To succeed in 2021, brands should focus their efforts towards areas that align with the goals of all the internal stakeholders, taking lessons learned from 2020 as a stepping stone.
B2B marketers have witnessed an entirely different 2020 than they originally planned. Even though the pandemic crisis is slowly fading away, experts predict brands aren’t enthusiastic about investing their money in the marketing budget. In fact, Forrester has predicted that businesses will reduce their marketing expenditure by $15 billion by the end of 2021.
As budgets have been tightened, it’s more critical than ever to maximize the impact of marketing even if less budgets are allotted to the expenditure. Due to the increase in buy-in from internal stakeholders, 2021 provides an opportunity for CMOs to put the lessons they have learned to optimize their marketing strategy.
Below are a few activities that brands can focus on to maximizing their ROI in 2021.
Aligning Internal Goals
When setting the new marketing budgets, it’s imperative that CMOs align their marketing goals with the brands’ goals. Since marketing programs should enable the brand to achieve specific objectives, it is imperative that the strategic goals align as well as the required budget is in sync with the other department of the enterprise.
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Furthermore, to garner the support of their C-suite counterparts, CMOS can establish clear expectations from the beginning that everyone will strongly agree on. Thus, by setting clear goals that encompass the enterprises’ goals, CMOs can know what their marketing team is expected to achieve in 2021.
Developing Plans by Focusing on the Below Three Areas
Although increasing revenue sits at the core of marketing goals, brands must focus on other areas as below while developing plans and budgets for 2021.
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Investing in the foundation of the brand
Moving forward in 2021, brands should focus on strengthening the foundation of building their brand. This will not only provide a better insight into the value proposition as well as an ideal prospect’s profile, but also solidify the brand’s mission statement, its values, and competitive differentiators. By investing in strategic positioning areas, audience personas and brand expression will be able to convert many leads and increase their revenue in the long-term.
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Focusing on tech and operations
As CMOs are responsible for weaving ROI with marketing spend, it is important that they focus on prioritizing operations as well. Since personalization is at the center stage of today’s customer journey, marketers will require clean data and the right martech stack that can help to increase their speed and eliminate the expenditure on unnecessary marketing efforts.
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Focusing on areas with the highest ROI
To make the most out of each cent on the dollar, brands should shift their investment on goals in a more strategic way. They should analyze the channels they have historically invested in, and analyze the tech stack data for the top-performing channels.
This will help make data-driven decisions and allocate budgets to the channels that deliver the greatest ROI. Furthermore, it will also enable them to understand whether they should invest in low-performing channels or not.
Taking a Step Back?
Stepping into 2021, brands should step back a little, analyze then set a strong foundation and align their strategy to it. Although it is not possible to predict the future, brands should take the coming year’s planning to reflect on what they have learned and then rely on data for investing their marketing money in the areas that will provide the highest impact.