Being able to accurately show how well your efforts impacted a company’s bottom line is one of the biggest challenges marketing teams face every year. For years, the easiest indicator of a marketing team’s success was measured mostly in sales and lead generation. But with the rise of content marketing, influencer relations and social media in marketing plans, it’s sometimes difficult to accurately quantify exactly how all these tactics improve ROI. Regardless of where you stand on the value of these tactics, even the most stubborn skeptics will need to face the reality that content marketing, social media and other tactics for the digital age are here to stay. Unfortunately, most marketing budgets have yet to catch up with the financial and personnel resources necessary to successfully utilize these tactics.
Many of these challenges and concerns were addressed in IEEE GlobalSpec’s “Trends in Industrial Marketing Survey,” which surveyed 326 marketing and sales professionals in the industrial sector on marketing trends within the engineering, technical, manufacturing and industrial communities. Here are some of the most interesting tidbits from the survey:
Breakthroughs in marketing analytics have made it easier to calculate the ROI of a company’s marketing efforts.
“Marketers are under steady pressure to demonstrate ROI for their marketing programs. The need to improve ROI is one of the top challenges industrial marketers face. To meet this challenge, marketers use leads as their number one measure of success. But generating high-quality leads for sales is also one of the top marketing challenges. This may sound like a vicious cycle, and some marketers would agree, but the point is that measurement matters. Other measures of success include customer acquisition and sales attributed to marketing campaigns. Marketing automation software, which can improve tracking and measurement capabilities, is used by only 37 percent of industrial marketers.”(more…)
Running a successful marketing campaign requires a number of different tactics, not just one “silver bullet.” Join Matt Sonnhalter for a Marketing Minute and learn how your company can get the most results out of your marketing efforts by using an integrated campaign.
To view other videos from Sonnhalter, visit our YouTube channel here and let us know if there’s a B2T marketing topic you’d like us to cover.
Do you use a creative brief to guide your marketing plan?
In the most recent Marketing Minute video from Sonnhalter, Matt explains what this useful marketing tool is and the 11 elements that Sonnhalter’s creative briefs include.
Blogs can play an important part in your overall marketing plan. By integrating them with other marketing tools like e-newsletters, other social sites and your existing website, as well as offline activities, you can enhance your efforts and results.
I have found that we are getting more activity as far as page views on our blog than our website.What’s more important is that I have regular readers who view my posts via RSS feeds and everyday, new readers find the site through key word searches.
We have also gained insights into our readers, and by their responses, we know what they want to hear more about. We even use surveys and polls to help us get answers directly from the readers as to what is important to them. We can look at monthly results to see which topics are having more traction than others.
Our long-term plan is to gain the readers’ trust and become their go-to resource when it comes to marketing to the professional tradesmen. By being informative, creative and reliable in what we say, and the examples we give, we build trust with our readers.
Ultimately, we want to gain new business opportunities, and a blog helps you do that. We recently won a few pieces of new business from companies that were following us on our blog. Many are virtual clients who feel comfortable doing business with us even though they never met us in person because they like what we said on our blog.
These are a few things you should expect from a company blog. We use it as a marketing centerpiece that we position our other activities around.
I’d like to hear some of your success stories around your blog successes.
There is no simple solution to social media. Yes, you might get a bright idea and put it out there and then what? If you can’t answer that question, then you’d better rethink what you’re doing.
Why would you think that a social media strategy would be any different from any other marketing one? Unfortunately, some folks think social is different.
Here are 5 pointers that might help in developing a social media strategy:
Define your audience – Not all of your current or potential customers are into social. Identify who’s following you as this will dictate messaging.
Define the message – What’s the overall message and the other components that will support it?
Define the participants – Depending on your target audiences, you will want to involve others in the company on the team for their expertise.
Integrate into other marketing elements – Social isn’t a stand-alone strategy. Make sure to integrate it when possible into other activities to maximize your efforts.
Make sure all your ducks are in a row before launching – Don’t get anxious and pull the trigger too fast. Make sure all elements are locked and loaded before starting.
I’m sure you could add to the list and I’d like to hear from you on other elements that you’ve included in your programs.
