Wondering whether all the hard work you are putting in for your B2B digital marketing strategy is getting results? Wonder no more! In this article, we share definitive signs that your strategy is NOT working. Let’s dive in.
The Leads Are Few and Far Between
While B2C firms can expect to get upwards of 20 leads a day, depending on the product or service offered, the story is different for B2B firms. It’s more realistic to anticipate about 15 – 20 leads per month for a B2B firm.
If it’s been 3 – 4 months since you’ve launched your B2B digital marketing strategy and you are only seeing 3 – 5 website leads per month, something isn’t right. Skip down to our “What You Can Do” section to see how you can address this issue.
Leads Aren’t Good Quality or Are Not the Target Audience
Another sign that you need to revamp or update your B2B marketing strategy is the quality of B2B website leads coming. Are you getting a good quantity of leads but over 90% of them are disqualified or aren’t in your target market? For example, if your target market is biotech firms that have a budget of over $50k a year for your SaaS product and you are only seeing leads coming in from start-up biotechs that can only afford $5k a year for software, something is likely off in your marketing messaging or positioning.
Similarly, you may be seeing leads from travel insurance companies looking for accounting help when you don’t operate in the travel insurance industry. Now, not every website lead you get will be qualified and your target market, but if you are noticing a significant number of leads (80%+) are disqualified or not your target audience, it’s likely your digital marketing strategy needs to be updated or reviewed.
Read more: B2B marketing do’s and don’ts for attracting leads.
Bad Quality Website Traffic
When looking for signs that your strategy is or isn’t working, website traffic is a great metric to review as well. Unlike leads, B2B website traffic is not an end in itself but is more of an indicator of who is getting to the website and if they are in the target audience. It’s important to note here that quality is more important than quantity. You can have a ton of website traffic, but if it’s not people who are in your target market, it won’t positively impact your bottom line.
What does quality website traffic look like? Quality website traffic is, on the whole, an engaged audience. Engaged website visitors tend to visit multiple pages on a website and often spend over a minute or a minute and a half on your website. If they are reading a blog, they may spend longer on the site and visit less pages. If you are seeing a spike in website traffic but your average time on site is less than 30 seconds and your pages per visit are 1 or less, the traffic to your website isn’t the quality that you want.
Poor Click-Through Rates on Ad Campaigns
Say everything looks great with the quality (if not the quantity) of leads and your website traffic is looking great – you should take a look at the click-through rates on your ad campaigns. Poor click-through rates on search ads (PPC), social ads, and other ad campaigns point to either your audience targeting or messaging (or both) being off.
The only thing to keep in mind is that click-through rates won’t be in the 50 – 60% range, despite what you may think. They will likely be closer to the 1 – 2 % range. Also, you will want to have a good sample size, at least a few months of data, before you start to evaluate campaigns.
What You Can Do
Before you panic or stress out and shut off all your marketing campaigns, there are a few processes you should follow to correct/update/revamp either part or all of your digital marketing strategy.
Audit everything you are doing: Organic, Paid, Social. Before you decide that social ads and posts aren’t working, take a comprehensive look at all the campaigns/channels in your strategy. Nothing in your strategy works in a silo and it can be tough to determine the relationships that exist between them. For example, your social organic and paid promotions may have high engagement and click-through rates, but may not be showing a lot of lead conversions. This could be because this is a first or second touch for a prospect and they aren’t ready to get in touch just yet. The fact that the promotions have good engagement and are garnering click-throughs shows that they are working to increase brand awareness. You may need to re-evaluate the focus of your different channels/campaigns.
Lead attribution: Where the leads are coming from, quality, closing rate. If you aren’t doing any lead attribution, it’s time to start. Even if you can’t afford a CRM like Salesforce or HubSpot that tracks multiple touch-points with a lead or prospect, you should be identifying the last-touch attribution for every lead. This can easily be done with a quick set up of Google Analytics and monthly analysis of leads and sources.
When looking at your lead attribution, you should be seeing which sources are sending the most leads, which sources send the best quality leads, and which sources have the highest closing rate. You may be surprised. If you are getting the majority of your leads from Organic Search but your highest dollar deals come from Google Ads, you likely need to up your budget on Google Ads.
Cut what isn’t working or revamp the approach/strategy. Your digital marketing strategy should be an organic, living, breathing thing. You should be able to continually evaluate your strategy and to adapt when necessary. For instance, you may want to shut of Google Ads during the month of December if you see low click-through rates or you may want to run more social media posts during your busiest time of the year to maximize brand awareness. If you do end up cutting out part of your strategy, be sure to document it in Google Analytics. That way if you see a significant change of some sort (huge drop in website traffic, downward trend of leads, etc), you can go back and re-instate that part of your strategy.
Digital Marketing: Don’t Set It and Forget It
A digital B2B marketing strategy should be set, analyzed, evaluated on an ongoing basis. Your customer needs and wants change, particularly as the demographics of your audience changes. Your brand needs to be adaptable/flexible, especially if you are looking to grow or expand.
By continually evaluating and looking for signs of success or failure in your digital marketing strategy, you can set your company up for success with inbound lead generation.
