Marketing leaders are no strangers to pressure and change, but venturing into an unpredictable 2023 after a shaky 2022 has created even more scrutiny about how to maximize budgets and deploy the most cost-effective strategies – while still driving impact.
Budget uncertainties, reluctant B2B buyers, evolving digital habits, and changing data practices all lead to questions about channel priorities, technology investments, and operational effectiveness. Are brand efforts necessary if buyers aren’t even ready to spend? Should we take a broad advertising approach to save on ad spend or continue to be hyper-targeted on specific channels? Are there weak links in my tech stack that could free up budget?
These can be hard questions to answer – but not if you have the data you need to make them. Unfortunately, too many marketers struggle to answer these questions or confidently make decisions, because they either haven’t captured the necessary data OR the data they’ve captured is not sufficiently organized. According to Salesforce’s 8th Edition State of Marketing Report, a majority of marketers “predict they’ll use nearly twice as many data sources in 2023 than they used in 2021,” but in that same report “31% of B2B marketers say getting a unified view of customer data is a challenge.”
(source: Salesforce, 8th Edition State of Marketing Report)
So how can you get a handle on all of your data to make it actionable and before it becomes outdated, to gain a centralized view of all of every tool, campaign, and channel – so you can be as nimble and cost-efficient as possible in this environment?
With Octane11.
Octane11 helps by ingesting and connecting ALL of your data sources in minutes, converting them into a consistent, reliable, and usable format, and delivering actionable insights through rich, flexible visualizations. In fact, Octane11 customers experience as much as an 86% reduction in reporting lag time!
With Octane11, marketers can easily decide how to optimize their budget for maximum performance. This could mean cutting the budget for a given channel that has been quietly underperforming or shifting spend to upper funnel initiatives; or doubling down on existing customer activations or testing new ICP criteria, for example.
That all said, it’s easy for long-term impact to be shrouded by short-term needs. Marketers also need to prove that their investments are preparing their company for when the pendulum inevitably swings back to growth. As noted in LinkedIn Collective’s recent article Reimagining B2B Measurement in the New Economy, “the recession is likely to be shorter than your buying cycle,” so making insights about customer behaviors and alignment with sales teams even more pivotal to decision making. Nurturing those buyers even during a downturn can provide you with a competitive edge when they receive the green light to purchase again.
Finally, preparing for that next wave of growth also means developing a solid baseline. Implementing a strong measurement foundation today will help you document the impact of various marketing tactics and vendors, so you can maximize efficiency when buyers return. This will help you create the base case metrics necessary to make the case for future budgets and provide you with the framework to compare your outcomes to those of your peers.
Do you want to ensure efficiency AND impact this year? Octane11 can help you make informed, data-backed decisions. Let’s chat!
Book a demo at: www.octane11.com/contact/
