No in-person events the rest of 2020? Now what? With no future current participation, we’re seeing a lot of restructuring and planning going on in B2B marketing organizations, where marketing teams are thinking about ways to allocate more of their budget to reinvestments in digital marketing.
But what’s the best way to re-plan our B2B marketing budgets?
These days it’s more important than ever to make good bets. The name of the game is efficiency in marketing spend, and here are some high-level tips to keep in mind:
- Validate your targets and refine your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) in a downturn.
- Understand what’s working and what’s not working. For this, you need to know about funnel metrics and campaign attribution.
- Pick a message, content types, and specific channels and then test the combination.
- Pick the combination winners and run a larger campaign.
While this is a good time to remember the marketing ABCs, one of the key tricks in creating efficiency is knowing what type of digital marketing is really working and from there, where to make your bets. To do this, you can turn to some Digital Source Tracker charts which will help you uncover and understand those answers.
Prior to COVID-19 and even now, B2B marketers split their demand generation between digital and non-digital marketing efforts. The chart below (Chart A) shows the split of sales influenced by digital vs. non-digital marketing programs.
Chart A:
Chart B shows the influence of digital and non-digital marketing programs with a heavy emphasis on the 1st marketing touch. Notice how further skewed the digital programs are for generating new interest.
Chart B:
In terms of campaigns, Chart C shows which campaigns, both Digital and Non-Digital, that are influencing the most sales.
Chart C:
Velocity metrics can also be really useful. Remember that velocity is measure in time in days. When it comes to velocity, smaller is better and Chart D shows a nice trend of much faster times from MQL to Closed/Won. Whatever the marketing team was doing in Q4 and Q1 2020 looks a lot better than what was going on the previous year — in Q1 2019. To learn more, you can view the program mix in Q1 2019 and compare it to Q1 2020.
Chart D:
There’s a lot to learn about digital marketing when we measure against revenue and sales results rather than just clicks and pageviews. With our current business environment, there’s never been a better time to start re-planning our B2B Marketing budgets and measure our marketing.
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