What to cut and what to keep in your marketing strategy

Recently, we shared 4 Tips for Auditing a B2B Marketing Strategy to provide guidance for marketers looking to assess the strategic direction of their marketing plan.

In this article, we dig a little deeper into the question of what to cut and what to keep in a marketing strategy as part of the evaluation.

When determining what to keep or remove from your B2B marketing strategy, it’s important to take a holistic view. It’s not as simple as “it works” or “it doesn’t”. What can be considered “working” or “not working” can vary widely depending on the objectives / goals or even the incentives of the service.

Short and long term goals

Instead, it is important to reframe the question as which channels / activities produce the desired results? For this to be effective, it is crucial to have clearly defined objectives or goals. These should include short and long term goals.

For example, a shorter term goal might be to increase organic traffic by 24% from last year and convert 3-5 website leads per month. A longer term goal may be to increase annual website traffic by 45% year over year, increase leads to 30 leads per quarter, and increase market share in a market. particular of 10% in 2 years.

Give it enough time

A strong B2B marketing strategy includes the right mix of tactics that produce results quickly and over the long term. It is essential to allow a particular tactic or approach the appropriate time to be implemented, monitored, monitored and evaluated. It depends on factors like budget, number of B2B website visitors each month, tracking capabilities, etc.

For example, we often recommend strategies that include a mix of search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click (PPC) ads. PPC ads are meant to drive traffic and leads as soon as possible while we work on building a site’s SEO to drive targeted search queries to the website. Stopping a PPC campaign after 2 weeks of data would be a bad choice, just as stopping SEO after a month would be counterproductive.

Don’t think of results in a vacuum

Rarely does a single metric tell the whole story. For example, when it comes to driving traffic and leads to your B2B website, you need to look at various metrics in context to determine if a particular channel is producing results.

As an example, we’ll look at paid display ad traffic. Often times, display ads generate a significant amount of traffic, often 4,000 to 5,000 website sessions per month. However, when we take a look at the quality of traffic generated to a B2B website by display ads, it becomes evident that these website visits have a very high bounce rate, low average time on site, and produced zero. completed form or download guide. . Based on this information, display ads are not producing positive results and should be removed from the marketing strategy.

Show me the money … No, really, show me the money

Track your leads and the actual and potential sales income that goes with them. This is one of the most telling metrics that we believe should be taken for B2B marketing strategies. Why? Because it’s easy for salespeople to say anecdotally, “Leads are good” or “Leads weren’t good,” but if you show them every lead and ask them to provide sales data / of proposal amounts for each lead, you can calculate opportunities for your marketing efforts. Top performing salespeople closely follow all of this data and willingly share it with marketers in an effort to get more of these great deals.

Tracking leads and opportunities should also include the source of the lead, even if this is just the last touch attribution. This gives marketers the data they need to determine if certain channels are starting the conversation but getting closer to other channels. Plus, they can decide which channels generate the best leads.

For example, we find that organic search leads and PPC leads tend to be the best leads. Why? Because often both types of website visitors are actively looking for the product or service for the business.

Listen to the comments

While we’ve said that anecdotal evidence isn’t always the best feedback, when it comes to a customer or prospect giving you feedback, you definitely need to listen. These might not be comments you can extrapolate to an entire audience, but they do provide some insightful gems.

Consider things like:

• Do clients say they were subscribed to the newsletter for a year before having a project / need? (hint – your newsletter works as a development tool!)
• Did they mention a guide or an ebook that you shared with a colleague?
• Did they refer to a specific case study or blog post as the determining factor in getting in touch (even though that wasn’t the attribution source)?
• Did they list the search terms they used to find your business?

These are just a few questions that can be helpful in determining what to keep and what to discontinue in your marketing efforts.