Maximize Your Marketing Budget

WHITE PAPER

10 Proven Ways to

MAXIMIZE YOUR MARKETING BUDGET

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White Paper 10 Proven Ways to Maximize your Marketing Budget

Introduction 4 Don’t skimp on content 6 Turn your spokespeople into assets

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Nurture your brand ambassadors 10 Find your rich seam of data

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Eliminate bad event habits 14 Maximize your reporting and monitoring investments

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Ensure your web site isn’t ‘leaking’ leads

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Get smart about SEO 20 Start a social advertising program

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Make your global marketing truly global

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Conclusion 26

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INTRODUCTION

White Paper 10 Proven Ways to Maximize your Marketing Budget

As budget-planning season begins, marketing teams are often faced with the challenge of how to achieve more with less. Given the increased scrutiny of marketing budgets in these tough economic times, it is no surprise that every dollar allocated toward marketing efforts needs to be attributed to direct results that impact the company’s bottom line.

Today, marketing must clearly demonstrate return-on-investment by generating leads, cross-selling additional products and services to existing customers or improving the overall customer experience.

As a marketer, if you are about to undertake your planning and budget exercise for the next year (or perhaps you are in the latter stages of finalizing your budget), be sure to consider these approaches for getting maximum value from your spend.

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DON’T SKIMP ON CONTENT

White Paper 10 Proven Ways to Maximize your Marketing Budget

Do you have a line item in your budget for content generation? If not, you may be making a false economy.

A strong flow of original content allows you to get far greater bang for your buck. A single piece of unique research, for example, can be turned into PR material, an email campaign, a landing page, a Webinar and a blog post. It may take time and investment upfront, but great content will deliver much further-reaching benefits than simply populating all of these channels with traditional promotional messages.

Too often, content is seen as a nice-to-have. It’s something to focus on after you have the basics in place. But today, content IS the basic requirement. Make sure you have some budget built into all your campaigns for content. Better still, create a central content budget and create materials that can feed all your channels and programs.

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TURN YOUR SPOKESPEOPLE INTO ASSETS

White Paper 10 Proven Ways to Maximize your Marketing Budget

There is a fundamental, and costly misperception about spokesperson training. 80% of the time is usually spent on coaching spokespeople how to avoid answering questions. The reality is, most spokespeople will never be in a confrontational media interview so their carefully constructed and highly expensive ‘armor’ will never pay its dues.

Instead, most of the interviews your spokespeople do will be opportunities to deliver value. A good spokesperson knows what a reporter is looking for and concisely delivers it to ensure inclusion in the article. But more than that, a spokesperson that is an asset can spot other potential opportunities and think on their feet to turn a so-so article into a great one. And, a really valuable spokesperson makes such a positive impression that they become a regular source of expertise for the reporter – and of ideas for you.

Not all of this can be trained of course. So don’t waste precious budget on training large numbers of spokespeople simply because they have the right title or experience. But if you have someone with great spokesperson potential in your company, it’s worth investing in regular practical coaching to turn them into a valuable asset.

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NURTURE YOUR BRAND AMBASSADORS

White Paper 10 Proven Ways to Maximize your Marketing Budget

Your brand ambassadors are comprised of your employees, your executive team, your customers, your partners, your vendors and any other individual that interacts with your company in a positive manner.

Leverage the ambassadors you currently have and amplify them through content. Get them to write and speak about core company stories, customer stories, or other events and happenings about your company. For example, if you have a product team in your company, get them to create content for your corporate blog, or create videos of them discussing your newest product in a passionate way. Distribute this content across all your channels (and especially in social media channels like YouTube). Have each employee set-up Google author tags in Google+ and get them to interact on other industry blogs and forums.

Unless these ambassadors are already social media savvy, you’ll need to allocate some budget to training them on social media governance matters so that employees are comfortable with the “do’s and don’ts” of interacting on social channels.

This investment will pay off if you’re successful in getting ambassadors to contribute content. But getting them to do so frequently can be a challenge.

Here are some easy tips to consider: • Publish a list of topics or suggestions for content and ask for volunteers who feel comfortable creating content for each topic. If no volunteers come forth, recommend certain individuals based on their area of expertise.

• Create an editorial calendar. Share it with each contributor, and assign on his or her Outlook calendars deadlines for when their content is due. Don’t try to do too much; keep the calendar simple, and even getting a post a month from each individual is a win.

• In some cases, have your marketing or PR team create outlines or story “shells” that your subject matter experts can then expand upon. That way you get the benefit of more contributors without putting excess burden of responsibility on them.

• Stuck for content ideas? Search your social channels and your competitors’ channels and uncover topics and areas of concern your prospects and customers are experiencing in your industry. Assigning people to respond to questions in LinkedIn discussion groups, for example, is an easy way to generate relevant content.

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FIND YOUR RICH SEAM OF DATA

White Paper 10 Proven Ways to Maximize your Marketing Budget

All companies have data or research that is unique to them and that can be leveraged as a strategic “secret weapon” to unlock new opportunities. It is well worth investing time in examining your data assets. For example, a cloud computing company may possess a wealth of data on load volumes that it can then aggregate and extrapolate into unique talking points on customer adoption of the cloud. By publishing this data in a unique and compelling manner, they have just created content that they can then own and share that will generate greater return awareness for them. What’s more, as media outlets increase their focus on so-called “data journalism”, this is exactly the type of information that can form the foundations of an outstanding PR campaign.

Because there is now greater access to this kind of data, survey-based research is starting to lose some of its appeal. There’s something less credible about findings based on what people say they do in a survey versus what they actually do. If you’re going to spend budget on research for PR and content marketing purposes, make sure you have identified a truly unique angle.

Similarly, there are many other options today for conducting market research without having to default to expensive surveys or focus groups. Social media listening tools are a great place to start and are a fraction of the cost. If you have already built a sizable community, you can tap the expertise and views within that group to get feedback on your products.

Some suggestions for leveraging what you already have to gain valuable insight: • Talk to your finance and operations departments about the Key Performance Indicators your company uses already. The systems will already be in place to track this data and there may be some compelling trends hidden within them.

For example, if you use downloads as a KPI, are there peak times of year or days of the week for downloads? If so – and assuming you can make some intelligent observations about these trends – you have a potentially valuable source of data for all forms of content marketing, not to mention some essential proof points for PR. • Identify the feedback mechanisms you have, including community forums, support desks, social channels, customer advisory boards and newsletter subscribers. Each of these is a potential source of insight and opinion that can be turned into compelling evidence for your marketing programs. For example, perhaps you’re a consumer electronics manufacturer and you spot an increase in set-up queries every year on the day after Black Friday. You might launch an integrated Set-Up Saturday campaign to attract more customers this year.

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ELIMINATE BAD EVENT HABITS

White Paper 10 Proven Ways to Maximize your Marketing Budget

If your company regularly participates in high profile events, conferences or seminars (or perhaps you are planning to create and host an event of your own,) including a budget for PR and social media activities at these events will help increase the success of your event. The key is to not be formulaic in your approach to events. There are more ways to generate visibility at an event than tchotchkes and press releases.

Live social media engagement and monitoring (such as live tweeting, live video hosting and Q&A with members of the media at the event) are often picked up and broadcast on a larger scale, increasing the reach of your event.

Don’t assume for every event that you will automatically secure a certain number of media briefings, or a guaranteed number of attendees. Few media outlets cover events per se anymore so it’s rare to see reporters churning out multiple news stories from vendors during a conference.

Social media provides that function now. Instead, they tend to focus on extrapolating one or two key themes so your goal should be to be included in some of those stories. Having some news to announce at the event will help, but be sure to get the information to your media contacts well in advance. Leverage videos, mobile apps, surveys and Twitter streams before, during and after the event to maximize effectiveness. Train your event attendees and prepare them to be ready to engage with journalists and attendees with key messages that tie-in to your overall promotion.

After the event, amplify your content through event-specific landing pages and Twitter streams that promote the announcements and videos captured during the event.

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MAXIMIZE YOUR REPORTING AND MONITORING INVESTMENTS

White Paper 10 Proven Ways to Maximize your Marketing Budget

Investing in media monitoring and reporting on results of media, PR and communications efforts are critical to demonstrating success and tracking new opportunities to inject your company’s message. An investment in proper social media monitoring and reporting tools will strengthen your overall social media investment while capturing progress against KPI’s and ensuring an effective ROI for continued social media investment.

While there are several great tools out there that can really dive into very detailed analysis of your marketing efforts, a large investment in these tools is not always mandatory. Using what you already have in place in your organization or leveraging many free tools (such as Google Analytics) can help you uncover opportunities to inject content or interact with new audiences. Setting up Google Alerts can help identify relevant topics or opportunities to react to items that your competitors are currently engaging in. The key is having a plan in place and using what you do have so that you can capture an effective ROI on your marketing expenditures.

Limit the number of metics you actually track and focus on those metrics that effectively drive or impact your business. Companies often flood their reports by tracking unnecessary metrics that have little impact to business outcomes (for example, measuring how many new followers you have on your company’s Twitter or Facebook page may look impressive, but the true measurement of success is how those followers are actually engaging with your company.) A more effective approach is to try and simplify your reporting into areas that are meaningful. For example:

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Am I effectively measuring and capturing new customers?

Do I know they are real customers (because they have actually purchased from me) or are they still prospects or simply passive visitors?

What else can I do to turn these visitors/prospects to customers, and am I measuring the effectiveness of those activities?

Once they are customers, am I measuring how I am deepening our relationship? At the same time, am I monitoring and responding to any servicing issues that will ensure I do continue to deepen customer relationships?

If your company utilizes marketing management tools such as Eloqua, Pardot or Marketo, it may be worthwhile to focus resources on improving the quality of the data that is entered into these tools as well as refining your campaign scoring models. Experimenting with A/B testing on different messages or developing a nurturing campaign for more valuable leads is an effective way to maximize and improve the opportunities you already have in your database.

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ENSURE YOUR WEB SITE ISN’T ‘LEAKING’ LEADS

White Paper 10 Proven Ways to Maximize your Marketing Budget

You know the scenario: The current web site has been around for several years. Pages are added frequently, many different authors contribute content and the whole experience is starting to creep slightly off-brand.

It’s a common problem, as few companies ever budget to make periodic refreshes to their existing web properties.

Having a budget item to audit and refresh your web site can be extremely beneficial. A web site audit will uncover areas where navigation and site links may be broken, where content is stale or off-brand or where there are current opportunities (such as links to new social channels) that are currently overlooked.

Some of these challenges may be technical and may need to involve your IT team or any vendors that host your CMS or other systems. But it is worthwhile to periodically review your web site to fix any technical issues.

Plan on reviewing the content on your website and if there are gaps in content that are obvious, a budget should be set aside to create new content or opportunities to add content within the site structure. In many instances, even enhancing blog content can be an effective solution in updating your site if adding new page templates is cumbersome.

Some common website “tweaks” that are often over-looked, and yet could yield rich results in your lead generation efforts include:

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Simplify the number of fields a prospect has to enter in order to find out more information. All you really need is name, company, email and phone number – anything more may feel too intrusive and scare your prospects away.

Make sure your home page (and all key pages) has visible calls to action only one-click away. Don’t make it difficult for your visitors to contact you at any point during their stay on your website.

Ensure your social channels are all fully connected and linked, and that buttons identifying them are clearly visible on your home page Validate that your back-end tracking system is accurately capturing and tracking leads. Omniture, Google Analytics – whichever system you are using, periodically audit it to make sure leads are accurately tracked and data is effectively mined.

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GET SMART ABOUT SEO

White Paper 10 Proven Ways to Maximize your Marketing Budget

Studies have demonstrated that a majority of major purchases (especially in B2B procurement cycles) begin with an online search – in many cases, as high as 80% of purchase decisions begin on a search engine. In addition, visitors tend to place greater importance on “natural” search results versus paid search ads, based on the fact that Google, Yahoo and Bing are valuing companies enough to place them so high on the page one results for that search term.

Yet many companies treat their organic search engine optimization efforts as an after-thought or assume search results will happen naturally without having to place dedicated resources or effort behind it.

If your company is in such a predicament, planning for SEO can be one of the most effective marketing strategies you undertake. If you are currently utilizing SEO tactics as part of your marketing spend, it may be worthwhile to set aside additional budgets to:

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Audit your website for broken links and fix on-page technical SEO issues.

Improve your overall SEO by integrating existing or new social channels and blogs into your SEO mix.

Updating your keyword list to ensure your site is optimized for any changes or trends within your industry.

If you can only focus on a limited amount of items, the simplest and fastest way to improve your SEO results should be: • Develop a keyword list of high-performing keywords relative to your business that you want to rank for. Incorporate these into your website structure and content in a natural way (never keyword stuff!).

• Create content that is valuable to your audience and create and fix page titles, ensuring they are consistent.

• Try to capture as many quality inbound links to your site as you can and ensure links are working correctly.

• Fix your URL structure and make sure you are consistent with the URL structure across all your pages.

• Publish content frequently. Keep your site fresh and keep it growing. If your site structure does not easily enable creating additional pages of content, then leverage your blog to its fullest extent.

• Time – it is your greatest ally, and the longer your site has been around, the greater emphasis Google will place on it as a site of trust and authority.

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START A SOCIAL ADVERTISING PROGRAM

White Paper 10 Proven Ways to Maximize your Marketing Budget

You may already have had success using paid search ads on Google and Bing, but have you considered alternative paid advertising opportunities? For B2B clients, social channels are proving to be a profitable and un-tapped area to generate new leads. Social media integrated with traditional marketing methods has proven to be an excellent tool when launching a product. For B2B clients, social media is the ideal platform to capture new sales, given the conversational nature of B2B communications and the lengthy time it often takes to go from lead to closed sale. Social media marketing is a true extension of word of mouth advertising, and whether companies want to admit it or not, prospects and customers are likely talking about your company (and your competitors) on social channels.

Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook all offer advertising capabilities that, depending on who your target audience is, could become a prime source for new leads if executed effectively. Social advertising can be an easy (and often necessary) way to drive traffic and a base of active followers on a social channel. If your channel is new or if you are struggling to capture attention, advertising may be the solution to your problem.

Content syndication is another effective way to help fuel discovery of your social media content. The idea is to drive more engagement with your content by writing it in to related digital contexts to either boost traffic to your website or blog, get exposure to your company or product or even to generate new business leads. Outbrain, CNet, UBM, QuinStreet, TechTarget and CBS Interactive are all channels that specialize in paid tech B2B content syndication. Using these channels effectively through publishing snippets of content, including video or graphical content, can increase awareness of your offering.

Display ads were once denigrated as being no better than invasive “pop-up� ads, but the choices today for effective display advertising are quite diverse and effective. Many display ad networks allow for site and social retargeting – which provide for an even greater network of possible targets and a higher return-on-investment. Display advertising and social advertising programs can also be extended onto your mobile platform, so that when prospects are utilizing mobile search or mobile social channels, serving a relative and insightful ad for your company at that time may yield successful results.

Conquesting can also be an extremely effective method of capturing market share as well as reminding your existing customers why they should choose you again and again. By taking out ads next to editorial content about competitive companies, you seize the opportunity to remind prospects that they have other choices. To maximize your conquesting efforts, work with an agency partner who can recommend media channels with the technology support to identify and serve ads to users who have been to competitive locations in the past, as well as users identified by purchase history data indicating a competitive association.

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MAKE YOUR GLOBAL MARKETING TRULY GLOBAL

White Paper 10 Proven Ways to Maximize your Marketing Budget

If your company has a global presence, make sure your marketing allocation for global efforts is really serving your needs. For instance, targeting “Europe� is not the same or as effective as targeting the specific countries within Europe you want to reach. A realistic approach that takes into account geographic and language nuances within each country is far more effective than blanket marketing campaigns that blast content that may not be relevant from country to country.

Experience also proves that having one global agency support you in your global marketing efforts is far more efficient than trying to manage multiple agencies in every individual market. By partnering with a single global agency, you get country-specific expertise and content strategies that will resonate specific to those individual audiences. Some of the ways to ensure this approach is delivering efficiencies include: centralized reporting, coordination at strategy-setting stage and ensuring you have local spokespeople and materials before embarking on an international investment.

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White Paper 10 Proven Ways to Maximize your Marketing Budget

CONCLUSION Planning your marketing spend can be a juggling act – especially today when the range of available tactics is so great. But, whatever your mix of tactics, certain elements need to be prioritized, such as strong PR and marketing content, a well-optimized web site and effective monitoring and measurement. These basics will form a foundation for all your other marketing programs, ensuring a higher return overall.

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White Paper 10 Proven Ways to Maximize your Marketing Budget

About us LEWIS was founded in 1995 by a former journalist and, since then, it has grown to over 500 employees based in 28 wholly-owned offices across the US, EMEA and Asia Pacific.

Its regional headquarters are in London, San Francisco and Singapore. LEWIS is known for delivering bold digital communications campaigns that enhance revenue, value and reputation for global brands.

Digital communications services span PR and media relations, social media marketing, search engine optimization and digital content production.

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