With 2023 coming just around the corner, companies are busy planning strategies and budgets for the new year. Naturally, this raises discussions over how to organize spending so that you get the most bang for your buck. 

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How to Strengthen ROI with Your 2023 Marketing Budget

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1. Tieback your marketing activity metrics to your budget. 

The goals you set for your marketing and activities depend on many factors, especially your business stage. (Obviously, if you are in a very early stage, your marketing activities focus on attracting new customers or gaining new subscribers, whereas a more established business focuses on retention marketing strategies.) As a CEO, being aware of which marketing activities generate most of your leads ensures the marketing budget is being well spent on the appropriate channels, and then later re-invested in the top-performing areas. 

Tying your marketing metrics to your budget is very important to help your business grow.

Example business goals for 2023:

• Increase pipeline by 10% each month
• Grow brand equity and brand presence
• Boost sales to existing customers
• Enter a new market
• Increase collaboration between sales and marketing teams
• Improve quality of incoming leads
• Strengthen company culture

All of these goals influence the tactics you choose, the budget, and a coherent strategy. All of these marketing goals and activities are ultimately about generating business growth.

Tip >> Review your marketing performance and budget regularly. Stay committed to your marketing goals, but adjust allocations for each activity based on ROI. 

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2. Make adjustments as you go, and re-evaluate the ROI of every activity.

Ask yourself how each marketing activity is moving the business toward achieving its strategic goals. Marketing budgets for companies require a lot of planning, but there’s also room for adjustments.

• Does your business really need to be at trade shows to source and convert leads? Or would the same funds be better spent on webinars or PPC?
• What platform does your target audience use to consume content? Do they use social media? For B2B companies, LinkedIn is a good tool for promotional use and direct communications. Quora is also a good way for B2B companies to reach audiences.

Tip >> Be prepared to shift your marketing activities quickly, easily. Don’t get hung up or fall in love with one aspect of your marketing budget which may later need to be changed. Remember, marketing is a mix and not a one channel activity.

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3. Pace yourself for the marathon of marketing growth.

If you have not already done so, put a calendar in front of you and line it up side-by-side with both your marketing budget and product roadmap. Create estimates and go back to check again what you think will be needed throughout the year compared to actual spend.

• As an overview, you might see that Q1 and Q2 are really strong
• Q3 might be a bit slower because of summer vacation
• Q4 can also be a little slower due to winter holidays

Tip >> You probably aren’t due for a vacation anytime soon, so take mini-breaks with your marketing team to celebrate major milestones. If that’s not in the budget, simply rewarding yourselves with one late morning could work, too. 

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4. Get your customers involved.

This is a marketing concept to keep you within your budget, and at the same time, aim for growth. What can you do to motivate other people to be your brand ambassadors and market your business for you? DropBox used an incentive strategy, offering something of value to customers in exchange for sending their friends or colleagues to sign up. DropBox offered additional free storage, but likewise, you can develop a free offer to entice customers to give you referrals. Consider offering something of value but without any major investment – such as a free audit, widget, a custom demo, or downloadable material – in exchange for referral leads.

Additionally, you can engage your customers in testimonials and adding them to your website and marketing materials to encourage cross-promotion. Happy customers are more than glad to have you add your logo to your website to spread the word about their business as well.

Tip >> Win new customers from existing ones. Offer customers something of value in exchange for sending their friends and colleagues as new leads.

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5. Make sure your marketing team is the best. 

Ensure every member understands your business, tactics, and audiences and knows how to generate a relevant and effective marketing strategy and execution plan.

While we all know that the most expensive line item for almost any budget is the manpower (aka labor in accounting terms), finding and hiring experts with specific experience in sales and marketing need not be expensive. You don’t have to get a recruiter. Or a headache. The key here is to factor in your greatest expense, the labor:

• Does it make more sense to hire a single, local full-time marketing employee versus outsourcing and bringing on an entire marketing agency to handle the soup-to-nuts of marketing projects? 
• Some marketing agencies start small and grow with you. What does your business need?

Tip >> Hire the best based on referrals. Then, encourage your people to keep learning and growing to be the best. Keep everyone sharp by hosting lunch-n-learns or events when each member can address a topic or share expertise.

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I always answer this question with another question: “What do you want to achieve?”

HMMM…easy enough, right? This sounds like a no brainer, but it’s actually one of the most difficult questions for B2B startups to answer. The typical answer I get is “MORE”

More customers. More brand recognition. More profits per deal. More users.

And of course, my all-time favorite,  “Lower spend.”

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Marketing starts with goals

PPC, SEO, trade shows, webinars, PR, and content are some fundamental elements of a successful comprehensive marketing approach, but they are just tools. In order to use your budget wisely, you need to start with goals and KPIs.

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Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) –  the best-kept marketing secret

KPIs help CEOs measure marketing resources and marketing efforts invested in various activities.

KPIs should reflect the short-term business strategy as well as the long-term strategy. They should be specific, realistic and perhaps most importantly, measurable.

KPIs are all about what marketing attempts to accomplish, how it should be measured, what impact it will have on the business and when.

Once KPIs are achieved it will be easier to show ROI to the board and explain the correlation between marketing spend and success.

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Revenue Goals vs Brand Goals

B2B startup marketing goals should always include two tracks: the short-term (revenue goals) and the long-term (brand goals).

The Short-Term: Revenue Goals

Revenue is easy to measure. In a SaaS company, for example, the goal might be to increase software subscription by 15% or convert 20% of free users to paying users.

The Long-Term: Brand Goals

Brand goals are harder to measure, but extremely important. We always assume that even if your company is the most innovative startup in its field, there’s competition out there and your potential customers must be able to trust your brand and eventually choose it. Therefore it is essential that you become the go-to expert in your industry. Your goals can be press coverage in relevant magazines, building a qualified database of potential prospects, increased social media engagement, receiving industry awards, getting speaking opportunities at conferences relevant to your industry etc. The list goes on and on.

Working both tracks in parallel will set your business up for success.

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How to measure your results

Once you’ve got both tracks covered, the next step will be to establish what you consider a positive outcome to be, and to then measure the results of these efforts.

Revenue goals are fairly straightforward:

How much is a marketing qualified lead (MQL) worth? How much money are you willing to spend assuming 30% of MQL’s will convert into sales opportunities (SQL)?

For example:

A yearly software subscription in a software company is $20,000.

Are you willing to invest 10% i.e. $2,000 in marketing in order to bring MQLs knowing that approximately 1 out of 3 MQLs will convert into a sales opportunity?

When it comes to brand awareness and trust, sample goals to measure might be:

• %  increase in social media engagement
• Decrease in website bounce rate
• Amount of press coverage in relevant publications

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Are you focusing your marketing efforts in the right places?

One company’s MQLs are not going to be the same as another company’s MQLs and therefore it is critical to define what an MQL is for your business.

In order to set the right measurements for marketing, you need to intimately know your buyer persona. Who are your prospects? Who are the people marketing should be targeting?

• What are the relevant job titles?
• Which organizations are relevant?
• Which verticals are relevant?
• In which countries?

The more specific your MQL definition, the more focused marketing can be in its targeting, which of course could translate to less budget, more impact.

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Time is money

True. We all want our efforts to show results ASAP. This is perhaps most obvious in the startup world where there’s often an aggressive need for time-to-market. Startups must raise funds in order to do so, they must be able to show business results. However, at the end of the day, you have to be smart about it. If you instruct your marketing team to spend money on campaigns before understanding the essentials and making sure all your marketing foundations are in place, you are just wasting time and money.

Think about it this scenario, for example: You started a Google AdWords campaign to drive traffic to your website, but the website messages are not aligned with the campaign messages and the Call To Action (CTA) buttons do not lead to an actionable activity to allow capturing the prospects’ contact details. This is poor planning and a perfect example of why it’s important to lay the groundwork before dashing ahead.

Another great example is marketing without having proper sales tools for the sales team. If your marketing team is bringing leads, and you have no references, testimonials or success stories to send when they ask, you may just lose a potential buyer. It’s like fishing without bait.

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A B2B marketing timeline

Every startup should design the marketing timeline according to the level of its marketing fundamentals maturity. Sometimes it is necessary to spend the first 30-60 days conducting market research and building a unique, appealing company story based on the technology and pain points in order to create an inspiring value proposition. Sometimes it is also important to take time to analyze the company’s CRM, optimize assets and set the foundation for development of sales tools.

It is always recommended that while doing all of the above, the marketing team work in parallel to prioritize small short term victories too. These are victories that can be achieved right away in the short-term – successes that will help the marketing team work towards accomplishing the larger, longer-term goals.

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Getting set up for success

The startup world is dynamic, and therefore we recommend evaluating KPIs on a quarterly basis. What does this mean? Analyze the results achieved so far. Look at what is working and what needs to be tweaked. There’s always going to be a need to learn from the actions taken, make adjustments and refine. There’s always a need to work on new challenges.

As long as the CEO communicates with the marketing team, keeps them involved in the business challenges, and aligns goals and KPIs accordingly, the company and the marketing team is set up for success.

The important thing to remember is that B2B startup marketing is a constantly evolving journey that requires assessment, analysis, and adjustment while on-the-go. Having a plan with milestones and measurable short-term and long-term goals is vital, but remaining flexible and able to adjust is also important. 

With B2B marketing for startups, for the most part, you get what you put in. But of course, it ranges. If you hire an expert marketing agency to do your marketing for you that understands best practices and how to get the most out of your money, you will be able to maximize what you spend on your marketing efforts and create significant revenue increases from leads that come in. If you hire someone who is less experienced in the startup marketing field and is unsure how to set the appropriate KPIs and measure them, it is unlikely that you will be making the most of your money. Agencies will also be able to help you allocate your budget for the best results.