Why Half of Your B2B Marketing Budget is Wasted

What part of my money or investment is really garnering any value?

The task of creating budgets has always been a complex endeavor. Even before the lockdown, the effectiveness of marketing budgets has been on a decline, and now that we are coming out of the lockdown, budgets have become even more challenging.

The majority of marketers don’t realize that half (or even more) of their budgets are being wasted on things that don’t bring returns on their investment. As a B2B Digital Marketer, you have to see to it that you are getting the results you want on your bottom line and understand what you should be doing differently. Nowadays, the stakes in digital marketing are much higher than they used to be, and the task of digital marketing has become more complex. A one-size-fits-all solution simply won’t make the cut. You have to be more targeted and more deliberate when it comes to your strategy, and therefore your budget.

In this episode, Brian Walker shares five things that you need to look at in your B2B digital marketing that may be burning half or more of your budget.

Brian leads the operations and strategy for a team of SEM, SEO and CRO experts providing digital tactics for SaaS and B2B clients. He comes from a background in using data, digital, and general nerdiness to help businesses get more from their marketing dollars.

Brian has helped Statwax push the envelope of what’s possible in B2B digital marketing. From the beginning, Statwax has striven to bring more efficient, data-driven performance strategies to their partners. They have witnessed their efforts expand into SEO, CRO, and beyond, their team grow to include a second office location in Dallas, and their partnerships thrive.

Brian has been a continuous source of innovation and motivation since Statwax’s creation in 2015. From keeping his pulse on the heartbeat of customer acquisition trends and evolving prospect behaviors, to modernizing the marketing attribution and visibility process, Brian continues to propel Statwax and its clients beyond the status quo.

Podcast Timestamps/Outline

02:03 – Introduction

02:45 – About Brian Walker

03:47 – The stakes are much higher than they used to be

06:46 – What part of my money and my investment is really garnering any value?

07:56 – 5 things that contribute to half or more of your marketing budget being burnt

08:10 – 1st – Attribution.

11:53 – 2nd – Alignment or congruency between sales and marketing.

18:25 – 3rd – Visibility.

22:15 – 4th – Lack of understanding of who your ideal buyers are.

26:22 – 5th – Inaction to testing or not spending on testing.

32:41 – Can one person handle all of the B2B digital marketing?

35:12 – What should B2B digital marketers be thinking about right now?

37:59 – Connect with Brian Walker

Memorable Quotes

“With so much noise in the digital space and the opportunity to be on so many channels, so many touch points, not having visibility into exactly how each of those ultimately helps produce a customer is so detrimental.”

“Figure out the common threads between the pain points that are leading folks elsewhere and proactively build out marketing to address that beforehand.”

“So much of marketing is me, me, me. The ones who are doing it well focus on them – the customer.”

“Not all leads and not all customers are created equal.”

“Two different people in the same industry might have wildly different views on what’s a problem or not and where their role is in solving that problem at their organization. So they need to see two wildly different marketing journeys to understand why they should care.”

“You have to test. You have to try new things. Testing smartly and failing fast and having visibility into why it worked and why it didn’t is the only place scale is going to truly come from.”

“Testing does not mean failure, because that means something else won.”

Episode Links and Resources

Brian’s email: [email protected]

Statwax website: https://www.statwax.com 

Digital activity ROI assessment: https://b2bdm.com/digital-activity-roi/ 

More episodes related to budget and strategy: https://b2bdm.com/top-b2b-content-strategies-2023