Similarly, there are values that will not provide qualitative information and whose measurement is irrelevant and a considerable waste of time. And it is curious that sometimes, these irrelevant values are the ones that most attract the attention of the other members of the board of directors. The famous data intoxication that we have already written about on other occasions and that we must not fall into.
What objectives are relevant in B2B digital marketing?
New clients
Undoubtedly, attracting new customers is the ultimate goal. How many should be acquired annually is a question to which each company has a different answer.
"The more the merrier" is not an answer. Neither realistic nor serious.
It is not realistic because an objective must be quantifiable. And it is not serious because each company must be aware of the implications of acquiring a new client in terms of the adaptation of the company – personnel, equipment and processes – to serve them with products and/or services.
Can we get 5 new customers? 10? 1 or 2? The answer is up to you.
Customer loyalty
In the B2B sector, we tend to forget about this objective. It is true that when a relationship is established between companies, it has so many consequences that, unless something serious happens, the relationship will continue for years without any problems. Just as in B2C, loyalty processes are an obsession of the marketing team because customers are fickle, capricious, temperamental and very unfaithful. In the world of B2B relationships, this does not usually happen.
But it doesn't cost anything to have a little list of timor leste consumer email detail either. It's easy to create online loyalty programs based on offering customers a flow of information that is useful to them.
From sending newsletters with the latest developments in your area or in the sector, to invitations to online courses and seminars that can help you do your job better and faster.
Although business relationships once established are usually destined to last, it is worth investing a small amount into cultivating them.
Positive ROI
ROI , the acronym for Return On Investment , is established to measure the economic performance of different marketing actions.
It seems logical to think that this performance should be positive... in all cases?
It would be ideal, but it depends. Apart from the obvious difficulty of measuring it in actions such as attendance at events or advertising in traditional media, there are the presumed benefits of the aforementioned actions and other online ones that can be measured and give us negative data.
I'll explain this with data from a supposed online campaign: we launched a Display campaign with a ROI of -10%. A negative ratio if we compare it with the Search campaign, which offers us a positive ROI of 35%.
Initial push? Eliminate the Display campaign and shift investment to Search. It seems logical, but after a few months we see that the ROI of the Search campaign has sunk to 10%. What happened?
There are marketing actions, even online, whose ROI will rarely be positive if we analyse them in isolation. They are actions aimed at creating a brand and memory in the minds of our potential clients. Actions that will serve to ensure that when the client is (as in the example we mentioned) actively searching for the products or services we offer, our brand and its iconosphere (graphic identity, colours, typography...) will be familiar to them even if they don't know why.
This familiarity will translate into trust, which will translate into conversion: a sales opportunity for the sales team.
Therefore, in a B2B digital marketing plan we recommend measuring the ROI of online actions as a whole, always taking into account the implications of investment deviations from seemingly unprofitable channels to profitable ones.
But the analysis of these factors is part of the role of your online marketing agency . They are the ones who must know how to move investments to achieve the necessary balance. And to do so, they must know how to delve into the analysis of certain data and interpret it correctly.
This is a broad topic that we will cover in future articles.
And there are no other objectives of interest? You may be asking yourself this question. The honest answer is that at the decision-making level of a marketing manager, no. These three clear objectives are the ones that will determine the entire strategy.