The Game of the Marketing Budget
Do you want to play a game? If you’ve ever seen any of the Saw movies, your answer should be a resounding NO. The same answer should apply to playing around with your marketing programs. Successful marketing programs differ for every company across various sectors. Your budget and marketing strategy should reflect your company’s performance history rather than conform to a template based on industry trends. Don’t play a guessing game with your marketing mix. The ideal marketing budget comes from diverse programs backed by optimal return on investment based on your past marketing results.
Establish the Rules: Looking at Historical Data
You have all the information needed to understand an ideal marketing mix hiding in the corners of your marketing automation platform. Historical data associated with each marketing program reveals which ones were most successful in converting opportunities to leads. Past program results will show the response rates to different types of marketing strategies. This allows you to decide which ones were most effective. One issue commonly over-looked is how performance changes when programs are run together. Though we all wish prospects convert to customers with one marketing instance, reality shows us that’s just not true. The value in evaluating marketing programs together is understanding the journey that converted a sales qualified lead into an opportunity rather than only evaluating their first or last marketing touches. The journey tells you which programs provide positive or negative impact on your company.
Knowing the Players: Optimized Marketing Mix
Optimal marketing mixes create a plan for allocating your budget across programs. We call it optimal because the allocation maximizes revenue by finding which program combinations succeed. It’s important to identify how programs interact together throughout the year. Some programs belong together; complimentary programs run in a series. Others may be substitutes and should never run at the same time. Your marketing mix should represent the best of what each program offers. By optimizing your marketing mix, you can plug in your budget and get a result that shows which programs to run and when to run them.
Mix Up Your Strategy: Diversify Your Marketing Mix
Instead of evaluating a marketing program on its own, combinations of programs provide much more optimized reflections of their performance. The average opportunity requires approximately seven to eleven touches to become a qualified lead for the sales team. If two email programs and a webinar run in series, their success should be evaluated together rather than separately. In practice, each segment of the series receives a weighted value for the conversion of the lead. Then, you can identify which programs run together effectively and improve the efficiency of your marketing programs. Why do an extra webinar when two emails will suffice?
Ranking at the Top: Return on Investment
By comparing the ROI of a program series against another series, the overall understanding of their success in converting opportunities to leads increases. ROI allows you to rank combinations of programs as well as the ideal periods to run them. If you’re trying to meet a deadline, some programs work faster than others. Some programs have greater returns in the long-run. Knowing which time segments of the year are most responsive identifies areas of strength and areas of growth for marketing programs. This information allows you to make a marketing budget that works for your marketing quotas, as well as the company’s overarching mission.
Own the Game, Don’t Play It
The world of optimized marketing is right at your fingertips. Use historical marketing data and programs’ ROI to maximize your returns to revenue within your established budget. Everything about your marketing strategy should be geared towards maximizing impact on pipeline and revenue for your company. In the world of big data, there’s no reason to be blind to marketing optimization. Here at ORM Technologies, we don’t play games (unless they involve major bragging rights in the office). For more information on how we can help you optimize your marketing mix and perfect your marketing budget, please email us at info@orm-tech.com.
