Recognizing when to stop and reformulate your B2B marketing strategy will make all the difference to gaining a competitive edge in your industry. Some strategies simply do not work. Whether this is due to a lack of foresight, a sudden change in markets, supply or demand fluctuations, or any other circumstance for that matter, it makes little difference at all. All that matters is following a practical strategy with a high likelihood for success. If the potential of your digital marketing strategy is clearly no longer what you projected it to be, stop fueling it with energy, attention, and resources. We’ve put together a look at the key signs that your strategy isn’t working so that you’re always moving forward.
Evaluate Your Strategies
We’re always chasing a better conversion rate, but this doesn’t mean that you should be devoting focus towards strategies that will never fruit rewards. Most B2C firms target a reasonable, attainable expectation of twenty leads per day relative to their business model, service, or product. Unfortunately, most business to business firms come to expect the same rate of business, which is almost never viable. B2B businesses can expect around twenty conversions per month with an established strategy. This is of course relative to your industry and the size of your business but Google determined that the average B2B conversion rate is around 2%. Anticipating anything different will skew the way that you market and promote. Give any well-formulated digital marketing campaign two to three, possibly four months of evaluation. If it’s not working, with the strategy pulling in at least three to five leads a month during its building phase, then it isn’t working, and you need to do something else.
Lead Quality Is Everything
Pulling in tons of leads doesn’t mean that your strategy is working. Lead quality is everything when it comes to formulating a winning B2B approach. Take a hard look at your metrics and determine whether you’re attracting a majority of unqualified candidates, perhaps drawing the attention of the complete wrong demographic, search traffic, or another lead source. For example, if you are targeting pharmacology companies with a budget of under $75,000 per year for your Software-as-a-Service product but are only bringing in interested companies with a budget that’s a fraction of that size, then your outgoing marketing is either positioned wrong or miscommunicated. Constantly refine the way that you project your message to your target audience to improve the quality of your leads.
Assess Online Traffic
Poor quality online traffic is often the first indicator that your B2B digital marketing strategy is misaligned. Website traffic and social media signals show you exactly what message is being translated, and exactly who is responding to your marketing. There are many factors to website traffic. Pay attention to how long visitors spend on pages and blogs. Your bounce rate immediately shows you whether your content is capturing the attention of your audience. If not, your marketing needs to change. All the traffic in the world is worthless if it isn’t converting, quality traffic, so keep this in mind when adapting your content strategy relative to your incoming visitors.
Measure Your Metrics
Once you’ve struck a balance of leads and traffic, now it’s time to look at the click-through rates of your ad campaigns. Once again, this metric is another key measure of whether your message is being received in the way that you intend it, and by the right demographic projected to have the greatest potential of becoming a customer. No matter how well-refined your marketing, click-through rates don’t reach the fifty-percent range. PPC, social advertising, and other display, social, mobile, and search traffic networks will reach closer two percent. With this in mind, one has a realistic outlook to weigh the efficacy of any campaign and its click-throughs.
How To Improve Your B2B Digital Marketing Strategy
Make sure that you’re never hasty in any decision that you make concerning your marketing. It takes a couple of months before the analytics start showing anything meaningful, but this doesn’t mean that you should just set and forget your campaigns. On the contrary, audit, and measure every last part of your marketing. Set advanced analytics to keep track of social ads, incoming links, attention on parts of your site and posts, and don’t forget in-depth split-testing of all advertising, paid and otherwise. Every last part of your marketing strategy needs to have a cohesive bond (and influence) on every other part of your organic and assertive marketing & promotion.
Track & Measure Everything
By auditing everything, you have a bird’s eye view of your brand, letting you fine-tune and test before you scrap a project. Comprehensive auditing of your digital marketing is a core component of success, and a foundational aspect of this is paying attention to lead attribution. Look at your marketing strategy from the viewpoint of your potential lead. Where did they derive the motivation to browse to and land on your site, funnel, app, or doorstep? This will give you an idea of where your leads are coming from. The most accurate way to track lead attribution is to implement a CRM that captures information from every part of the marketing and sales process.
Leverage The Power Of Analytics
Even if you can’t afford a dedicated CRM or the setup thereof, dedicate the time to learn how to set up Google Analytics so that you have an accurate analysis of your lead sources every month. Pay attention to the sources providing the highest number of leads. Compare this to the sources with the highest conversion rate. Adjust your marketing to accommodate more resources where they are needed. If your social campaign is killing it, but your organic traffic is lacking, up your ads budget while steadily improving your SEO. Use what is working to your advantage.
Never Keep Refining Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Ultimately, you are the only one who can assess the viability of your marketing success. Every industry is different, and each business has a different vision and goals. One should ideally work independently of any industry averages, striving to reach a pinnacle of success that hasn’t been seen before. This will, of course, take time and steady work. The best way to guarantee the highest ceiling for success is to set a bar that’s changing relative to right now. Adjust your goals weekly. Watch your tangible results, plan accordingly, and never stop adapting. Myopportunity.com has the networking and AI-powered business network that you need to be supported at every step of the way, with the contacts, customers, businesses, and a wealth of information readily available to both free and subscribing users.
