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Maximizing ROI: How to Align Your Marketing Strategy with Business Goals

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Are you tired of investing in marketing campaigns without seeing significant returns? You’re not alone. Many B2B organizations across industries struggle to achieve their desired ROI from their marketing efforts, but the issue may revolve around your strategy, not your execution.

By aligning your marketing strategy with your business goals, you can ensure that every campaign, message, and piece of content is working to achieve the outcomes that matter most to your business.

Below are 4 simple steps to ensure your marketing strategy is working towards your business goals and maximizing your ROI.

Table of Contents

  1. Define Clear Business Goals for Your Marketing Strategy
    • How to Set Business Goals
  2. Identify and Segment your Target Audience for Marketing Success
  3. Choose the Right Communication Channels to Reach Your Audience and Your Business Goals
  4. Evaluate Campaign Effectiveness and Optimize for Business Goals

1. Define Clear Business Goals for Your Marketing Strategy

Clearly defining clear business goals with your entire team is the first step in aligning your marketing strategy with your overall objectives. This involves understanding what you want to achieve with your marketing efforts, such as generating leads, increasing sales, or improving brand awareness.

How to Set Business Goals

To make sure you are driving your business in the right direction, we recommend SMART goals–and we don’t just mean intelligent goals that make sense for your business. You’ve probably heard of SMART goals before but here’s your reminder. You want to set goals that are…

Specific – Avoid vague goals. Instead, set specific ones such as “Increase website traffic by 50% next year” or “Increase B2B sales conversions by 25% next quarter.” The more specific you are, the more likely you are to achieve your goal because you will have a clear picture of the intended outcome instead of a vague idea of where you want to end up.

Measurable – What you want to achieve must be measurable to know whether you are progressing or not. For example, if your goal is to improve your lead quality, you need to identify the metrics that will indicate success or additional improvement opportunities, such as cost per lead and MQL to SQL conversion rates. After all, measuring your impact is the only way to know if you are getting closer to your goals.

Achievable – Setting realistic goals is the only way to achieve them. Be realistic about what your team can accomplish and how long that may take. While setting high goals is a great aspiration, you want to set your business up for success. Having realistic expectations and staying within parameters will help you achieve your goals instead of falling short.

Relevant – It might seem like a no-brainer, but your business goals must be relevant to the company’s overall mission. What does your company set out to achieve? What value do you bring to your market? And what goals will help you deliver that value to your targets?

Time-Bound – The only way to keep your team on track is to have a timeline. Setting goal-specific deadlines helps to keep your team motivated and moving in the right direction. For example, you may want to double your engagement on social immediately, but this takes time. Instead, set weekly, monthly, and quarterly milestones to show progress without setting overly-aggressive deadlines that stress out your team, ultimately setting them up for failure.

With clear goals in place, you can tailor your marketing strategy to the needs of your company and track your progress more effectively, as well as align your team to all be working toward the same goals. Without well-defined objectives, it is difficult to maintain expectations throughout your organization in terms of what marketing will deliver to your bottom line.

2. Identify and Segment Your Target Audience to Increase Conversions

Segmenting your target audience and then realigning your marketing initiatives to focus on the challenges that your audience is facing creates a significant and meaningful shift in your marketing strategy.

You may be a healthcare technology company looking to sell your software to large health systems; however, there are a large number of positions, departments, and staff with differing areas of influence within health systems. While you could target health systems in general, your message will reach many doctors, nurses, and other healthcare services staff who are not your target personas. Instead, you want to contact the decision makers in operations and IT who would be responsible for choosing new software.

By segmenting your overarching audience (health systems) into smaller, more targeted groups (operations and IT executives), you are more likely to reach relevant decision makers. You can more accurately hone in on their pain points and priorities so your content will speak directly to their needs, ensuring you engage the right audience with the right messaging from the start.

You may want to further segment and explore Account-Based Marketing. ABM includes a higher level of targeted personalization in its campaigns. To build brand awareness among specific health systems, you might start by identifying key companies you want to target, for example. Then, you will further segment their organization so you can craft messaging specifically to the needs and wants of all organizational stakeholders. When it comes time to try to convert the health system into a client, the entire organization is aware of your brand and its value to every segment of the company.

Once you thoroughly understand your target audience, you can align your marketing messages and tactics that resonate with them, leading them toward your desired outcomes. Without segmenting, you risk using the wrong messaging and engagement tactics for the wrong audience, leading to low engagement and wasted efforts. Instead, you can segment your audience to send a perfectly-crafted message that addresses the key pain points of your targeted decision makers, driving results and bringing you closer to your business goals.

3. Choose the Right Communication Channels to Reach Your Audience and Your Business Goals

Choosing the right communication channels is a must to achieve your marketing and business goals. Likewise, increasing the number of platforms on which your target audience can see your content is a massive driver of brand awareness and conversions. By choosing an omnichannel approach, you can cover your bases across several channels to engage your audiences wherever they go.

Different channels will be more effective depending on your goals and target audience. For example, social media may be a more effective channel for reaching cold leads and warming them to your brand, while email marketing may be more helpful in nurturing leads in your CRM. By combining the two, you engage new leads on social, get them into your CRM, and then continue to nurture them through email.

By understanding which channels are most efficient for each goal and audience, you can optimize your marketing strategy to guide sales-qualified leads throughout your buyer’s journey, and make investments where they deliver the most return, thus maximizing your ROI.

4. Evaluate Campaign Effectiveness and Optimize for Business Goals

Finally, evaluating the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns is essential to optimizing your marketing strategy and ensuring that it continues to align with your business goals as your organization evolves.

Over time, your goals and expectations may change, and your marketing strategy needs to keep up. As data comes in, you want to review and optimize your marketing efforts based on the results. For example, if you run a LinkedIn advertising campaign, you will want to look at your CPM and conversion rates. If CPM is increasing while conversions are decreasing, it’s time for a refresh. Look at your top-performing ads and create more content in a similar vein; look at low-performing ads and figure out where you can improve. What content your audience engages with can reveal what pain points and value props are most engaging to your targets.

By tracking your progress toward your goals and analyzing your campaign data, you can identify what’s working and what’s not, allowing you to make adjustments accordingly. This ongoing optimization is key to staying relevant and front-of-mind of B2B leads while maximizing your ROI and achieving your desired business outcomes.

Ultimately, aligning your marketing strategy with your business goals is essential to maximizing your ROI. By following these 4 simple steps, you can ensure that your marketing efforts drive results toward your desired outcomes.

Want to learn how Breezy Hill Marketing can help you create a marketing strategy that drives you toward your business goals? Contact us today.

Crystal Buessing

VP of Digital Strategy
Crystal uses her 12+ years of marketing experience to lead diverse teams and execute highly-personalized marketing strategies.

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