Kiwi marketers urged to take a hard-nosed business stance

Kiwi marketers urged to take a hard-nosed business stance

Marketers in New Zealand need to be more business, sales and return-on-investment minded if they want to survive talk of looming redundancies and a slowing economy.

The CEO of search agency, Insight Online, Kim Voon, said many CEOs have an accounting background and won’t hesitate to kick the marketing team to touch at the first hint of a recession – and many marketing managers need to be aware and proactive to stop this from happening.

“When a company is doing poorly, marketing is often the first to take the hit. That’s partly because bean counters can’t see the value of marketing, and partly because marketers need to do a better job of showing and proving ROI.

“There’s no question that every organisation needs marketing, but it needs to be clearly defined with a clear view on return-on-investment. Even brand awareness campaigns should be made to work for their dollar,” Voon said.

Voon said that reporting on ‘likes’, ‘views’ and ‘impressions’ and even ‘shares’ as an end result don’t offer dollars and cents value to a business.

“We need to show a correlation between what we measure in marketing and increased sales.

“If you are doing a brand awareness campaign, then the key conversion technique may not a lead, but it should at least be an email address – an email address you can use to generate returns on your marketing.”

Voon offers the following three tips for better ROI based marketing:

1. Learn from account based marketing (ABM)

Account based marketing – targeting specific organisations and decision makers with the most revenue potential – is an emerging discipline within B2B marketing because it is focussed on the sale.

“ABM narrows your focus beyond persona-based marketing. Your prospects are highly targeted with content that is only relevant to their problems and pain points.

“Certainly, targeting beyond general personas is harder work, but the returns can more than make up for it,” Voon said.

2. Integrate marketing and sales

Voon says that while an organisation may not want to merge sales and marketing into one unit, it can integrate the departments using common technology platforms that facilitate a more seamless collaboration between the two.

“It may be as simple as a shared spreadsheet or more sophisticated software like Salesforce and Hubspot that can track a prospect from first engagement through handover to a sales person and the final transaction.

“Most of the data marketers work with is aggregated, anonymised data. Facebook and Google Analytics produce anonymised data. Capturing email addresses and other details using online forms helps to put a face to the customer,” Voon said.

3. Know where your budget is coming from

“The lesson from this is that marketers need to understand the business numbers. Where your marketing budget is coming from, why it is that amount and the kind of return that your CEO and CFO are expecting from that.”

Voon said that while the bean counters may occupy many positions of authority, nobody is going to a fire a marketing department that can prove it is generating bottom line revenue.

For more information visit: https://insightonline.co.nz/

Ends.

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