How small business marketers can optimize marketing budgets and drive leads (VB Live)
Presented by CallRail
Businesses today have to do more with limited budgets, while keeping customer experience front and center. In this VB Live event, learn how to make the most marketing impact, leverage data to generate hot leads, harness personalization, and more.
Today, small business marketers are faced with some very particular challenges, from shrinking marketing budgets and growing number of marketing channels, to the waves of data it all generates, to the growing emphasis on personalized marketing. And the tides are continually shifting in an ever-changing pandemic.
Here’s a look at how small business marketers can do more with less in an increasingly complex landscape.
Prioritize quality over quantity
The first step in optimizing your marketing budget is making sure that your efforts are all focused on the time and investments that will move the needle the most. In order to do that, first you need to know what quality looks like.
“Make sure you clearly define, for yourself and your business, what qualified or good leads look like to you,” says Laura Lawrie, principal product manager at CallRail. “Is that somebody submitting an appointment request form? Calling to discuss your services? Understand who your prospects and leads are, who’s most likely to convert, and then trace back efforts that are most likely to lead to those quality leads.”
Prioritize the right channels
The explosion of channels means there are so many more ways to reach potential leads, but how do you narrow down the ones that will give you the most bang for your buck. Focusing on understanding that customer journey and investing in tools that can give you insight into it is key.
“Understanding the lead sources that get you to the top of the funnel versus the bottom of the funnel will help you understand where to focus your budget and how to plan your campaigns accordingly,” Lawrie says.
But if you’re well versed in data collection and reporting, and you feel like you already understand that lead journey really well, then maybe it’s time to progress into looking at trying to tie ROI to your marketing efforts, which is a very challenging prospect, but a worthwhile one, Lawrie says.
“You might find that maybe the juice isn’t worth the squeeze for some of your offerings,” she says. “You’re spending so much on your cost per click to get those customers that really the margin you get out of that particular service or product isn’t worth it. That gives you the power not just to market with confidence, but to do business with confidence, because you understand and invest in the things that will give you the best return.”
Prioritize your budget allocations
With a limited budget, you need to know how much to put into search, how much to put into social, how much to put into display, and so on.
To do that, you need to get a good understanding of your baseline, or as the saying goes, know what makes your phone ring. But from there, you need to test.
“Even if you just have a starting point, a budget you’ve invested in that makes sense to you, use that as a test,” she says. “Let that run for a month, and again, take a look at what’s leading to your qualified leads. That can tell you where to divert that spend into the appropriate areas. Test, test, and test again.”
Prioritize key customer touchpoint data
No matter where you’re allocating your marketing dollars, you’re going to get a wild amount of data back in return. Managing that volume of data can end up being a time sink, if you don’t know where to turn your attention.
Lawrie strongly recommends a marketing attribution tool that stitches together all the reporting data from the various sources you’re tapping, and takes care of identity resolution, or consolidating potential customers according to their phone number, their email, their tracked web session data, and so on. This will give you insight into multi-touch customer journeys.
“If you’re just doing something like pulling in Google Ads reporting, Facebook reporting, or organic search result reporting through something like Rank Ranger and just trying to throw that onto a dashboard, what you’ll end up with is just multiple reports from various biased points of view,” she points out.
But a marketing attribution platform can tell you, for instance, that someone found you organically through the organic search results, but then because of your Facebook Pixel remarketing strategy, they saw a Facebook ad and they clicked it, but they still didn’t purchase. Then their last touch was a click on a Google ad because it was at the top of a search.
“If you’re just looking at those individual sources of reporting, even if they’re consolidated in one dashboard, you’ll miss out on, hey, those three clicks, actions, they were really one single person with one intent to purchase,” she says. “Something that can consolidate that and reconcile those is going to allow you to market with confidence.”
To learn more about how small business marketers can do more with a limited budget, harness data, and leverage marketing attribution like a boss, don’t miss this VB Live event!
Attendees will learn:
- How to do more with the marketing budget you have in 2022
- How to prioritize lead management and reduce friction throughout the entire customer journey
- How to sift through marketing and sales data to optimize your campaigns, and ultimately drive more leads and improve your ROI
Presenters:
- Laura Lawrie, Principal Product Manager, CallRail
- Seth Colaner, Moderator, VentureBeat
- More industry thought-leaders to come!
