7 Things Ruining Your Marketing Budget and How to Fix Them

B2B buying cycles are getting longer and more complex, and the longer you spend in the funnel, the more likely you are to make missteps that could destroy your marketing budget.

Many businesses fall victim to common mistakes, so it’s not the end of the world if you make one. But if you want to protect your budget, you must first know what the most common pitfalls are.

This article outlines seven steps you can take to avoid these common pitfalls and protect your marketing budget.

1. Target only senior executives

If you’re only marketing to executives or senior executives, re-evaluate your strategy. Although 64% of C-suite leaders have the final say, 24% of those who also play a role in purchasing decisions are not part of the C-suite, according to a Google study.

You can’t minimize the role of non-C-suiters in influencing approval. If you spend your marketing budget solely on the C-suite, you run the risk of not reaching other key decision makers in an organization.

For example, if you are marketing to a manufacturing company that has different sites in the region and you want to capture their attention, tailor your messaging to the manager of each factory site, not just the CEO.

Including non-C-suite decision makers in your marketing strategy gives you a broader but still targeted reach and maximizes your opportunities.

2. Ignore millennial audiences

Millennials now make up 46% of all B2B buyers, or nearly half, according to Google. In addition, 18-34 year olds represent almost half of B2B researchers.

(Source: Think with Google)

Because more and more Millennials are joining B2B companies and influencing buying decisions, it’s a big mistake not to consider them when developing your marketing strategy. Allocate some of your funds to researching content and media channels used by different age groups.

3. Focus only on generating new leads

Actively growing your customer base is crucial to future-proofing your business, which means acquiring leads. But sometimes companies focus their marketing efforts on lead generation alone, and they forget about other goals, lead nurturing, for example.

If your only goal is lead generation, what do you do once those leads are in the bag? You risk losing them. Not all prospects are ready to convert. Generating new leads is only half the battle.

In the B2B world, where the sales cycle is longer, it is beneficial to have a more comprehensive approach with multiple objectives: brand awareness, reputation management, lead generation, lead nurturing and customer retention. .

4. Not having an adaptive strategy

Change is inevitable. Technologies come and go. Trends come and go. The data becomes stale. If you want to get the most out of your marketing budget, you need to adapt to these changes.

For example, the COVID-19 crisis has challenged the status quo for millions of businesses around the world. The economy is extremely volatile and we don’t know what the future holds. If a similar event pushes your marketing budget, you have to adapt if you want to survive.

A good marketing plan is nimble. Evaluate your budget changes each quarter and be open to increasing or decreasing the budget for certain tactics.

5. Not doing A/B testing

It’s a costly mistake to overlook A/B testing, or split testing, which is an essential part of marketing. Without testing the variables in your campaigns, it’s impossible to determine what actually works. Spending just 5% more of your budget on split testing will prevent your marketing dollars from being wasted on tactics and audiences that don’t convert.

Look how this single A/B test resulted in a 336% increase in conversion.

(Source: Not bounced)

Whenever you try new marketing strategies or tactics, perform A/B testing regularly to differentiate which tactics work from those which consume a lot of budget. You will be surprised at the increase in the effectiveness of your campaigns.

6. Forget “social” in “social media”

Some B2B companies use social media as a billboard to spread their offers, which is a mistake. Social media is not just an advertising channel.

Imagine talking with someone who only talks about themselves. That’s how it is if you use your social network only to advertise. Potential customers might see your brand in a negative light, which is counterproductive to your marketing budget.

Instead, think of social media as a two-way street. You need to bring value to the table if you want to maximize your gain on support.

Try to understand your customers and how they use social media. Educate, engage, entertain and inspire so that you bring value to your customers; only then can your company’s voice be heard.

7. Not measuring results

52% of merchantsadmit that their companies have less or even no ability to measure and analyze the impact of their marketing efforts.

This is a common phenomenon in B2B and B2C: a company spends a large budget on marketing without developing a system to measure the results. But if you don’t analyze the results of your strategy, you run the risk of wasting your budget and courting failure.

If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it, because Peter Drucker says it. To start measuring the effectiveness of your strategy, determine the metrics applicable to your campaigns: ROI, traffic, leads, engagement rate, time on page and CTR, among others.

If you perform results analysis in combination with split testing, you can use all of this data to improve your results and get the most out of your marketing dollars in 2020 and beyond.