If you have not defined your marketing budget yet, this is the first step that your organization needs to take. You need to have a clearly defined marketing budget that incorporates all marketing expenses, including:

• Marketing team salaries, including benefits, taxes and equipment
• Advertising and sponsorship expenses
• Marketing technology, software, tool costs and subscriptions
• Vendor costs
• Trade shows, events, webinar costs
• Team member training (conferences, certifications, etc.)
• Other miscellaneous marketing expenses

After you have a clearly defined marketing budget, download our 10X ROI template and establish your 10X ROI goal.

The KPIs outlined in the question above not only allow you to calculate your marketing ROI, but they also give you key information about what you may need to improve. Therefore, they are integral to a strong ROI-driven marketing strategy and must be tracked.

To start taking the steps to track these KPIs, you will need to set up this tracking within your marketing automation and customer relationship management (CRM) system.

Nearly all of your goals should be SMART goals. By making your goals satisfy every aspect of the SMART goal framework, you can ensure that you have clear goals to hit and that those goals will have a positive impact on your bottom line. It will also allow you to periodically reassess your goals so you can pivot if your current marketing efforts are not working. Here is the SMART goal framework laid out for you:

• Specific - Your goal should have a clear objective you can either achieve, or not achieve, with no grey area in between. In other words, whether you achieve a goal or not shouldn’t be subjective.
• Measurable - Your goal should target a key performance indicator (KPI) you use to measure the performance of your efforts.
• Attainable - You should have a realistic shot of achieving your goal.
• Relevant - Your goal should align with the overall objectives of your organization.
• Time-Bound - Your goal should have a timeline with a specific end date that you must achieve your goal by.

A strong value proposition is key to all marketing and sales efforts. It will help you portray a consistent message across marketing and sales channels, emphasizing the most important points as to why a potential customer should choose your company. Your value proposition should satisfy the following requirements:

• It’s clear and simple. A strong value proposition typically consists of one to three sentences (sometimes 1-2 paragraphs).
• It outlines what your organization does. If your target customer were to read it, there should be no chance that they would be confused as to what your business does or can do for them.
• It’s unique. Your value proposition differentiates you from your competitors.
• It targets relevant ideal customer profiles (ICPs)/buyer personas.
• It states the primary benefit of your product or service. This should reference the challenges solved, pain points solved, and/or the goals achieved for your ICP/buyer personas thanks to your product/service.

Use our value proposition template to come up with a strong value proposition for your organization.

ICPs and buyer personas guide your marketing and sales teams, ensuring they are targeting the right organizations and decision-makers and are using language and messaging that resonates with them. They are also instrumental in developing a strong value proposition. We suggest you use the ideal customer profile and buyer persona templates to create ICPs and buyer personas for your target clients.

Your organization’s website must use your value proposition, ICPs, and buyer personas to guide its messaging. If your website doesn’t, you will need to rewrite it and optimize it with messaging that does. Unfortunately, websites are often large, and it can be difficult to know where to start.

You won’t be able to do it all at once, so it’s best to come up with a list of priorities to help you decide what the next step is for you. Here are some suggestions:

1. First, if you’re creating marketing materials (blogs, social media posts, etc.) and implementing them, ensure your team members/agency/contractors are using your value proposition, ICP and buyer personas to guide the content.
2. Next, focus on updating the things that most of your potential clients will see first. This often includes…
   1. Website Homepage
   2. Contact Page
   3. Product/Service Pages - These are pages that outline the benefits of the products/services that you offer.
3. Then optimize content and resources that is on your site and/or used by your salespeople. Get rid of or modify content and resources to better appeal to your target market based on your value proposition, ICP and buyer personas.

Remember, your messaging should clearly outline the benefits your target customer can see by using your product. Try to put yourself in the shoes of your target customer and ask, “Would I really care about this if I read it?”

For example, if your site says “We have 10 manufacturing facilities in North America,” that may not mean anything to your target customer. But if you say, “Our 10 manufacturing facilities allow us to ship our products within 1 business day to any location in the US,” it might have a better chance of appealing to your target customer.

ROI-driven marketing requires a written marketing strategy. Creating one will help you connect your tactical marketing efforts with your overall marketing goals and keep you on track to achieve those goals. It is also a place that any team member can go to to align the current marketing strategy for your manufacturing organization.

Use our marketing strategy template to create a formal marketing strategy for your organization.

Your marketing strategy must incorporate both inbound and outbound marketing tactics to maximize the number of potential leads and sales coming in through your marketing channels.

• Inbound Marketing - Inbound marketing involves attracting and converting your target prospects by creating valuable content that speaks to their goals, challenges, and pain points in relation to your product or service. These strategies focus on customers finding the content organically (often through search, social media, or by friends/colleagues) and choosing to engage with your brand because they find value in it. Inbound marketing tactics involve (but are not limited to)…
  • Content marketing
    • Blog posts
    • Whitepapers
    • Ebooks
    • Webinars
    • Infographics
  • Social media
  • Email - Specifically, when prospects sign up to your organization’s email list to receive more marketing messaging from you. Direct email outreach is an “outbound” marketing tactic.
  • Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Outbound Marketing - Outbound marketing involves reaching out to prospects through methods like paid advertising, email outreach, and account-based marketing. With outbound, it’s your organization that starts the conversation with your prospect.

To increase the number of qualified leads coming down the funnel, shorten sales cycles and increase marketing ROI, you must nurture leads throughout the buyers journey. How you do that will often depend on what stage of the marketing/sales funnel a lead is in.

For example, you may send a new Website Lead ebooks and links to blogs that revolve around your ICP/buyer persona pain points to see if they may be interested in your product. But if this was an SQL, you may want to send more specific information regarding your products to try and entice them to convert to a customer.

Think about your current marketing and sales funnel and consider some of the ways in which you can nurture your leads to increase the likelihood of them becoming a customer.

If your organization does not have one dedicated marketing team member, it should seriously consider hiring one. A strong general marketing strategist with digital marketing experience will be key to guiding its direction. Ideally, this strategist should have 10+ years of experience and a strong grasp of ROI-driven marketing. That said, depending on your budget you may opt for a less experienced strategist that has a drive to learn and improve.

Another option could be to hire a marketing agency. However, even if you go with an agency, it’s still best to have a marketing team member that can act as a point of contact for the agency and provide direction and feedback. Working with an strong agency can supercharge your results, but it’s still a time commitment that many C-suite executives don’t want to deal with.

You will need to begin to look for employees, contractors/vendors, or agencies that can fill the tactical marketing efforts outlined by your strategy. Start with your local network to source potential options. Here are some other areas where you can potentially source candidates:

• LinkedIn - For potential employees and contractors.
• Upwork - Primarily used to source contractors for specific jobs.
• HubSpot Solutions Directory - Great place to find qualified vendors and agencies.

It’s extremely important to align on marketing objectives and for sales and marketing departments to work together. To do this, you will want to ensure your organization satisfies the following requirements:

• In writing, you define clear accountabilities for both marketing and sales when it comes to driving new business. In other words, there should be no finger-pointing going on between departments on who messed up when things go wrong.
• You have integrated reporting and systems to identify potential opportunities or issues in the client acquisition process between sales and marketing.
• Sales and marketing have key performance indicators that are regularly tracked and analyzed to determine areas for growth/improvement.
• Both marketing and sales agree in writing on the overall goals and objectives for corporate growth. Each team understands its role in success.
• Both sales and marketing work from the same data.

It’s also helpful to have regular alignment meetings between sales and marketing leaders within your organization.

While it can be a time-intensive process, switching your website to a stronger or more manageable CMS will help you immensely when implementing your ROI-driven marketing strategy. To do this, we suggest you hire a vendor or agency that’s experienced in migrating to a specific CMS. This way, you will avoid any pitfalls, speed up the process, and ensure you receive a technologically sound website.

When you’re trying to make your website easy to navigate, the two things you should focus on are your navigation bar and your CTAs.

First, the navigation bar should clearly lay out the 4-5 most important sections/pages of your site. Here are some examples of website sections/pages that you may want to include in your navigation:

• About - Provides information about your company.
• Products - If you have more than one product, there may be multiple pages under this section header.
• Blog - Section for all blog content published by your company.
• Resources - Section for all resources published by your company. This usually includes things like case studies, whitepapers, and ebooks.
• Locations - Lists all locations of manufacturing facilities, distribution centers, offices, etc.
• Primary CTA - More on this below.

The second thing that you should focus on to make your site easier to navigate is your Primary CTA, which should be within your website navigation.

• Primary Call to Action (CTA) - A CTA is a 2-6 word prompt that encourages prospects to take a specific action. A CTA should be a button that’s linked to the page where prospects can take the desired action. Your Primary CTA is what your organization will use to entice prospects to take the first step to do business with you. This CTA should standardized for the entire site.
  • Common Primary CTA Examples: (”Schedule a Call”, “Request a Quote”,)

In your navigation bar, you should have a primary CTA that is an action-oriented statement that’s specific to your organization’s product or service. “Contact Us” is not a strong CTA.

Taking these two steps is one of the easiest ways in which you can make your site easier to navigate.

To see what you need to improve on your site when it comes to SEO, running a site audit on Semrush is a good first step. From there, you can begin to see the areas of your site that need improvements. If you don’t already have an SEO expert on-hand, you will likely need to find a strong SEO contractor that can help you determine what the next steps for your organization should be.

Once you have outlined your marketing strategy and goals, you need to begin reporting on your progress to executive leadership. This keeps them up to date on the progress that the marketing team is making on their goals. It is also helpful in aligning departments across your organization so you’re working together towards big-picture ROI goals.

Your marketing reports should not just be general reports on the things that the marketing team has been doing lately. They should also regularly report your goals and KPIs. This accomplishes two things:

1. It ensures that executive and marketing leadership stay focused on the actual reasons why they are conducting their marketing efforts, which is to improve KPIs and progress on marketing goals.
2. It allows the marketing team and executive leadership to spot problems and solve them quickly. For instance, if you see a big drop in website traffic, you can look to identify the cause of that drop in traffic and solve it to keep the rest of your marketing efforts and goals on track.

Developing marketing reports takes time out of marketing leaderships day. As you begin to implement an ROI-driven marketing strategy, you’ll see that one of the most important things you will need to do is find ways to increase efficiency. There is nearly always too much to do with too little time.

One easy way to increase efficiency is to set up real time dashboards that track your KPIs or goals. You can set these dashboards up within your marketing automation software and/or Google Analytics. This will allow you to not only monitor these goals and KPIs in real time, but will also allow you to easily pull the data for marketing reports, faster.

Your organization either needs to switch or procure a marketing automation software. We recommend HubSpot. It’s easy to use and has all the features you will need (and more) to build out a strong ROI-driven marketing strategy. That said, there are other platforms that can likely work for you as well:

• SharpSpring
• Marketo
• ActiveCampaign

A customer relationship management (CRM) platform is a must. As with our marketing automation software recommendation, we also recommend HubSpot to be your CRM platform. However, you can use other CRMs as long as they can easily connect with your marketing automation platform. 

You should connect your marketing automation software and your CRM software. A quick google search will likely lead you to instructions that can help you do this. If for some reason you cannot connect them, you will need to switch your marketing automation and/or your CRM platform to systems that will.

Creating standardized templates for your pages not only helps you establish a consistent look across your website, but it can also provide structure and guidance to the writers and graphic designers that creates the content that goes on that site. This helps increase efficiency and can also increase the quality of your content, ensuring important information is included on each page.

We suggest working with your web developer and any content specialists that you may have to create templates for all the various webpages and types of content that may be on your website. It can also be beneficial to create document templates based on your webpage templates for writers to follow when creating new content for your organization, especially if you will be creating many of a specific type of webpage.

The Great 8 provides many resources that your organization can use to stay up to date with industry best practices on our resources page.

It’s important that you create these templates so all emails have a consistent style that establishes your brand. Moreover, it helps you implement emails faster. You should be able to create this template within your marketing automation platform. This email template should include:

• Your logo
• Colors that match your brand style guidelines

It should also be easy to read any content that you put within that template. If you have different types of email content, you can have multiple templates. For instance, you may have one for newsletters and one for standard email blasts.