The end of the financial year is approaching, and – miracle of miracles – you still have some money left in the marketing budget.

The clock is counting down to June 30, so you have to spend it quickly before it disappears – but what will deliver the best results in the least amount of time? Before you go and invest in a brand-new blimp or an inflatable tube guy, here’s our take on the best way to spend your remaining b2b marketing budget.

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Experiment with retargeting 

We’ve all seen those scarily prescient ads on the internet – you’ve looked at an item online but not purchased it, and suddenly, ads for that item are popping up on every other website you visit. This is remarketing in action. Basically, your site drops an anonymous cookie on your visitor’s browser, which allows your retargeting provider to place ads on other sites they visit, redirecting them back to your site.

If you’re lucky, your website's first-time conversion rate is around 2%. But that still means 98% of people didn’t buy anything. Remarketing goes after this 98% and gives them a second chance to purchase – or, at the very least keeps your business front of mind. We’ve seen a $10 return for every $1 spent on remarketing – a pretty impressive ROI, I’m sure you’ll agree. 

Give your least-loved assets a makeover

There’s bound to be some call-to-actions or landing pages that didn’t perform as well as you’d hoped. Identify the ones with the lowest conversion rates, and give them some much-needed TLC, whether it be a new design or tweaked copy more tuned to your buyer persona’s needs.

And if no one has checked under the hood of your website for some time, investing your b2b marketing budget in some heat map tracking could also be a good idea. Heatmapping will show where people click and how far they’re scrolling. If some pretty essential information is being missed out on because of where it’s positioned or a page you would like to direct more attention to in the new financial year, now’s the time.

Invest in a marketing automation platform

If your marketing content is on point, you should see an influx of new and qualified leads coming into your business – huzzah!

But the job’s not quite yet–you need to convert those leads into paying customers.

If your business is struggling to keep up with the flow – perhaps your sales team is feeling overwhelmed by the number of leads you’re passing on to them; perhaps there’s some confusion about which conversations marketing and sales should be having with leads or perhaps you’re having trouble keeping track of your leads across every marketing channel – then this could be a good time to think about investing in a marketing automation platform. A good marketing automation platform can help you nurture your leads by giving them the information they need precisely when needed, based on their behaviour across all your marketing channels (not just email).

However, it’s important to note that marketing automation platforms are about scaling your success, not getting a machine to do your marketing for you.

Invest in a social media automation tool

I’m sure we’ve all had our hair-tearing moments with social media – the tasks associated with maintaining it can be repetitive, time-consuming and seemingly never-ending. And we all want more time in the day for the fun and creative stuff.

A social media automation tool can be a great way to get back some of that precious time in your day. It automates the more repetitive tasks, like scheduling promotions for evergreen content, leaving you and your team with more time to craft great content and status updates.

But one caveat (and imagine I’m saying this in a really spooky voice): beware the pitfalls of social media automation. It can be tempting to automate anything and everything, but it should not – I repeat, not – serve as a replacement for customer interaction. You don’t want to fall into the trap that Progressive, an American auto insurance company, fell into when they made the ill-fated decision to respond to every Tweet with an automated message

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Needless to say, the public didn’t take this cold response to a sensitive subject too kindly, and their reputation took a huge hit as a result. 

Hire an inbound marketing agency to review what could be better

You’ve undoubtedly got a million other ideas of what to do with your leftover b2b marketing budget, but time’s ticking away. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by choice, think about getting someone to do the thinking for you.

An inbound marketing agency will be able to look at all stages of the purchase funnel and tell you your top priorities. Here are just three simple options to consider.

  1. 12-month Inbound Marketing Strategy: Start your year with a bang with a freshly made, KPI-driven plan ready for you and your team to execute!
  2. Persona Workshop: Get 100% clear on your customer segment needs, fears, motivations, communications preferences and how - exactly - you can help them with a comprehensive persona workshop. The best part? Bring your most marketing-sceptic stakeholders along for the ride.
  3. Nurture program: We’re seeing a 15% lead-to-close conversion rate on some of our current client nurture streams - compared with a 3% conversion for standard sales emails. Why not see what we can achieve for you?

Whatever you do, don’t just spend the end-of-year budget on pens! Put your money where it’s going to have the most impact. And if you’re unsure where that is, call in the experts. It’ll be worth every penny.

Brand chemistry is a b2b marketing agency winning your customers' hearts and minds through inbound, brand, content, lead generation and digital strategy.
Our marketing specialists achieve stellar results with the latest lead generation techniques.

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