When CFOs evaluate potential budget cuts, marketing is a tempting target.
Why? It’s a big line-item expense for most businesses, and it can be hard to tie spending directly to bottom-line results. Deloitte found that the average marketing budget accounts for roughly 13.6% of a company’s overall budget in 2023 — up nearly 4% over the previous two years.
It’s hard to measure the impact of marketing investments. Everyone knows when sales brings home a deal. And everyone knows marketing works, but it’s hard to attribute specific efforts to success, which makes marketing budgets harder to defend.
If you’re a CFO and you’re reading this piece, it’s probably because someone on your marketing team is trying to solve these challenges.
Let’s look at:
- Common marketing activities,
- How ROI could be murky,
- Solutions,
- And why solving these challenges can make a CFO’s job much simpler
Marketing Activity: Advertising
The Problem
For advertising ROI to be strong, you need ad dollars to be focused on the right audience. You can’t afford to waste impressions and clicks on people who are never going to buy from you. Unfortunately, many marketers don’t have the tools they need to spot which companies are ready to buy.
Instead, they’re left with two bad options:
- Wide audience targeting in order to reach all potential buyers = too costly despite potential high engagement
- Narrow audience targeting to hone in on near-sure things = high ROI, but not enough audience to power revenue growth
The Solution
6sense offers marketers precise targeting capabilities to make sure their campaigns reach the right buyers at the right time.
Because 6sense uncovers buying signals from accounts that are actually in-market, marketers can build advertising campaigns that reach a large number of the right buyers.
Why It Matters
You can squeeze more growth out of your existing advertising budget.
Your marketing team can be a lot more efficient if they have tools to tell them which target accounts are ready to buy.
By focusing ad spend on that subset of in-market accounts, they can show higher ROI on ad campaigns.
Intent Data can also be paired with predictive analytics to:
- See how accounts are progressing in their buying journey
- Understand which campaigns are moving prospects forward
- Examine which campaigns ultimately contributed to deals
Marketing Activity: Website
The Problem
Websites are where nearly every buyer will do the bulk of their research — especially early in the buying process when they are remaining anonymous.
The Solution
Marketers need the ability to uncover anonymous activity from critical accounts. It’s great if tons of people are visiting your website, but if that traffic is mainly from competitors, jobseekers, or non-buyers, then the website isn’t delivering real results.
A key to tracking real web ROI is to leverage a solution that matches anonymous buying signals to real accounts. 6sense has industry-leading account matching, meaning you gain critical intelligence about who is visiting your website and what pages they visit most.
Why it Matters
Only about three percent of B2B website visitors will ever fill out a form. If your team doesn’t know which accounts account for the other 97% of traffic, they’re missing a ton of revenue opportunities.
By uncovering anonymous activity, you will:
- Reveal which accounts are actively in-market
- Improve marketing’s targeting, increasing engagement
- Provide buyers with a winning, personalized experience
- Get more impact from all of your investments to drive web traffic and engage visitors.
Marketing Activity: Lead Nurturing
The Problem
Buyers get distracted, switch jobs, go through org realignments, juggle their own budget priorities … which means some great sales opportunities can slip on and off the radar as a prospect’s circumstances change.
Marketing is responsible for nurturing these leads and ensuring they stay on the path to becoming a customer.
The Solution
The easiest way for marketing to turn lead nurturing from money sink into a revenue driver? Leveraging AI.
6sense’s AI Email Assistant is an incredibly powerful tool that re-engages prospects that may have drifted away, holding 1-on-1 email conversations with prospects and booking them into conversations with your sales team.
Why it Matters
Email marketing is the cheapest way to drive revenue, but it works best when the messages are tailored to the individual. Most BDRs don’t have time to tailor individual emails for every account — and especially not for dormant accounts.
But AI can do that work all day long.
AI-powered Conversational Email can:
- Improve BDR effectiveness
- Allow marketing to keep cold leads warm without manual effort — and add opportunities to the pipeline without added cost
- Scale personalization efforts, which is proven to improve engagement with top accounts
Conclusion
Marketing is important, but in tight times they’re often a target for budget cuts. With the right tools and reporting in place, however, you can get better insights into their real-world impact on deals and make better informed decisions about the best way to position your company for growth.
Want to see more of the ways we bring clarity to go-to-market planning, execution, and revenue projection? Book a custom demo with 6sense today.
