4 Strategies for B2B Marketers to Increase ROI During the Economic Downturn

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B2B marketing is being challenged by longer sales cycles, smaller deal amounts, and customers who are leaving. Many companies have also cut their marketing budgets.

CMOs will be able to see short-term gains that will help them get through the predicted downturn if they focus on these areas:

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Integrating your advertising platforms into your CRM platform or demand generation platform should be your top priority. You can then optimize your campaigns to target bottom-funnel events. It is important to use Google because you can optimize your campaigns based on the Google algorithm. Get third-party software to track inbound calls. This will allow you to track them by channel, down to the granular level. Phone tracking allows you to identify which marketing channels are contributing to sales, and helps you allocate budgets.

In the past two years, privacy changes have caused marketing attribution tools to be less reliable and make finding winning campaigns more difficult. You can overcome this by asking users how they found you on forms or surveys after purchases. These self-reported workflows are not 100 percent reliable but can still help you determine which channels drive the most sales. You can allocate budgets by channel, based on the relative performance of each and your other attribution tools.

If your sales start to decline, examine your data and identify which cohorts of customers are not performing well or churning. Exclude them from your advertising targeting. It could be inefficient business verticals, unprofitable job titles, geographical regions, age, or other demographic groups. You can use a revenue intelligence tool to analyze calls that led to demos or sales.

If, for example, you notice a rise in calls from Fintech startups who are interested in your product, try new creative ads that reflect what they said they liked about it and test landing pages using the same messaging. Media buying: See if you could improve targeting and serve more ads for this group.

Keep track of your buyer personas. If you run a report of all your customers, including their job titles, then you can determine which persona is best to target. Then focus your marketing efforts on those personas that have the most leads. You should arm your prospects by providing them with the metrics that they are looking for. That is, you will need to demonstrate that the solution or service is not a cost, but an investment.

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Focus on segments that drive the most revenue to your business, such as landing pages for products and pricing pages. Use a qualitative analysis tool to see what your users click on when they interact with the site. It's important not to test all of your campaigns if you run paid advertising campaigns. Budget 80% for campaigns that carry your quota, and the remaining 20% for new ideas.

The next item on your list should be improving the page load speed. Conversion rates can drop up to 20% for every extra second that it takes to load the page. Loading times under three seconds are a good benchmark. Lead response times are another time-sensitive indicator that should be optimized. You should try to reach out via phone, email, or text within five minutes. This will increase conversion rates in double digits.

These things require resources. If you do these things correctly, making the changes during a recession will improve your performance and help build a data driven and winning business.

Related: How To Adjust Your Marketing To Survive A Recession