Are you a mid-market company whose sales team needs support generating B2B leads? Chances are, you looking to increase your company’s marketing revenue or scale your marketing budget. However, because lead generation campaigns involve multiple people, the real costs can be difficult to control and track. We will outline the importance of a marketing budget, a marketing plan, and the real costs of lead generation.
Importance of a Marketing Budget
An expertly executed strategic marketing plan and budget will help you generate qualified leads, build stronger relationships, increase brand awareness and convert sales. The best marketing plan outlines how to achieve your goals, determining costs, priorities, and a timeline. Your plan should be both flexible and sustainable to guide your business to stay on target regarding estimated costs vs. actual costs.
Marketing plans are a tool that enables your business to gain maximum value from your marketing budget. The plan should answer your questions regarding how best to allocate marketing budgets for both online and offline channels. If you’re not sure how to accomplish this, an outside marketing service can provide you with a custom content marketing plan and ongoing support during its execution.
Lead Generation Costs
Lead generation marketing allows companies to nurture and earn potential customer trust until they’re ready to buy. This process stimulates and captures interest in a product or service to develop or grow a sales funnel. B2B lead generation is critical to maintaining and growing your business.
High-quality content is currently the best way to prove your company’s industry authority and attract new leads. Whereas poor-quality content achieves the opposite. There are several other channels to optimize to achieve your marketing goals, including social media and Search Engine Optimization (SEO), online advertising, website landing pages, public relations, and personalized emails. Given the amount of work required to create effective digital marketing, it’s essential to get it right. The real costs of lead generation, including time and talent, can severely tax the resources of a mid-market business. If your cost per lead (CPL) calculation leaves out crucial data, your business could be wasting money and missing out on rewarding opportunities.
Using Marketing Services
Marketing can be a powerful engine for revenue growth, but it’s also challenging to get right. Not every company has internal marketing experts suited for today’s technology and changing digital landscape. Nor do many B2B companies have the budget to hire or train internal employees. For sustainable growth, your company needs decisive perspectives that can help identify your best assets, clarify your company’s goals, as well as build effective, workable, and relevant marketing plans.
Finding Qualified Leads
Sales teams need marketing activities that segment B2B leads. This is vital so they only receive qualified leads. Determining a qualified lead is more complicated than just targeting people who signed up for your newsletter. Your sales team shouldn’t waste valuable time responding to low-quality leads when there are ways to shrink the pool of prospective customers.
Outsourced experts can create custom automation workflows that help close more deals and waste less time. They use conversion rate optimization (CRO) to improve the effectiveness of your sales pipeline conversion points.
Managing Marketing Campaign
Successful businesses understand the need to run marketing campaigns year-round, not only for intermittent promotions and sales. Managing multiple and ongoing campaigns can be a challenging task that involves many people. The effort required to create, test messaging, and advertise on the appropriate channels requires time and attention.
Building Innovative Campaigns
Every day, the list of marketing tactics and platforms grows longer and more complicated. Your company requires the expertise of trained marketers familiar with today’s digital landscape and its rapid changes. These experts will track and strategically use up-to-date data to shape informed marketing decisions for optimal lead generation. It’s not easy to run any business and multiple marketing campaigns simultaneously.
The following data is from the February 2020 CMO Survey, which, for 11 years, has asked top marketers how they expect to change their marketing spend in the upcoming year. In short, marketers expect budgets and spending to increase in the next five years. Spending on customer experience will also continue to grow. Google is increasingly shifting towards online engagement, therefore content needs to be targeted, relevant, and personalized. Experts often use Google’s algorithm as a tool to recommend where a business should allocate its marketing budget.
Investing Strategically
Marketing specialists typically advocate a percentage of every sale going back into marketing and lead generation. B2B businesses would be wise to utilize this tactic in quarterly and annual planning.
An external marketing service will have the focus and expertise to succeed in this vital lead generation role. According to results from the same CMO Survey, companies invested 11.4% in growth via partnerships in 2020. Lead generation marketing has been around for some time, but in this age of abundant data, it’s going through a monumental shift. Buyers are much more self-directed and inundated with competing information. More than ever, it is essential for B2B’s to have a robust marketing budget and find new and creative ways to reach potential customers.