Four Steps to Kick-start Your Marketing Optimization

September 7, 2021 Stan

Marketing Optimization covers a lot of territory. Think of everything you could be doing more efficiently, from paid ads to emails in your nurture track. The task of optimizing them all can seem overwhelming. But in many respects, optimization IS marketing. It’s the constant effort to do better, to experiment, learn and iterate. It’s what marketers do naturally, but finding a way to apply learnings strategically across your entire operation can be daunting.

Without a coherent strategy around marketing optimization, your successes run the risk of being isolated and unconnected. How do you approach something so big? Where do you get started? Here are 4 steps that can help get the ball rolling, and get you on your way to getting the most out of your marketing resources.

Follow the Money

The first place to start an optimization project is with money. How much do you have? Where are you spending it? Most importantly, how much are your efforts generating for your organization? Wherever possible look to calculate the ROI on your marketing campaigns, and also look for ways to attribute revenue from the technology platforms you use.

Not everything will be easy to see, and there are always going to be must-have technologies that don’t neatly tie back to an ROI. The goal is to develop a detailed understanding of how your marketing team is consuming and generating revenue.

Over time it’s easy to develop blind spots. We do certain things because that’s how they’ve always been done, or we fail to see the true value in an activity that we take for granted. Stopping to take a careful look at your marketing expenses and revenue can help clear away some of these blind spots, and help you see new ways to improve.

Measure & Analyze

With a clearer picture of your budgeting and revenue landscape, the next step is to start looking closely at your campaigns. Regardless of the platform, each campaign should have data points that will define success. Learn these KPIs and begin to establish benchmarks. Learn how your campaigns perform over time and, if possible, look for industry-level benchmarks. Don’t get too caught up in comparing how campaigns in your organization perform against your competitors. The best data is often your own.

Break out your campaigns by type. Nurture, conversion, and retention campaigns will each have their own unique set of metrics that define their performance. For nurture campaigns, focus on visitor behavior, device, and entry points. This will allow you to concentrate on the content (which pages are getting the most traffic), format (desktop vs mobile), and the source (paid search, social, email, etc.). Conversion campaign KPIs will typically be form submission or customer center calls — instances where a contact is reaching out to your organization requesting additional information. Retention campaign success is commonly measured through engagement (email opens, clicks, and content downloads), and of course, renewal rates.

Once KPIs and benchmarks are identified, you can begin testing new approaches and confidently identify successes. Solid KPIs and benchmarking will also help you prioritize. If your data reveals a particular campaign is underperforming and carries a high cost, it can be among the first campaigns you select for improvement.

Experiment & Automate

With data in hand and a prioritized list of campaigns to optimize, the next task is often the most fun, experimentation. A/B testing is a common technique. It’s great for comparing the effectiveness of things like subject lines, button placement, or CTA text. You can also look to experiment with new technologies or try campaigns across different media. The work you’ve done to establish KPIs and benchmarks opens the door to all types of experimentation and gives you the means to evaluate outcomes objectively and understand their impacts on ROI.

Automation is another area that’s important to a successful optimization project. Automation will rarely increase responses or income associated with a campaign, but it can be exceptionally good at reducing costs, allowing you to allocate resources to the areas that need it. As you experiment with new things, automation can be the key to turning it into a sustainable, ongoing part of your marketing portfolio. Automation can also be a budget and time-reducing lifesaver that frees your team up to try new things.

Another activity that can fall under this category would be auditing your current tech platforms to assess their total range of functionality. Are you using each to its maximum potential, or are there untapped capabilities?

Document

This is often the most overlooked element in an optimization project. Good documentation will help you in many ways. It supports sustainability over the long term, it eases maintenance, and it helps with troubleshooting when the inevitable bug crops up. Keeping a “playbook” with technical specs, process details, and objectives of each project will allow you to hand off the work to various team members. Good documentation can be a valuable resource to share with other parts of your organization, too. It’s fun to share successes, and having them down on paper can be an inspiration to other departments.

Finally, don’t forget to set a schedule or cadence for re-evaluating each task in your documentation. A campaign that’s optimized to meet today’s challenges won’t stay that way forever, and you’ll appreciate having a detailed record of your actions when it comes time to start the process again.

At the end of the day, marketing optimization is all about using your resources and technologies to their best potential and getting the most out of your campaigns. No matter where you are on the road to optimizing your marketing operations, there’s never a bad time to look for ways to improve. While it can seem overwhelming, it’s OK to start small. These strategies can be applied to a portion of your activities, even a single campaign. The experience you gain will help you hone your approach and methodology for optimization, allowing you to “rinse and repeat” across all your marketing activities.

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