not only satisfy them but also draw your community closer to you.
More on Strategies: Load for Lull and Make the Most of an Off-Peak Season
Grow Your Staffing Firm with Steady Care
Your efforts should reflect your results. Keep track of your successes with the right data in your hands. Remember that these are the proofs you can keep going back to in the future when sudden changes or uncertainties come your way.
Your victories in marketing are only as strong as your confidence in the data you possess. Believe in them and learn from them to keep growing your business in abundance.
Let’s Build Your Very Own Marketing Structure for Success!
Trust Allied Insight to keep your brand relevant through marketing strategies specifically designed for your business and its growing needs. We’ll take care of you through Securing Brand Uniformity, Personalized Thought-leadership Content, Sales and Recruitment Enablement Resources, and more.
References
1 LinkedIn. “4 Marketing Measurement Mistakes to Avoid.” https://business.linkedin.com/content/dam/me/business/en-us/marketing-solutions/resources/pdfs/4-Marketing-Measurement-Mistakes-v01.06.pdf . Accessed last March 8, 2023.
2 Tequia Burt. “This Week in Marketing: Grace Under Pressure”. https://www.linkedin.com/business/marketing/blog/trends-tips/this-week-in-marketing-grace-under-pressure . Published last February 6, 2023. Accessed last March 9, 2023.
3 Shopify Staff. “What Is Customer Lifetime Value? The Complete Guide To CLV”. https://www.shopify.com/blog/what-is-customer-lifetime-value#:~:text=Customer%20lifetime%20value%20is%20the,of%20an%20average%20business%20relationship. Published last September 13, 2022. Accessed last March 9, 2023.
4 Luke Henderson. “What is Marketing Productivity? Metrics, Best Practices”. https://niftypm.com/blog/what-is-marketing-productivity/# . Published last March 23, 2022. Accessed last March 9, 2023.
5 Paddle. “How to calculate (and improve) sales revenue: using the sales revenue formula”. https://www.paddle.com/resources/revenue-formula . Accessed last March 9, 2023.
6 “Cost Savings”. https://www.spendesk.com/en-eu/glossary/cost-savings/ Accessed last March 9, 2023.
7 Alaina Franklin. “What is customer satisfaction? Definition + importance”. https://www.zendesk.com/blog/3-steps-achieving-customer-satisfaction-loyalty/ . Updated last January 23, 2023. Accessed last March 9, 2023.
8 Michael Brito. “Top 3 priorities for your 2023 B2B marketing strategy”. https://martech.org/top-priorities-for-your-b2b-marketing-strategy/ . Published last January 26, 2023. Accessed last March 9, 2023.
9 Megan Krause. “How to use influencer marketing to meet your company’s goals”. https://martech.org/how-to-use-influencer-marketing-to-meet-your-companys-goals/ . Published last March 30, 2018. Accessed last March 9, 2023.
10 Matt Zilli. “5 key characteristics that enable companies to cultivate customer advocates”. https://martech.org/5-key-characteristics-that-enable-companies-to-cultivate-customer-advocates/ . Published last August 7, 2018. Accessed last March 10, 2023.
