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In a challenging economic climate, B2B marketers must speak the CFO’s language more than ever to unlock budgets and direct their efforts towards commercial performance.
In this article, our editorial team highlights three common daily mistakes that impact your ROI. Because these mistakes are ‘easily’ avoidable and fixable, you can generate quick wins without breaking the bank. Let’s get started!
#1 Not Including Sales Teams in the Editorial Effort
More than ever, marketing must move beyond vanity metrics like the number of likes, views, or followers, measured by business KPIs, such as leads generated and, ultimately, its contribution to bookings.
And who better than the sales team to bridge the gap between marketing efforts and on-the-ground reality? Salespeople are in direct contact with prospects and customers. They understand not only the key conversion factors but also the concerns, objections, misunderstandings, and even the exact language used by the target audience. Ignoring them means losing a valuable ally who brings relevance, utility, and the ultra-practical insights that B2B buyers expect to advance in their journey.
Practically, you can include one or more salespeople in your editorial meetings, especially when choosing topics to cover. Additionally, when planning high-value content (such as a white paper), you can assign salespeople to gather information from clients and prospects. Note: Salespeople are excellent amplifiers of your content on LinkedIn.
2 Letting your best content go to waste
According to a study by Edelman, clients are more interested in the relevance and utility of content than its originality. If you lack the resources to develop ambitious formats with original content (expert interviews, annual barometers, ebooks, etc.), let the numbers do the talking and analyze the content that has performed best on your blog, social media pages, lead nurturing campaigns, and sales presentations:
· Instead of starting from scratch, use these successful contents as inspiration to explore different angles;
· Update content that has had some success: Google LOVES regularly updated articles and will reward you with a visibility boost;
· Take inventory of complementary content and compile it into a white paper;
· Identify your most data-driven content and turn it into infographics to share on social media or via email.
#3 Working with a Polluted Email Database
Working with a database polluted by outdated, incorrect, or invalid email addresses exposes your email campaigns to serious short-term performance issues and the risk of blacklisting your domain.
Sending emails to invalid addresses results in “hard bounces,” meaning emails that cannot be delivered permanently. Hard bounces damage your sender’s reputation with email providers and can label your emails as spam.
If this happens frequently, email providers will place you on a blacklist, preventing your emails from reaching your recipients’ inboxes. Worse, a single blacklisted address associated with your domain can impact all others, with nearly irreversible damage.
Additionally, using a polluted database skews your analytics (especially deliverability) and leads to poor decision-making. Here are some practical measures:
- Use email validation tools on your forms to act proactively;
- If you have a large database, process it in batches to clean, deduplicate, and possibly enrich it;
- Remove addresses that generate hard bounces after each email campaign.