Optimizing your marketing budget: Key factors to consider

Given the current climate, it’s no surprise marketing budgets are under close scrutiny and optimizing your marketing budget is likely going to be a key area of focus. Every penny you spend must contribute to revenue growth, so you’ll need to carefully consider the marketing activities you invest in.

Part of this careful introspection involves understanding what drives real results. If achieving lower marketing spend without compromising on results is on your wish list, your marketing strategy and campaigns need to be truly data-driven. Without real intel at your fingertips, you’re going to struggle to identify those make-or-break moments that have a real impact on your bottom line.

In this blog, we’ll answer all these essential questions, including what is marketing optimization and why it's important. We’ll also highlight the key factors to consider as you begin your marketing optimization journey. Read on to gain insights into how you can leverage all the data at your disposal to make every penny count.

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What is marketing budget optimization?

Marketing budget optimization is the process of adjusting your marketing campaigns and activities to improve the results they generate based on what the data is telling you. By using data to guide your thinking and strategy, your decisions will be rooted in real intel. What does that mean? You’ll be optimizing your marketing budget to make sure you drive more of the results you want with less investment.

The key to marketing optimization is not just tracking what you’re spending across every channel, but the revenue those channels are generating. If you’re able to show a direct link between campaigns and profits, you can start to make smarter budget decisions that double down on revenue generation.

Data comes from many places, and you need solid foundations in place to make sure you’re leveraging this data to its full potential. In doing this, you’ll be able to start putting more resources into what is working, and taking it away from what isn’t. Many marketing teams rely on marketing attribution to accurately track performance and revenue, enabling them to implement marketing budget optimization across channels.

Why is marketing optimization important?

Marketing optimization is important because nobody wants to feel like they’ve wasted time and money. And more importantly, in a world where marketing budgets are being slashed, you need to be able to drive the desired consumer actions in the most profitable way possible. Every marketer should be setting time aside to analyze and reflect on how their campaigns performed, to iterate and improve on the next one.

Marketing optimization also helps you make smarter decisions when planning for the year ahead, especially if you focus your annual spending on marketing budget allocation by channel. If you can clearly see which channels lead to quality leads and higher Average Order Values (AOV) – and which ones are a money pit – you can adapt your budget accordingly.

All in all, having total visibility of what is and isn’t generating revenue will be key when optimizing your marketing budget. But, if you have a multi-channel strategy, you could be faced with the challenge of joining the dots between online discovery and offline conversion. When this is the case, your marketing attribution will likely have massive gaps. The key budget optimization factors listed below shed light on how Call Intelligence solves this problem.

1. What data do you have – and what are you missing?

You need to pay attention to the data you have, and you also need to pay attention to the data you don’t have. Optimizing your marketing budget relies on collecting reliable customer data that will help you make data-driven decisions. But what you might not realise is that you’re sitting on a goldmine of customer intel, collected every single time your customers pick up the phone.

Smart marketers are busy collecting intelligence and attributing revenue accordingly. If digital advertizing is a core part of your strategy, you need to figure out how much revenue is generated by these activities. But guess what? They don’t always convert online.

Call Tracking helps you connect the dots between online activity and offline telephone conversions. This ultimately means you’ll be looking at the full picture – not just the online version – and you can accurately calculate the true ROI of your marketing activities. Whether it’s Google search, a PPC campaign, or word-of-mouth on social media, you’ll be able to identify the key channels you should and shouldn’t be investing in.

2. What persuades your customers to convert?

Knowing exactly what will convert customers from browsers to buyers might seem like an impossible task. Every phone call holds a wealth of insight that helps you understand what persuades your customers to convert. Conversation Analytics helps you unearth these hidden insights at scale. You’ll be able to identify the key conversation themes that had the most impact and, importantly, drove the most profit.

Tighter budgets mean you have to make each and every campaign work as hard as possible. So, once you’ve identified the key messaging that drives those all-important conversions, you can start to replicate that across all marketing activities. In turn, you’ll be creating quality customer experiences that generate real results.

It’s important that this becomes a continuous process of improvement. As the customer experience evolves, it’s likely your messaging will need to do the same. By keeping a constant finger on the pulse of what’s making your customers pick up the phone to make a purchase, you can build a solid pipeline that consistently delivers on your revenue objectives.

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3. What does the customer journey look like?

Customer journey mapping taps into customer data to accurately record each step of the journey. The goal is to understand their desired path to purchase, and craft experiences that will lead to a sale every time. To do this, you need to know the impact of every touchpoint.

Having this kind of data at your fingertips helps you convert leads faster and with fewer touches, and retain existing customers longer. This makes it easier to optimize your marketing spend based on understanding what drives real revenue. Then you can start to answer questions such as, which touchpoints are most effective at driving conversions? Which ones are closing deals? And which ones are blocking customers from picking up the phone and making a purchase?

Carter Jonas used customer journey mapping to optimise their marketing budget. 65% of their inbound leads come in via the phone. But without clarity on where they came from, they couldn’t make informed, strategic decisions about how to spend their budget. Working with Infinity, they were able to track the source of incoming phone calls and develop a clearer understanding of the journey that led to each call. This led to a 10.4% increase in the rate of quality calls and the ratio of qualified leads increased by 9.7%.

4. How much do you know about keywords?

For any campaign to be successful, you need to take a deep dive into the granularity of what is and isn’t working. This is especially true when optimizing your marketing campaigns, and even more so for PPC campaigns. PPC is known to be a budget-hungry beast, and it’s tempting to spend all your time binning the most expensive keywords. What we don’t always realise is lower cost, equally as useless, keywords fly under the radar. While they don’t seem to cost much, they’re a major budget drain long-term which goes against all principles of budget optimization.

Your focus should be on reducing PPC budget wastage and to do that, you need to go deeper. The keywords generating real revenues should be the ones you put the focus on, and chances are they won’t be the high-volume search terms you’re putting all your bidding on. It may very well be that you have a ton of longtail, low-volume keywords that are real money-makers.

Smart Match pinpoints your most valuable calls and shows you which keywords are generating your most profitable offline sales. By connecting outcomes and revenue to your activities with Smart Match, you can eliminate waste and see which activities you need to double down on to bring your CPA tumbling downward and drive-up Average Order Values (AOV).

How call intelligence will help optimize your marketing budget

If your key focus is to optimize your marketing budget, you need to understand what makes your customers tick. Call tracking with smart Match clears up your marketing blind spots and gives you the inside scoop on what is working and what isn’t working. This means you can re-adjust your budget to put the onus on the activities that are driving the best results.

Infinity’s speech analytics suite, Conversation Analytics, takes your budget optimization one step further by answering the questions you’ve never been able to ask: what is it about our product or service that has our customers on the fence? How are our best agents converting leads? How can we turn that make-or-break moment into a win?

Conversation Analytics provides intel on common sticking points that delay conversions. You can pinpoint the moment when sentiment dips and use clever sales scripts to turn an unhappy customer into a loyal advocate. You can even highlight the language or the incentives that resonate most with customers. You can then use that knowledge to help sales agents refine their sales scripts and convert more leads.

Unlocking the insights into what happens before, during, and after every call will help you level up your marketing activities and totally optimize your marketing budget. From targeting the right keywords to drive more conversions, to creating exceptional customer experiences from start to finish, Call Intelligence will help you harness the power of all the data you have at your fingertips.