As we all know, there is no one figure deemed to be the best marketing budget. It’s an amount relative to the organisation, its resources and its target objectives.
But ultimately, the true measure of a campaign’s success is not solely based on the size of the budget. After all, even with a big budget, if you don’t spend it on the right things, you are not going to get the results you expect.
So the more important concern is how you allocate your marketing budget. This blogs outlines the key investments you need to allocate your marketing budget for, in order to make sure you generate a positive return on investment.
1. Nurturing campaigns over stand-alone campaigns
While some stand-alone campaigns may be necessary in an organisation, they shouldn’t occur regularly. In most cases, some stand-alone campaigns can be expensive and are therefore done as one-off campaigns.
Nurturing campaigns on the other hand are more integrated and when used with digital and content marketing is relatively inexpensive. It is important to make sure that all your content pieces link to others so that buyers always have a path to follow to keep the engagement going. Allocate a portion of your budget to develop an end-to-end nurturing campaign that will move your buyers along their journey.
2. Buyer-centric reusable content (videos and whitepapers) rather than self-promotion collateral
No buyer is interested in your product if they don’t need it, so you should refrain from writing content about how great your company is or how wonderful your products or services are. Company or product-centric content are easier to write about since its your field of expertise, but it is not relevant to your buyers at the top of the funnel.
Ensure your content is valuable and relevant to your audience. Take into account the problem you solve for them and the need you fulfil for them to build your content pieces. This way, everything ties back to helping them solve their problem, and not the fact that you’re trying to meet this month’s sales target. Make sure you allocate a certain part of your budget to the learning and understanding the concept of buyer centricity, and perhaps acquiring the skilled people to do so.
3. Automation over manual labour
Even though you have the right people in place, it’s important to make sure you’re investing in the right tools. It is a waste of time for your marketers to be logging on social media every few hours to post an update.
Invest in the right automation tool that can help you with blogging and social updates to maximise time efficiencies. Some tools are also equipped with automated campaign functionalities that automate email sends to a contact when they have filled a form or downloaded a whitepaper, which enables your nurturing campaign. A marketing automation tool can also assist in tracking and measurement, which allows you to regularly review and improve your processes.
4. Consistent marketing over ad-hoc marketing
If we lived in an ideal world, you would have no competitors! But unfortunately, we don’t. So your audience is not only being exposed to the information your company publishes, they’re being fed a myriad of information from your competitors as well.
Therefore it is very important to keep your brand and the value your product / service can deliver top of mind. It’s better to invest in a marketer whose role it is to develop blog content every week and post social updates every day rather than doing it yourself and only posting updates whenever you remember to do so.
5. Planning rather than diving in
Some businesses believe B2B marketing is easy to handle. They list out a few tactics they want to do and they get a marketer to come in and do it all. But then they don’t see results, and they believe the marketer or the tactics have failed them. But more often than not, businesses dive in to say content marketing or social media marketing without a proper plan to back them up
Develop a comprehensive B2B marketing plan that is firstly based on your buyers needs and their behaviour. Then develop a comprehensive plan that entails all the tactics you need to execute. Build a content plan that outlines all your messaging to your buyers to make sure it ties back to their needs. Create a social media plan that lists the channels, and the schedules of your posts to ensure you maximise your reach. It is better to invest your budget in expert B2B marketing planners rather than going in blind.
As I mentioned before, the key is not to determine the right budget, but the right way to allocate that budget.
To understand about the investments involved in B2B marketing, refer to our article on the costs of content marketing. Or, take our free B2B marketing health check to see how your marketing is faring.
