As the economy slows, B2B marketers are faced with the challenge of managing longer sales cycles, declining deal values, and customer churn. If that wasn’t enough, many companies are making significant cuts to their marketing spend.
With this in mind, CMOs can see significant short-term improvements that will help them weather the predicted downturn by focusing on the following areas of their business:
1. Optimize campaigns for offline conversion events
The first priority is to integrate your advertising platform with your CRM or demand generation platform. This will allow you to optimize your advertising campaigns for bottom-of-funnel conversion events. This is especially important if you use Google, because you can use Google’s algorithms to optimize your campaigns for bottom-of-funnel events. If you have a sales team that answers inbound calls, be sure to get third-party call analytics software that lets you track calls, by channel, all the way to the most detailed source. Call tracking helps you determine which marketing channels are driving sales and determines budget allocation.
2. Marketing Channels with Short CAC Payback Periods
Privacy changes over the past two years have made marketing attribution tools less reliable and more complicated to find successful campaigns. To avoid this, you can ask users how they found your business during sign-up or post-purchase surveys. While these self-reported attribution workflows are not 100% reliable, they can help you identify which channels are generating the most sales. Based on what your customers tell you and what other attribution tools show, you can allocate budgets per channel based on relative performance and pause the ones that aren’t working.
3. Best Customer Cohorts
If your sales performance starts to decline, look at your data to see which customer cohorts are underperforming or churn and exclude them from ad targeting. These could be underperforming business sectors, job titles, geographic regions, ages, or other demographic cohorts. If you have a revenue intelligence platform that allows you to listen to and transcribe call recordings, analyze calls that led to demos and sales.
For example, if you find on the phone that fintech startups are increasing their product purchases, test new ad creative that incorporates what they love about your product and test landing pages with the right messaging. When buying media, see if you can improve your targeting of this cohort to serve them more ads.
It’s also important to keep your buyer personas in mind. You can determine which personas to focus on by running reports on all your customers and their job titles and focusing your marketing on the personas that generate the most leads. Be sure to give your prospects the metrics they want – that is, show them that your service or solution is an investment, not a cost.
4. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
Focus on the segments that drive the most revenue for your business, such as landing pages, product pages, and pricing pages. Use qualitative analytics tools that let you see what users click on as they interact with your site. When running paid ad campaigns, it’s important not to run tests on every campaign. Reserve at least 80% of your budget for campaigns that meet your quota, and the rest for testing new ideas.
Next on the list is improving page load speed. For every additional second it takes a page to load, conversion rates can drop by up to 20%. A load time of less than 3 seconds is a good target. Another time-sensitive metric you should optimize is lead response time. Ideally, you should aim to call, text, or email potential leads within five minutes. This alone can improve your conversion rate by double digits.
Of course, this requires resources. But if you get these changes right during a downturn, you can improve your performance and build a successful, data-driven business.
