Maximize Your Marketing ROI

The age of data-driven digital marketing is overrun with analytics. They are great for measuring leads and likes on your website or optimizing the click-thru and conversion rates in your campaigns. However, successful business leaders have learned to measure the value of marketing in different terms. It must be business-driven to maximize the marketing ROI and continuously improve its return on investment.

When Marketing is Simply Strategic

For most small to medium-sized companies, marketing is a Rubik’s Cube of options without a cohesive strategy for building a brand and growing a business. Your investment in website design, digital content creation, lead generation campaigns, and social media must be squarly focused on business outcomes, not marketing outcomes. Solving the marketing puzzle requires a fully aligned marketing strategy among stakeholders and a game plan that is fully integrated with sales. Marketing shouldn’t be confusing. It should be strategically focused and fully accountable for shared business goals.

Is your marketing driven by these business goals?

Creating qualified new business opportunities for sales
Maximizing the value and profitability of deals won by sales
Driving new customer acquisition in target market segments
Creating an authoritative brand identity to attract new buyers
Returning 20 times your investment in incremental top-line revenue

When marketing plans start with business goals, investments are easy to prioritize. And, the results can be measured with metrics that track performance and enable continuous improvement.

The Value of Strategic Marketing

Are you getting full value from your marketing investment and a maximized marketing ROI? If so, congratulations! You have succeeded where many young companies fail to be strategic. They often succumb to the temptations of tactical, trial and error marketing. If that sounds like your situation, don’t worry. With coaching from an experienced marketing executive, solving the marketing puzzle can be simplified and put on a more strategic track. Below are some best practices to evaluate whether your marketing has become overly complicated and tactical, or operates as a strategic asset for growing your business.

Strategies Aligned with Targets

Marketing goals should be grounded in the business plan. If that calls for 20% year-over-year growth, marketing must lay the groundwork for that growth. It requires a strategically focused campaign plan for building brand awareness and buyer demand for solutions that drive revenue and deliver value to customers in your target markets.

Initiatives Tied to Sales Targets

Sales operates by the numbers. Working a sales pipeline with opportunities generated by marketing and moving through stages to meet sales targets for order volume and value. Together, marketing and sales should continuously monitor their progress against shared targets for sales qualified leads that translate to deals won.

Messaging Tuned for Target Markets

Marketing must develop messaging that motivates buyer behavior. That means researching target markets to identify pain points and business challenges for decision-makers and influencers. The messaging developed for each buyer persona must be tailored and continuously refined to resonate with buyers in each target market.

Feeding the Sales Funnel

Your messaging framework should establish a foundation for campaigns that drive awareness, interest and consideration for products and services. Content developed by marketing should focus on top buyer concerns and guide them towards a purchase decision. The primary goal for campaigns must be the creation of qualified sales opportunities that increase pipeline value.

Driving Continuous Improvement

Business goals and sales targets provide direction for market research, messaging strategy, and campaign execution. All campaigns must be measurable. Performance metrics should be reviewed every 30 days to gauge the impact of campaigns and provide data to manage continuous improvement. Performance metrics should feed a dashboard for regular team review.

Maximizing the Marketing ROI

To be an investment rather than an expense, marketing campaigns must deliver a return in the range of 20 times the investment. This translates to a marketing percentage of sales in the range of 5%. Over time, this ratio should be improved to minimize spending and maximize revenue impact. This approach leads to predictable revenue performance a maximized marketing ROI.

Is Your Marketing ROI Maximized?

Marketing message must effectively resonate with target buyers
Your website must articulate your messaging to generate qualified leads
Digital assets must attract, educate and motivate buyers to take action
Customer acquisition campaigns must drive incremental revenue for the business
Marketing performance metrics should be used to drive continuous improvement

Take the 5 minute self assessment to see if your marketing is achieving these 5 Critical Success Factors. Use it to identify gaps and areas for improvement. With the right strategy, creativity and execution, marketing can produce results in the form of business inquiries, actionable opportunities, sales cycle acceleration, increased order value, reduced acquisition cost, and higher profitability.

Take the 5 Minute Self-Assessment

It only takes a few minutes to identify your marketing gaps and the steps you can take to fix them. This interactive self-assessment will take you through a 15-point checklist covering 5 critical marketing success factors.

Are you following best practices?
Where do you have gaps?
What is your marketing ROI?
See how you score . . .

Then get a free follow-up session to interpret the results. Take the Assessment

Maximized ROI