All marketing brings negative ROI unless optimized

Marketing brings negative negative ROI unless optimized. This should come as no shock as generally it is the case that with anything that we do a process of optimization is required before it is operating at an optimal level. Marketing being one of the crucial aspects of a business in the B2B space, simply engaging in a marketing effort and expecting upsized results is naive. No offense is meant toward the reader with that statement, though facts should be stated plainly.

An earlier article talked about the necessary education involved in order to increase advertising results without increasing cost, and taking the step to become familiar with the terms, key performance indicators, and other metrics of a particular marketing effort being utilized. Optimization includes education, testing and analysis, and a continuous and constant adjustment based on results.

And, even with reaching an objective in an optimization goal, there are other optimizations that can be implemented to further increase yield in the marketing effort. Let’s look at a few of the different ways to optimize a B2B marketing campaign

Optimizing for B2B marketing strategy is a must.

Generally when implementing a marketing effort you’re probably thinking about optimizing the particular channel for instance optimizing your facebook social media marketing, email marketing, or pay per click marketing however the first thing to focus efforts on as far as optimization is really the holistic marketing effort, and that is the strategy.

Now let’s go into that a bit more.  A lot of the time when the person responsible for marketing begins their marketing effort they generally base their efforts on a single-channel, sometimes there isn’t even a strategy, and if there is a strategy usually it’s based on various speculations, guesses, and assumptions.

Now there is nothing wrong with that, because we have to start somewhere, however this is where optimization comes in because optimization helps to narrow down and select the one that works. It’s like an upside down triangle, a funnel with wide possibilities at the top, but that eventually narrows down to a point. Through optimization, testing and analysis, that is learning from the results and adjusting accordingly, we arrive at our most effective strategy or series of strategies.  

Marketing brings negative ROI however the optimization process refines efforts and leads down to the most effective strategy or strategies.

Personalization optimization in B2B Marketing

Personalization of the messaging involved in B2B marketing is an area where optimization really pays dividends. Because at the end of it our marketing efforts are targeted to people, and if we drill down on our defined target group we can craft messaging that resonates with individual. And this is easily done with the tools available today.

Utilizing LinkedIn and email marketing, we can automatically systemize the personalization process. When we send an email it can also include the individuals name, their role, and other pertinent information that we have collected. If we have applied some effort to our optimization, then we may have access to a segmented prospect list. Consequently, based on perhaps the leads that are most likely to convert, we can even go further in personalization by crafting individual marketing or series of marketing responses specifically for them.

Personalization can take many different paths including utilizing retargeting to engage with people after they have viewed a particular content, or engaging with a prospect based on their prior habits or behavior on our site and all of these are scalable.

Optimizing for B2B Marketing metrics

Understanding the important metrics that drives lead generation goes a long way in helping us adjust and optimize for outcomes on a technical level. For instance if you see that your click-through rate (CTR) is 10% with a 70% bounce rate, and a 5% conversion rate (CVR), this can lead you to perhaps working on decreasing your bounce rates and then assessing how that affects the conversions, i.e. people that actually contact you.

There are numerous metrics when it comes to assessing marketing performance, and you do not need to know every one of them, in fact you do not need to know that much, it only comes down to about few. Though from an understanding of those metrics you’ll find it easier to optimize marketing for better outcomes.

Optimizing mix, by combining different marketing channels

In the optimization of a marketing strategy, we are looking at the various channels by which we can engage and effectively reach our marketing objectives. And by combining different channels we yield outsized results. For instance developing informative content that engages an audience can then be combined with remarketing. The result of this is that those who engage the content are engaged again through another channel with messaging that relates to the next stage of the pipeline. It’s you moving the prospect along from one point to another.

Every marketing channel and tactic has its effective purpose, and it’s invariably the case that in designing a marketing strategy we are connecting one tactic to another in order to form a holistic system. Imaging a train with its different carts each carrying different loads.

For example, a content marketing strategy is designed to create opportunities for a business relationship to begin, it is not a sales platform. It’s simply meant to engage the audience, and within the content we can then implement email marketing, remarketing, and other strategies that lead our prospect from simply engaging our content to perhaps submitting their email, or another behavior that brings them closer to them becoming converting on a marketing objective