According to Deloitte's Annual CMO Survey, for the B2B services sector, the marketing budget will average 9.2% of the total budget. The marketing budget for the B2B product sector will average 12.5%. For many companies, this can be a significant amount of money.
Yet, many B2B marketing leaders do not have a long-term marketing strategy for their businesses. They rely on one-and-done marketing and ad campaigns or follow trends to the hottest social media channel or technique. There is little thought put into goals, objectives, or reasons behind spending the money to launch these campaigns. And it shows in the results. A bad marketing strategy (or none at all) has a significant cost. This cost comes from lost or nonexistent sales, damage to brand reputation, lost customer trust, and wasted resources (time and money).
As a marketing agency leader, I see this every day. Most of our clients did not have a strategic marketing plan when we started working with them. These were marketing leaders at both small to medium size businesses and billion-dollar enterprises. They were launching marketing campaigns into the universe and hoping for the best. That’s what I call playing stupid games.
A stupid marketing strategy leads to stupid business results.
At my company, SyncShow, we developed a marketing methodology called, The Great 8 Pillars of ROI-Driven Marketing. When implementing The Great 8 Pillars we illustrate how costly a stupid marketing strategy can be.
Exercise: Write down three failed marketing investments you've made recently. Document your financial investment and the resources lost for each. If you can quantify any other losses like sentiment or reputation damage, or lost customers, record those numbers. Add everything up. I bet the resulting total stings a little. Take heart; you are not alone. Every marketing professional has made bad decisions in their career. The best you can do is evaluate the source of the failure and fix it.
Most failed marketing initiatives are rooted in not having the right people, strategies, systems, and software. This lack is usually the result of not having enough budget or the right information to build an effective marketing strategy. Too many marketing leaders focus solely on tactics and do not think about everything else that goes into marketing success. Namely, people, strategies, systems, and software.
Go back to your list of failed initiatives. I bet you can tie each failure to one of these four elements. For example, did you hire an inexperienced web developer to launch a new website? Did you attempt to achieve two conflicting goals in one marketing strategy? Did you rely too heavily on your existing media planning process to build a brand-new digital paid media strategy? Lastly, did you purchase a new CRM tool without thinking through how it will integrate with your other software systems?
All of these failures are the result of not thinking strategically about the best way to leverage your:
People (hiring an inexperienced web developer)
Strategies (two conflicting goals in one strategy)
Systems (a media planning process not set up for digital media)
Software (a new tool that doesn’t integrate with your existing systems)
The Great 8 Pillars of ROI-Driven Marketing offers B2B marketing leaders a framework to maximize the results of their marketing efforts. These pillars help you focus on the important aspects of a successful marketing strategy – people, strategies, systems, and software.
The Great 8 Pillars are:
Goals, KPIs & Industry Benchmarks
Value Proposition, Messaging & Branding
Marketing Strategy
Marketing Team Structure
Website
Analytics & Reporting
Technology Stack
Templates & Guides
We use this methodology with all of our clients, and they've seen the results they've always wanted from their marketing efforts, as much as 27x ROI. Now it's your turn.
You can learn more about the Great 8 Pillars and my take on effective marketing strategy here on this blog. I'll cover each pillar in more detail over the coming months.
With methods tried and tested through 20 years of B2B digital marketing practice, SyncShow's Diagnostic & Roadmap can show you precisely what you need to do to see massive and trackable returns on your marketing spend.