Five Tips to Maximize Your Marketing Resources 

Today’s Marketer  

Whether you are a marketing army of one or a robust team of ten or more, marketers wear many hats within their organization. Plus, most industries are fast-paced, keeping us on our toes in terms of changing business goals and conditions. No matter the market, making the most of your time, resources, and budget is crucial to success.   

What can you or your Team do to better prioritize initiatives, stay organized, engage with other departments, and create consistency in content creation and data collection? In this blog, get five tips to elevate your marketing efforts to achieve greater results.   

What are the five tips?  

1. Establish your Team’s roles and responsibilities  

2. Identify where your audience is  

3. Be consistent with your planning  

4. Establish your KPIs and reporting cadence   

5. Focus on quality over quantity  

Let’s break down each tip with practical insights and actionable strategies to kick off your marketing plans for the new year. 

Tip 1: Establish your Team’s roles and responsibilities  

Who will do what? Seems like a simple question, but for marketing teams, it can be difficult as the role extends to areas like sales (lead generation), human resources (team retention and recruitment through branding), accounts (client retention and engagement), and product Teams (branding and product marketing). Even small Teams will require conversations within the organization to create a clear understanding of responsibilities both internally and on outsourcing decisions.  

Once established, the next step is to decide on a review and approval process for content and assets to ensure content quality, accuracy, and accountability from all stakeholders and contributors involved. Add tips on how to give thoughtful, constructive, and timely feedback to smooth the process for product or subject matter experts who don’t generate content regularly. To secure accountability, document your processes in an organized and sharable way, not in a document saved locally. Establishing request guidelines and request submission forms for all departments to use will keep you organized and accountable.   

Documentation also comes in handy to secure your much-needed days off and during times of growth or transition. At least one other person in your organization should know how to do each function. Finally, stay in the loop through regular meetings like weekly stand-ups, 1-on-1s, and cross-departmental meetings. 

With your internal operations documented and aligned, it’s time to move forward with marketing initiatives, and what better place to start than where your audience is already at?

Tip 2: Identify where your audience is 

Here’s a hint: ask them. Who better to tell you what marketing works than your customers and prospects? To do this, create a process for asking prospective buyers how they found you when they connect. Add a form field for this information on your online contact forms, and have Teams ask when they receive a call. 

Track and report on this data to discover trends over time and see what channels are or aren’t driving traffic, which can help you narrow down channels and reduce or boost ad investments. It’s impossible to be everywhere all at once, so stay efficient and keep your department profitable by being strategic and targeted. Now let’s use those channels to showcase content. 

Adding fields to forms asking how a prospect found you can help make your marketing more efficient and cost-effective. 

Tip 3: Be consistent with your planning 

At this point, it is time to focus on staying strategically aligned during implementation versus becoming a taskmaster. Ask yourself, “How does this asset or content piece play into the organization’s goals?”.  

Creating a content and marketing calendar that houses all deliverables in one place helps keep those larger organizational goals and the audience data collected top of mind. Create a holistic view of the branding, product marketing, culture, and other asset types at work and see how they can work in tandem. For example, look to email and social to distribute long-form content like case studies, blogs, or whitepapers.  

Now you can determine how to space out your content to create a cadence and consistency essential to audience building across channels. Especially for B2B marketing, the buyer’s journey is long, and content for every step guides prospective customers to close.   

Content calendars are a space that can spur creativity in a thoughtful and organized way. It should be flexible and available outside your department to ensure team buy-in and encourage content sharing. Additional communication to remind Teams of the assets coming or assets available can help distribute them.   

With a content pipeline in motion, it’s time to use reporting to see results and make optimizations for future assets. 

Tip 4: Establish your KPIs and reporting cadence 

All marketing strategies and planning should have KPIs associated with them to align with larger business goals. These goals should be specific to your organization versus an industry benchmark, which looks at results more broadly.  

Agree on a reporting cadence that everyone is held accountable to. This allows you to pivot quickly if your efforts aren’t seeing the desired results within the allotted timeframe. You won’t be able to tie 100% of marketing metrics back to ROI, especially on efforts aimed at brand awareness, hiring, Team Member engagement, and trade show activity as these results take time to see and aren’t always tied directly to marketing dollars.  

Focus on the metrics that matter, the ones that truly tie back to business goals versus those that can be misleading when taking targeting and quality leads into account. Additionally, know what metrics decision-makers are looking for so that you don’t waste resources reporting on things that don’t matter to stakeholders. 

Knowing how to look at metrics will help keep you focused on larger goals. 

Now that you have your reporting plan, let those numbers roll in and get ready to use that data. 

Tip 5: Focus on quality over quantity 

This tip encapsulates the previous four as the quality of your metrics, content, and prospects is key to marketing success. Create content that is strategic and thoughtful, then report on the metrics that matter to the business’s bottom line. As this data rolls in, focus on where quality prospects are coming from and spend time and resources there. 

A big pointer here is don’t forget the quality that lies within your current customer base and their lifetime value. How are you nurturing them, and are you continuing to differentiate your business for the customers you already have? 

Examples of nurturing existing customers through marketing include:  

• Educational events (in person or virtual)  
• Instructional videos  
• Informational blogs  
• Early access or notification of new products, pricing, material availability, etc.  
• Thoughtful email campaigns with information relevant to their businesses  
• Promotional items or swag (a quick thank you goes a long way) 

To learn more about these marketing tips, contact the TopSpot Marketing Team. Not a TopSpot partner? Get started by contacting the TopSpot Team.