How can you make your B2B media strategy cost-effective?

Before you start with the fancy Deloitte slides on SMART goals, do this before you burn your money. Talk to 3-5 people and try to sell or pitch whatever you will sell people online. If you can't sell it through an offline channel, you are not ready to sell it through a digital channel. Too many people think digital is the way to sell, it's not if you don't even know how to sell it without you being in the room.

To make a B2B media strategy “cost effective” you first need to define what that means to your org. If cost effective = the cheapest cost per lead possible, marketing is incentivized to do whatever it takes to drive a form fill. This leads to ineffective tactics and behaviors that drive a bloated upper funnel that rarely makes it through to closed/won. If cost effective = an efficient driver of late stage pipeline (commonly stage 2 pipeline in most orgs), you’ll incentivize the right behaviors. And if you’re targeting a well defined cohort of target accounts, cost effective could mean efficient distribution or engagement cost.

For a cost-effective B2B media strategy, prioritize understanding your target audience's needs and habits. Invest in data analytics to refine targeting, reducing wasted spend. Opt for organic growth via SEO and high-quality content that resonates. Utilize platforms like LinkedIn for precise B2B targeting. Test ad creatives and placements, scaling what works. Engage in partnerships for co-marketing opportunities, amplifying reach without doubling costs. Regularly audit and adjust based on performance metrics, ensuring maximum ROI for every dollar spent.

Niche targeting is a smart and efficient strategy. By identifying and focusing on specific, highly relevant audience segments, you can make your B2B media strategy more cost-effective. This approach minimizes wasted resources and maximizes the impact of your marketing efforts, especially on social media. it's essential to define clear objectives, leverage social media platforms effectively, create valuable content, and continuously analyze and optimize your campaigns to ensure that your resources are utilized efficiently and your goals are met.

Optimizing your B2B media strategy for cost-effectiveness involves strategic planning and resource allocation. First, clearly define your target audience to focus your efforts. Second, leverage digital platforms and social media for targeted, cost-efficient reach. Third, invest in content marketing; valuable, shareable content boosts organic reach. Fourth, analyse data to identify high-performing channels and allocate budget effectively. Fifth, consider collaborative efforts like co-marketing or industry partnerships to share costs. Sixth, regularly assess ROI and adjust your strategy based on performance metrics. This data-driven approach ensures your B2B media strategy is both impactful and cost-effective.

Consider building an organic growth engine. Here's why it's paramount... ?? Cost-Efficiency: Organic growth minimizes your dependency on paid advertising, stretching your marketing budget further. ?? Sustainability: It's not a one-and-done strategy. Organic growth yields lasting results and a steady stream of leads. ?? Customer Trust: Your audience values authenticity. Building an organic following fosters trust and credibility among potential clients. ?? Scalability: It grows with your company, adapting seamlessly to your evolving needs and objectives. ?? Competitive Advantage: Leveraging organic growth gives your B2B company a competitive edge in the marketplace.

Use video as a way to convey your message in-feed, on social media. This is by far the cheapest format, especially on LinkedIn. You can build entite funnel using only video and segmenting your audiences according to how many % of the video they consumed.

LinkedIn is amazing, but it’s expensive with CPM’s going above $200+ regularly. Offset the cost by using a 3rd party data provider, combined with Facebook. Whilst CTRs are usually lower, and it has a different nature as far as user behaviour, the cheaper CPMs more than make up for it. Without a 3rd party data provider, Facebook is pretty much useless for B2B though. Unqualified leads can get way out of hand and make the channel seem useless. So don’t forget to bring your own data to the party.

Media is 'where' your tribe hangs out and important to know for 'what' value - fun, inspiration, learning. And unless you have deep pockets for media blast, you need to know this to serve better. I have experienced places like online groups where most participants are there to sell as against help. Similar goes with networking events. So understanding not just the channel, media, the marketers need to understand the context, the behavioural metrics too. What do your ideal customer do on that particular channel and then serve context aware content.

Find where you audience is actually engaging. People that work for B2B companies are human, after all and are likely on social platforms - but they also engage with industry specific publications and news as a way to stay up to date on their specific niche. Leverage tools like SparkToro to find where your audience spends their time.

It's relevant to understand who you want to speak to, who your main interlocutor is, in order to create an effective content strategy. Important to remember that you can't speak to everyone at the same time when thinking about results for B2B businesses. Niche targeting is smart and efficient.

Content is key in engaging with the audience but creative and the messaging used to stop the scroll and get someone interested is arguably going to become more important. As for content, specifically, focus on what problem the prospect or customer is trying to solve when you create the content - it isn't about what you the marketer or company want to say so much as it is about what your prospects or customers want to consume and engage with.

It is essential that we understand our target market. Without this knowledge, bombarding an audience with any message is wishful thinking. Invest time in research: who are the decision-makers, who influences their decisions, what media do they consume, when are they active and when are they not? Also, don't forget that the buyer journey is always more complex and unpredictable than the picture we paint in our plan. We are much more likely to succeed if our content and media strategy adapts to the habits of our audience.

Create high-quality content. Your content should be informative, engaging, and relevant to your target audience. High-quality content is more likely to be shared and linked to, which can help you to reach a wider audience and improve your search engine rankings.

Create templatized content for each stage of the buyer's journey: inform, trigger, benefit, differentiate, business value, and confirm. Begin by examining your product portfolio. Create a complete buyer's journey for each of your solutions. Next, select a single solution and a key persona from the buying group. Create a persona specific buyer's journey. Repeat this as many times as you can to create highly segmented and relevant paths to purchase. Work with marketing operations, demand, sales, and product marketing to create automated and measurable paths that create cross-channel journeys for accounts and buying groups leveraging your content strategy. Look at the performance of your rev funnel to identify areas that need to be optimized.

B2B sale cycle is a long road for most enterprise organizations. Unlike B2C where you can see a quick return on investment, B2B takes time to mature. Sure measuring MQLs and opportunity creation help with managing spend (shortens the timeframe to measure) but too often companies continue to do the same thing with mediocre results. I would challenge B2B companies to test B2C concepts and measure for the long run. Take 5% of budget and test brand awareness campaigns rather than only spend on LinkedIn. It's more work but may have a higher return on investment.

In the long-run (dependent on the length of your sales cycle) if your b2b media strategy isn't driving a positive ROAS it isn't working. It needs to achieve inquiry, mql, sal, opportunity, and revenue targets. It needs to have the right conversion rates between each stage. Take a high level view of your go-to-market, diagnose the problem, and test and refine accordingly. For example, let's say that you find that your SAL to opportunity conversion is low. A good thing to test here would be to use B2B media to promote more benefit, differentiate, and confirm content and messaging. If all you are looking at in b2b media is your cost per lead and metrics that are pre-cost per lead like impressions and clicks you're optimizing with no context.

Just don't get too hung up on impressions, clicks, and CTR. Yeah, they can be an early indicator but if it's the wrong impressions served and the wrong people clicking it's worthless. Make sure you have a quality metric that you hold yourself to and can always refer back to.

Often we think about test and refine in terms of our own data and campaigns only. It is incredibly important to have foundational test/measure processes like A/B testing to understand what for your audiences. Many teams focus on their industry or audience only and fail to monitor emerging trends and data outside of their campaigns. Even looking at emerging B2C trends and refining your tactics to apply them to your audience can keep you ahead of the industry and stand out in B2B.

A cost-effective way to monitor media performance and results is by effectively using URL tracking parameters (UTM parameters). Understanding what the short and long term goals & needs of your business is important in refining your campaigns - you need to define success to be able to track against it!

If your team is small, using automation tools can be an effective way for many tasks to be accomplished at once. Scheduling social media posts a week or two in advance can save a ton of time to be reallocated to brand building or growing the funnel.

Outsource your implementation but never outsource your strategy. I recommend avoiding media agency's entirely. Purchase the bulk of your programmatic advertising through an ABM solution provider. Then use things like Facebook, Google Ad Network, and other services to re-target your website traffic. Weight your google AdWords spend towards keywords with greater purchase intent. A majority of the reporting from solutions like Hootsuite and Buffer is largely meaningless to anyone outside of the social media team. If you increased followers by 100% but the followers aren't buyers from your ICP accounts they have no strategic value to the business.

The essence of any successful media strategy lies in understanding the nuances of human behavior and emotions. So, even if you're outsourcing, make sure you're deeply involved in the strategy and decision-making process. Don't just hand over the keys to an agency or a tool and expect magic.

Outsourcing and automation, my fellow digital ninjas, are your secret weapons in the battle for cost-effective B2B media strategy: Outsourcing Allies: Enlist the aid of media agencies or freelancers for planning, buying, and execution. They bring expertise and save your precious time and resources. Automation Ninjutsu: Tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, and Zapier are your loyal apprentices. They streamline your workflows, boost productivity, and keep errors at bay. With outsourcing and automation, you become the master of efficiency. Focus on your strengths and conquer the B2B media realm with ease! ??

For a cost-effective approach to automation, consider leveraging free or affordable AI tools like Google's AutoML or OpenAI's GPT-3 for certain aspects of your media management, allowing you to enhance efficiency and innovation without significant financial investment.

Before you outline objectives for the campaign, the most effective way of saving money on your strategy is to reflect on past activities. Extract all the activities you pursued during the year (e.g., SEO content, newsletter) and list them against your expectations to ensure you find the ones that actually worked. Once you’ve collected them, the next viable step is to find out which of the activities contributed to your marketing growth and which ones should be buried until better days. Some metrics to help you figure out the activity effectiveness: - Number of sales-qualified opportunities - Win rate - Pipeline conversion rate - Average Deal Size

If you're using B2B as your paid media platform, try to niche down. You want your perfect-fit prospects to see you multiple times a week. If your audience is smaller, this increases your chances of becoming 'nice-famous' because you can get a high-enough amount of exposure of content to your audience.

What you measure, how you measure, and the frequency at which you measure are all incredibly important. It's great that defining objectives is listed above, but you also need acceptable objective/goal measurements defined specifically for your organization. For example, for B2B media, you should be aiming for less than a 12-month media spend CAC payback period. If you know your ACV and conversion rates from 1) lead to closed won and 2) SQO to closed won, you can quickly calculate your acceptable limits. For example, say you have an ACV of $10k and a lead-CW rate of 5% and a SQO-CW rate of 25%, your acceptable numbers would be: Cost per lead = ($10k*0.05) = $500 Cost per SQO = ($10k*0.25) = $2500 CAC ≤ $10k

B2B marketing operates less like a straight path and more like an intricate web. Unlike the often straightforward B2C journey, B2B decisions involve longer processes and multiple stakeholders. Channels amplify each other: an article might drive web traffic, prompting a webinar sign-up, while social media can boost trade show attendance. Treating channels as separate silos hinders the compound impact they can achieve together. A cohesive narrative across all channels ensures synergy and maximizes effectiveness.

Leverage the power of partnership with like-minded brands to host events, publicize news, etc. Joining forces - and resources - can lead to cost savings without compromising quality. For example, start-ups with smaller teams and budgets often do not have agency support, etc., while more established firms do and can help to push out joint press releases to broader audiences. Bringing your client databases together instantly expands your reach. If you or they have a beautiful office space, showcase it by hosting client events there, FOC. The key is to take the time to think things through together early and explore all the ways your respective assets can be used to amplify the results.