A business’s marketing budget helps it determine whether its outreach is hitting its financial targets. Rigorous budgeting is an effective way to align your marketing organization with your strategy, goals, and expectations.
As B2B marketing teams move toward 2021, many prospects are taking a wait-and-see approach to investing in new capabilities. Enterprises catering to this demanding sector need to ensure their budget reflects due care.
Let’s look at four strategic techniques to build a B2B marketing budget in 2021:
1. Understand Your Business’s Top Priorities
What are your potential avenues of growth in the coming year? What accounts are likely to be the most active, and where are decision-makers getting information on solutions? Are you aiming to grow your book of business or deepen value with current customers? Questions like these can help you narrow down your 3-5 top marketing priorities and assign resources accordingly.
2. Focus on Doing More with Less
Marketing investments lead directly to conversions and bottom-line ROI. However, many departments are seeing cutbacks to support other operations, like product development. By updating your technology stack, you can automate common marketing tasks and achieve more without expanding headcount. Or you can partner with an industrial marketing firm and narrow your focus to your core strengths.
3. Establish Benchmarks
Measurable metrics provide the data you need to move forward, including when it’s time to course-correct. To get the most from KPI development, however, you need benchmarks based on the current state of your business and industry. What is your average agreement size? How long do leads remain in your pipeline? How does your churn look? If you’re not sure, now’s the time to find out.
4. Prove Attribution
For marketing campaigns to generate more value over time, you need to be sure where leads are coming from. Any confusion on this point leads to less efficient financial decisions. As more users reject third-party cookies, attribution isn’t getting any easier. Look for opportunities in your existing funnel to get more opt-in data. Also, explore emerging technologies that can help you clarify per-channel attribution.
With digital marketing expertise from a trusted outside perspective, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel to make marketing work for you in 2021. Learn more about AIMG’s industrial marketing strategy today.