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As the economy slows, B2B marketers Challenged by longer sales cycles, lower deal volume and customer churn. If that’s not enough, many companies are cutting back on marketing spending.
With that being said, CMOs can see significant short-term improvements that will help them power through the predicted downturn by focusing on these areas of their business:
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1. Optimize campaigns for offline conversion events
Your most important priority should be to integrate your advertising platform with you CRM or demand-generation platforms. This will allow you to optimize your ad campaigns for bottom-funnel conversion events. This is especially important when using Google because you can use Google’s algorithm to optimize your campaigns for bottom-of-funnel events. If you have a sales team taking inbound calls, be sure to get third-party call analytics software that can track calls by channel and down to the most granular source. Keeping phone tracking will help you identify which marketing channels are contributing to sales and help you make budget allocation decisions.
2. Marketing channels with short CAC payback periods
Privacy changes over the past two years have made marketing attribution tools less reliable and made finding winning campaigns more complicated. To overcome this, you can ask users on form sign-ups or post-purchase surveys how they found your business. While not 100% reliable, this self-reported attribution workflow can help you see which channel is driving the most sales. Based on what customers tell you and what your other attribution tools show, you can then allocate budget by channel based on their relative performance and pause what isn’t working.
3. Your best customer group
when sales performance starts to drop, examine your data to see which customer groups are underperforming or churning, and exclude them from your ad targeting. These may be nonprofit business verticals, job titles, geographic regions, age, or other demographic groups. If you have a revenue intelligence platform to listen and/or transcribe call recordings, demo and analyze calls that resulted in sales.
For example, if calls show an increase in fintech startups purchasing your product, test new ad creative with what they say about your product and test landing pages with matching messaging. On the media buying front, see if you can improve targeting for this group and get more ads to serve it.
It is also important to keep track of it BUYING PERSONS. You can figure out which personas to focus on by running a report on all your customers and their respective job titles, and then focus your marketing on the personas with the highest lead counts. Be sure to arm your prospects with the metrics they’re looking for — that is, you’ll need to show that the service or solution is an investment, not a cost.
Related: Digital Marketing 101 for Entrepreneurs
4. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
Focus on the segments that drive the most revenue for your business — ie Landing pages, product pages and pricing pages. Use a qualitative analytics tool to see what users are clicking while interacting with your site. If you’re running a paid ad campaign, it’s important not to run tests on all of your campaigns. Allocate at least 80% of your budget for campaigns that carry your quota and the rest for testing new ideas.
Your list is being improved further Page loading speed. For every additional second it takes to load the page, the conversion rate drops by 20%. A good benchmark is a loading time below three seconds. Another time-sensitive indicator to optimize is lead response time. Ideally, you should try to phone, text or email the potential lead inside five minutes. Doing this alone will help increase conversion rates by double digits.
Of course, doing these things takes resources. But making these changes during a downturn, if done right, will help you improve performance and build a data-driven and winning business.
Related: How to Adjust Your Marketing to Survive a Recession