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Has your marketing department discussed your budget for the new year yet? To keep your 2016 strategy on track, it’s essential to structure your budget smartly and align it to the right tactics.
Trends in marketing spend
Since 2011, digital marketing spend has ballooned, with the largest slices of the pie made up of search marketing and display advertising. The 2015 Forrester Research Digital Marketing Forecast, 2014 to 2019, determined that, “in 2016, the average firm will allocate 30% of their marketing budget to online” and this number could reach 35% by 2019.
But while digital marketing spend continues to grow, B2B marketers are also questioning their abilities to make an impact, at least given their current tactics. According to the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, the percentage of B2B marketers who think that their content marketing is effective has fallen to only 30%. And it’s no wonder, when 55% of B2B marketers can’t even say for sure what content marketing effectiveness would mean.
Given the abundant promise of digital marketing, coupled with these persistent questions about how to harness its power, your 2016 marketing budget must embrace digital tools and channels, while also leaving room for the flexibility to respond to your results in real-time.
So when you plan your organization’s 2016 marketing budget, here are a few things to keep in mind:
Collaboration with the sales department and business development team at your organization is critical.
After all, marketing goals are set in keeping with sales and business development goals. Align your budget with the needs of the organization as a whole. That means evaluating how much of your resources should be spent on remarketing to existing customers versus reaching new prospects, determining the size and stage of your ideal client and more.
Invest in market research
As you put money and resources toward creating great marketing content, don’t overlook the importance of conducting research into your audience’s needs. Consider: does your current budget fully equip your team to conduct ongoing research into your target audience, including their pain points and behaviors? What about up-to-date research into new marketing tools that might help you meet your benchmarks? When building your budget, it’s important to look to the future as well as the present.
Run the numbers
Think about how best to allocate responsibility for various marketing tasks within your existing team, and consider whether it makes sense to partner with an outside firm. While hiring a consulting firm will come with obvious costs, the firm may be able to offer the services of a range of experts, such as data analysts and designers, that your organization could not hire individually. An outside firm can also bring valuable connections and experience to the table. When making a decision, consider the demands on your team’s time, and look for a growth partner.
The digital marketing landscape is more complex than ever, and it’s constantly evolving. For more guidance on how to plan for the future of marketing, download our white paper, Return on acceleration: how B2B marketers should reapproach a world that won’t slow down.
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Many marketers will begin work on their 2016 plans this month. Are you one of them?
As you develop your 2016 marketing strategy, it’s critical to remember that we no longer live in a world of marketing “rules and tools.” Today’s successful marketers are instead guided by the new marketing value chain, which aims to approach marketing’s longtime goal of predictability by using data insights to drive marketing strategy.
In order to create and maintain an impactful marketing strategy in the new year, avoid these three mistakes:
Making decisions without data
Most marketers know the importance of using data to guide their marketing strategy, but that doesn’t mean they are actually use data insights fully or accurately.
As you craft a strategy for 2016, make sure that your marketing team has the data analysts you need to appropriately collect data and make sense of it. Then, set up a system to promote collaboration between creatives and data scientists on your team.
Attributing multi-touch conversions to only one source
In 2016, make it a priority to systemize the way you attribute conversions in a multi-touch marketing environment. And make sure your system gives weighted credit to every channel in which a lead interacted with your marketing messages in order to capture a well-rounded picture of the drivers that are causing contacts to convert into leads, and leads to convert into customers.
If you continue to attribute conversions based on an outdated system that cannot ascribe value to each of your prospect’s touch points, you are working from skewed data. If you’re using skewed data, you cannot appropriately determine the best way to allocate marketing spend to reach more of your audience and improve conversion rates.
Becoming too dependent on a single channel
If there’s one thing marketers should have learned from mobilegeddon, the decline in organic reach on Facebook and other marketing-landscape changes, it’s that digital marketing must be agile. In this industry, constant change is a given. Google is always trying to improve its algorithm, social networks are always looking for new ways to gain users and revenue, and new channels are constantly springing up and fighting to gain popularity.
So what must marketers do? Prepare a multi-channel strategy that positions your organization strongly on the platforms you own, such as your organization’s search engine optimized website, as well as on social channels and in media outlets. Work to build a reputation and reach that transcends channel, so that any changes in the channel that negatively impact your visibility do not sink your organization.
Want to know more about the new marketing value chain and how it can impact your organization’s success? Download our white paper.
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We talked last week about the lasting impacts of mobilegeddon, but the influence of mobile platforms in marketing isn’t just limited to SEO. Mobile continues to grow as a share of total screen time, and marketers need to adapt their strategies to meet people there.
From December 2010 to December 2014, smartphone usage jumped 394 percent and tablet usage increased by a mind-boggling 1,721%. Meanwhile, time spent on a desktop computer has inched up by comparison, only 37% above where it was in late 2010.
So what is your organization doing to embrace the mobile browsing boom? Make sure that your mobile marketing strategy includes these components:
Between development and maintenance costs, apps can be prohibitively expensive. But your company can still create compelling mobile content on your existing website. Use best practices to keep your site readable and easy to interact with on a small screen.
Looking for examples of B2B companies with strong mobile-responsive website design? Check out research company Gallup for clean data delivery and CRM provider Salesforce for attractive visuals and easy navigation.
Mobile-friendly email marketing
Forty-eight percent of email opens occur on mobile devices. As such, it’s essential for every email you send be optimized for easy reading on smartphones and tablets. Keep your email subjects short and clear to take advantage of your limited real estate on mobile devices. Make sure formatting isn’t too complicated; it may translate badly to smaller screens. What’s more, make sure all links within your email lead to mobile-optimized landing pages. There’s no quicker way to lose an engaged prospect than if their email link-click leads to a messy page they cannot read or navigate.
Short-form, “snackable” content
Think of how many people you see on the bus or the train or waiting in line, scrolling rapidly through articles and emails on their smart phones. While we are seeing a resurgence of long-form content online, mobile browsing is better suited to short-form, bite-sized pieces of content. This includes creating images that fit a mobile screen well: while infographics are often included in discussions of snackable content, they need to be made easily viewable to attract attention.
Need more ideas to improve your marketing? Take a look at Movéo’s past work.
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On Wednesday, we covered how Google’s “mobilegeddon” may have affected your organization, and what to do about it. Today, we’re taking a look at another recent marketing change your organization needs to stay on top of — the decrease of organic reach on social media.
Organic reach is defined as “the total number of unique people who were shown your post through unpaid distribution.” When marketers talk about the decline in organic reach on social, we usually talk about Facebook. The loss of organic reach on this platform in 2015 has led some to question whether it is still a worthwhile investment for brands, but in many industries, it remains critical to have a presence on the network. With a little work, your organization can maintain and grow a strong presence on Facebook despite the obstacles to organic reach. Here’s how:
Use organic post targeting
Did you know that Facebook offers organic post targeting? By targeting your posts to the market segment they align with, you can make sure that your organic reach, limited as it may be, goes where it has the best chance of making an impact. This guide from Social Media Examiner shows how to make targeting choices and analyze targeting results.
Your organization’s posts have a limited reach when housed only on your own Facebook page, but you have another resource for reaching a wider audience — your employees. Encourage your employees to repost your content in order to reach more people. There are many ways to do this. You might invite your employees to contribute guest posts and then promote their work. Or, you might create content that your team can be particularly proud of, such as posts about your corporate social responsibility (CSR) goals, and encourage them to share it.
Integrate paid and organic social media strategies
Organic reach has decreased on Facebook, but that doesn’t mean that your organization will only ever make an impact with promoted posts or ads in the future. Instead, pair paid and organic content in order to maximize impressions. Test different types of content in both paid and organic posts, and analyze your results. Use paid posts to drive traffic to your page and leverage them to promote your most valuable (and most shareable) content.
For true digital marketing impact, incorporate a social media strategy into a full demand generation program. Learn how Movéo can help.
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In our next three posts, we’ll be discussing 2015 marketing changes that affect all brands. Today we’re taking a look at Google’s April SEO restructuring plan (lovingly called mobilegeddon), in which they moved to give priority to mobile-friendly websites in search. This revamp of traditional SEO practices had marketers scrambling to make sure their websites were mobile-ready.
After the update, it at first seemed like mobilegeddon had had little effect on SEO. But within six weeks, reports found that it was affecting site traffic, and the impact was even greater than originally expected. According to Stone Temple Consulting, 46.6% of non-mobile-friendly sites had experienced a drop in Google rankings following mobilegeddon, while 30.1% of mobile-friendly sites gained in the rankings. According to Alastair Barr of the Wall Street Journal, the Adobe Digital Index “found that traffic to non-mobile-friendly websites from Google mobile searches fell 12% in the two months after the changes took effect April 21, relative to mobile-friendly sites.”
Today, the results of mobilegeddon are still impacting your organization if your site isn’t optimized for mobile traffic. In fact, Google has made a clear statement that they value mobile optimization, so future updates may well compound the effects of mobilegeddon.
In order to recover or better your site’s traffic, it’s time to make the following mobile optimizations:
Responsive design
Responsive design allows visitors to see your site sized appropriately for their own screen, whether they are viewing it on a desktop monitor or a smartphone. If you don’t have the resources or simply don’t want to create a separate mobile version of the site, responsive design can provide a clean, user-friendly website experience for your mobile users.
Larger, well-spaced type
It may seem counterintuitive, but smaller screens require larger type. Don’t make your prospects squint or zoom to read your content; choose a site style that provides easily-read type with plenty of white space.
Separated links that can easily be clicked
On a mobile site, you must go beyond making your calls-to-action attractive and engaging, you must also make them easy to click with the tip of a finger. That means spacing out links to avoid the likelihood of “misclicks.”
Improve page speed
On mobile, page loading speed is a key factor in gaining and keeping visitors. Page speed impacts your site’s search engine ranking and the user experience. For more on how to optimize page speed, read this guide from Moz.
Search ranking is key to marketing success, and a partner firm can help your organization improve digital marketing across the board. Contact us for more information on how working with Movéo could help your organization thrive.
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All marketers must continuously make adjustments to improve the reach and impact of their messages. So what separates the successes from the failures? Well, the best marketers know what not to do. They understand which changes to pursue and which ones to avoid. Here are five things you should never do if you want to keep your marketing on track:
1. Put all your eggs in one basket
In marketing, it’s critical to take advantage of new channels and craft messaging that appeals to your audience in the moment. But smart marketers avoid going all-in on an untested tool or tactic, always balancing their desire to test new ideas with the need to maintain successful strategies. Stay agile by spreading resources across digital channels and building multiple points of connection with your audience, so that if one falls out of favor, you still have a strong foundation on which to build.
2. Overhaul a campaign based on a statistical blip
We’ve often written about the importance of data analysts and using tools to help discern patterns in data, and this is why. If you don’t take into account the statistical significance of marketing data, you risk making changes based on outliers. If you don’t run campaigns or marketing tests for a meaningful length of time, you risk making marketing decisions based on coincidences, freak spikes or drops in traffic.
3. Change too many things at once
Remember learning to isolate variables in algebra? It’s just as critical in marketing as it is in math. If you change too many things about a campaign at once, your team will have no way of tracing what made an impact on the campaign’s success or failure. Instead, make incremental marketing changes one at a time, and carefully record and analyze the data you collect before deciding which changes to make permanent.
4. Act without consulting your data first
In today’s digital marketing landscape, data should drive all of your marketing decisions. Whether you’re in the middle of a campaign or developing a new one, it’s essential to review your data, gather new information and act according to the most up-to-date analysis.
5. Ignore the role of emotion in the B2B buyer’s journey
Data-driven marketing doesn’t mean emotionless marketing. Some marketers forget the importance of emotion in the B2B purchasing process, and think that, because marketers analyze data to better reach prospects, prospects are following the same process to find professional service providers and suppliers. Yes, their buyer’s journey may be guided by logic, but it’s not governed by it. As such, marketing campaigns that focus solely on logic and ignore emotion fail to make an impact.
Successful marketing is an ongoing process of adjustment and change. Creating a meaningful marketing impact is all about choosing the changes that will be successful and adjusting course when necessary.
If your B2B marketing team could use advice on keeping up with the fast pace of marketing changes today, download our white paper, Return on acceleration.
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Data-driven marketers know the importance of making incremental changes to their campaigns without taking risks that could hurt the overall results or making too many changes at once. Is your marketing strategy set up to collect accurate data about what’s working and provide the insights needed to guide change?
Follow these steps to keep your marketing data-driven:
1. Do your research
Learn from the wins and losses of your competitors, collaborators and others in your industry. Some careful research to see where others in your field have found success can save your own organization a lot of time and money.
Great resources for this data include:
- Industry research reports
- Competitor case studies
- Industry media coverage
- Competitor site traffic research
Don’t forget to include insights from your own past work. What tactics have proven useful in past campaigns? Do they apply to your current projects?
2. Change one thing at a time
Never get so excited about an idea you have to improve your marketing’s performance that you forget the importance of incremental testing. If you change more than one thing about your marketing at a time, you won’t be able to determine the source of any effects, positive or negative.
Whether it’s a change to your content delivery methods or your marketing’s targeting, set a consistent timeframe for making changes. Even if you begin to see negative results, leave your new program in place for this defined period of time to gather meaningful data. Then, analyze it to see why you got the result you did.
3. A/B Test
Another way to determine the impact of individual marketing changes is to test two or more versions of a given marketing message. Again, change only one thing in each version so that you can accurately attribute any differences in their performance.
A/B testing can be done in every marketing channel. Simply segment your audience, run the test and collect and analyze the data. A/B testing can be done on calls-to-action, marketing images, changes in copy, time of delivery and more.
4. Keep careful records
The key to each and every one of the above methods for adjusting marketing with minimal risk is careful record keeping. In order to analyze data and gather actionable results, you first have to collect data that is complete and clean. Before beginning marketing changes of any kind, review your data collection process to ensure that this is the case.
Do you feel prepared to move forward with marketing testing? Find out how marketing changes made a major impact for Movéo partners in our library of case studies.
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Your marketing department controls the public face of your brand. Marketing holds much of the power to build a positive reputation for an organization, but it can also cause disaster if that power isn’t wielded thoughtfully.
We’ve all heard stories of failed marketing campaigns, and worse, of marketing campaigns that actively offended their intended audience. To avoid appearing in the next “5 Marketing Mistakes You Won’t Believe” viral post, keep the following in mind.
Consider your audience
Will the ad design you all think is amazing around the office actually play well with your target market? Does the content strategy you’re preparing for the next six months provide value that is relevant to your audience?
Before launching any campaign, make sure that your execution will both appeal to your audience and actually address their needs in a meaningful manner. Conduct appropriate research to ensure that your content is answering your audience’s questions and is delivered in a manner that fits their lifestyle. For example, a high-level executive may not have time to read a whitepaper you e-blast to them at 2 in the afternoon, but they may respond well to a simple 8am email providing them a digest of your latest targeted blog posts.
Take stock of the news
Some of the worst marketing fails of recent years have involved brands piggybacking on the news inappropriately, leading to backlash when the public responded that the brands in question were using natural disasters or solemn occasions for profit. In many cases, the brands in question were guilty of this. In others, they simply hadn’t considered how a previously scheduled piece of content would look in light of recent events.
As always, be thoughtful. Before publishing a campaign, take the time to make sure that it’s relevant, timely and will be read as intended. Coordinate with the sales team and the external relations team to gauge public opinion of your company, and keep it in mind with every piece of content you’re sending out to a general audience. If necessary, head back to the drawing board. It’s always better to rework a campaign than lose public goodwill.
Consider your resources
Before beginning any campaign, make sure you have the appropriate resources to carry it through. While a marketing campaign without the proper backing won’t blow up in the way something offensive will, it also won’t achieve what you need it to do.
Learn from your mistakes
Some campaigns are more successful than others. Let your past results guide your upcoming campaigns by incorporating what you learned as you plan. Determine how to allocate your marketing spend, what topics to explore and what types of content to create based on where you’ve seen success. Don’t be afraid to try out new tactics, either: an unexpected social media strategy could have powerful results.
Want to learn more about how to keep your marketing on track in Q4 2015? Check out how Movéo helps partners create demand generation.
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Will your marketing team be able to keep your organization competitive in 2016? If you aren’t sure, what are you doing now to prepare?
It’s time to conduct a critical assessment of your team. Are there roles you need to fill now in order to continue making an impact? Are there people on your team who could offer more in a slightly different role than the one they fill now? As you allocate human resources and marketing budgets for 2016, consider the following roles your team may need to grow.
Data analysts
The new marketing value chain is data-driven, and to create successful digital marketing campaigns, your organization’s strategy needs to be data-driven, too. While digital tools like Google Analytics can absolutely gather and organize data for you, you can’t rely on these tools to analyze that data thoroughly and tell you what insights you should take from it.
Going into 2016, it’s essential to make sure your organization has well-trained data analysts on staff and provides them with the tools they need to glean insights from data.
Content creators
From striking ad images to educational white papers, your marketing team needs top writers and designers capable of bringing your content to life.
We’ve talked before about the importance of great content that meets the needs of your targets. The best content creators need to do more than just write well: they need to be able to work with data analysts to optimize and maximize their content. Don’t forget the importance of an editor who can make sure your copy is polished and professional.
A partner firm
Could your organization benefit from working with a partner firm? Perhaps you are looking for the added insights of a consultancy that has its finger on the pulse of industry best practices and innovations. Perhaps your organization’s structure is not set up to accommodate a large marketing team in-house but could benefit from the agility and expertise of an outsourced marketing function. Whatever your reason, choose a marketing firm that will be a growth partner.
Could Movéo be the right growth partner for your organization? Contact us to find out.
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We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: content rules, but only with the support of data insights. Even as content is serving as the public face of a company’s marketing, data is behind the scenes calling the shots. Is your organization making use of the power of data, or neglecting all it has to offer?
In order to take your content to the next level, you need tools to harness the power of the data you collect. Here are some we recommend:
Tool: marketing automation and inbound marketing software
Tracking and analyzing the right metrics can improve your content targeting, and the best way to measure the most actionable metrics is through marketing automation software. Tools like Hubspot, Pardot and Infusionsoft all offer their own unique approach to automating many routine marketing tasks while gathering cross-channel insights on marketing activities on a contact-by-contact basis. Not sure what marketing automation software is right for your organization? This guide from Digital Marketing Depot lays out some of the key differentiators of each product.
Benefits: Marketing automation software allows your team to understand the impact of each marketing activity you engage in on each individual lead in your pipeline. Imagine being able to click into the profile of a specific contact and see what links they’ve been clicking in your emails, where they’ve been spending time on your website, and what kind of content they’ve been downloading all in one spot. Then, imagine being able to run aggregate reports that tell you how a specific subset of your pipeline is responding to different types of content and messaging. With marketing automation software, these things are not just possible, they’re easy and often automatic.
Tool: CRM integration
An integrated customer relationship management (CRM) system shows your team what role each of your marketing activities is playing in the sales funnel — not just what role you think it is playing. While any CRM tool can help marketing and sales track interactions with prospects and customers throughout the buying cycle, a CRM tool that is fully integrated with your site and marketing automation system tracks this data more fully and automatically.
Benefits: An integrated CRM system allows you to do more than figure out what content is resonating most with your targets. It allows you to understand what content is driving sales.
Tool: Heat maps
Heat-mapping software shows your team some of the most granular data you can gather on each page of your website. Learn what people are actually looking at, how far they progress through each page and where the most attention falls on a page at any given time.
There are many options out there, including LuckyOrange, Crazy Egg and Clicktale. Do some research to figure out which one fits your organization’s needs.
Benefits: These heat maps let your team visualize the nitty-gritty details of your content’s effectiveness. Now your team can truly see what aspects of a specific piece of content resonate with your audience most, and make appropriate decisions about how to lay out future content pieces. You can even A/B test aspects of page design to see how they affect the heat map.
What other tools do you use to empower your team with the most actionable data insights available? If you want to hear more about how marketing changes could help your team improve your data, contact us.
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