Posted by & filed under Case Studies.

The Challenge

Elfi-Tech had an incredible opportunity to showcase the immense potential of their technology to prospective clients. These clients, mainly device manufacturers, were eager to explore the vast possibilities of licensing this groundbreaking technology.

The Approach

Elfi-Tech sought to create a new website to highlight their revolutionary technology, and they turned to GROW for assistance. GROW began by understanding Elfi-Tech‘s unique needs, the challenges they faced, and the market in which they operated. With this understanding, GROW was able to tailor a strategy specifically aimed at positioning Elfi-Tech as an industry leader and piquing the interest of device manufacturers. The strategy combined GROW’s expertise in content writing and high-quality design, highlighting both the innovative technology and the possibilities it brought about.

The Execution

GROW’s content team crafted compelling narratives around Elfi-Tech‘s product, its use cases, and the data it could extract. The content was technical yet accessible, ensuring that it appealed to both the target audience and non-technical stakeholders alike. Each use case was meticulously detailed, drawing readers in and igniting their imaginations about the technology’s potential.

Complementing the engaging content was the modern and visually appealing website design. GROW leveraged its designers to convey Elfi-Tech‘s innovation using high-quality graphics and other visuals. The design team built a website with a modern, upgraded look and feel, incorporating elements that subtly reinforced Elfi-Tech‘s brand image and positioned it in line with the top competitors

Results

The end result was a transformative online presence that significantly enhanced Elfi-Tech‘s visibility in the marketplace. The redesigned website received positive feedback from visitors and industry experts alike. Importantly, the website effectively conveyed Elfi-Tech‘s value proposition to prospective licensing partners, generating substantial interest and inquiries.

GROW’s collaboration with Elfi-Tech underscores the power of targeted content writing, high-quality design, and a tailored approach to meet a client’s unique needs. Through their expertise, GROW was able to turn a challenging project into a success story, transforming Elfi-Tech‘s online presence and opening up new opportunities for them in the marketplace

Testimonial

From our first meeting to the final product, GROW was instrumental in transforming our online presence. They demonstrated a deep understanding of our technology, our industry, and our needs. What stood out was their ability to be responsive to our unique challenges and requests. The GROW team didn’t just deliver a website; they crafted a digital platform that tells our story, showcases our innovation, and connects us with potential partners. Their commitment to seeing the project through to a successful conclusion was unmatched. We’re more than pleased with the results; we’re excited about the future.” – Erez Herman, CEO, Elfi-Tech

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Resources

Case Study

Leading Security Compliance Technology Firm Boosts Engagement with High-Quality Content and Powerful SEO Services

anecdotes is the leading technology provider for Compliance leaders, trusted by some of the world’s fastest-growing brands – Navan, Amplitude, and more. As the first enterprise-grade Security Compliance automation solution in the market, anecdotes wanted to raise awareness about its cutting-edge platform amongst hypergrowth companies and enterprise players.

anecdotes engaged strategic B2B marketing agency GROW to position anecdotes as a thought leader with expertise in the field to provide valuable solutions to their audience’s problems.

Challenge

As good content is at the center of every digital strategy, GROW was tasked with delivering engaging and consistent content that would capture anecdotes’ target audience’s attention, generate a positive response, reinforce the brand’s credibility, and subsequently lead to profitable sales. The scope included blogs, email campaigns, white papers, eBooks and press releases, all aimed at driving inbound traffic and leads. GROW was also fully responsible for enhancing anecdotes’ SEO rankings with the goal of optimizing lead generation.

Solution

GROW’s experienced team of professional content writers researched competitors’ sites and strategized how best to allow anecdotes to stand out as a pioneer and leading player in a vcrowded market. GROW collaborated closely with anecdotes’ internal resources and subject matter experts to ensure the content messaging was in line with industry terminology and latest trends. The resulting suite of content was fresh, compelling, and designed to appeal to both technical and non-technical audiences in the Compliance field.

In order to make anecdotes‘ innovative compliance technology more accessible to their target audience, GROW implemented an education-first content strategy. This entailed breaking down complex regulatory matters and Compliance automation capabilities into easy-to-understand blogs and white papers, supplemented by visually engaging graphics. GROW also launched a series of SEO-optimized thought leadership articles, aimed at demonstrating anecdotes‘ deep knowledge and expertise in the field, establishing trust, and building its reputation as an industry authority.

To optimize anecdotes‘ SEO ranking, GROW meticulously crafted keyword-optimized content, and employed advanced SEO techniques such as EEAT and link building. Further SEO efforts focused on attracting the right type of traffic, keeping the leads on the page, and moving them further down the funnel. GROW constantly monitored and analyzed SEO performance, refining strategies based on data-driven insights.

Results

With GROW’s strategic content marketing, anecdotes saw a dramatic increase in inbound traffic and in their brand’s visibility and recognition. The company’s thought leadership position was further solidified, and it successfully established itself as the go-to resource for Compliance solutions among enterprises. anecdotes‘ investment in GROW’s services proved to be a fruitful partnership that significantly enhanced its market position and potential for future growth.

Testimonial

With GROW as our strategic partner, anecdotes unleashed the full potential of our content strategy, SEO optimization, and execution, catapulting our brand into the spotlight. We witnessed a remarkable surge in visibility, and industry recognition, cementing our position as the unrivaled thought leader in the Enterprise Compliance space.” – Kerwyn Velasco, Senior Product Marketing Manager

For more information about how GROW can help your company distinguish itself in your marketplace, contact us today.

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Leading Security Compliance Technology Firm Boosts Engagement with High-Quality Content and Powerful SEO Services
In or out? Choosing between in-house or outsourced marketing

Posted by & filed under Life Style.

The song’s success lies in its lilting melody and how it effortlessly captures the feeling of the start of summer. Warmer sun, soft breezes, long and lazy summer days – these are all parts of this melody and the reason why singers and listeners return time and again to its lyrics.

However, while summer is long, lazy and delightful, it can also be a time of stress for freelancers. The summer months are often associated with a dip in earnings for freelancers, which can be very stressful. Often, so stressful that the joy of summer is overshadowed by the anxiety of quiet inboxes and slow income.

It’s very easy to panic, fill time with bad clients or toxic projects or low-income earners. To stay awake at night worrying about income and bills and responsibilities.

But…these quiet summer months can be a massive benefit for freelancers, especially if you plan ahead and get yourself mentally and fiscally ready.

Step 01: Focus on your client pipeline

Whether you’ve got an established client pool or if you jump from client to client, you will soon pick up trends in their behaviour and recognise when they’re likely to speed up or slow down. Your best bet is to use this current quiet period to look for new clients or to connect with old clients that may have gone quiet. You can use freelance platforms, LinkedIn, online searches, social media, and your network to explore new opportunities or send your portfolio to different companies and clients.

While this may not yield immediate results, you will be surprised at how successful it can be – companies can come back to you months after you’ve sent in an application or a reminder.

Step 02: Focus on your social presence

This is a fine line. You can use the time you currently have available to promote your skills on multiple social platforms, but you need to do this in a way that doesn’t come across as

desperate or too self-promotional. Clever ways of using social media or networking platforms include:

  • Creating an educational series of posts that unpack concepts or provide insights into your line of work, thereby highlighting your expertise without pushing a strong sales narrative.
  • Engage with other posts, newsletters, articles and research papers and share these on different platforms with a nugget of your own insight or advice. This shows how you’re invested in your career and the trends that shape it.
  • Undertake creative work for yourself and then showcase this on different social platforms. Remember the fine line and you’ll be fine.
  • Consider building a dedicated website with a blog or gallery that you can use to showcase your skills development, discuss trends, share work you’ve done across different clients, and that has customer testimonials. Then, share different posts and testimonials across social media – again, not in a tsunami of self-promotion – to build your presence and reputation.

Step 03: Focus on professional growth

A quiet patch can also mean an opportunity to undertake professional development. Want to learn a new skill that complements your existing skillset? Had clients ask for something you’re not completely comfortable doing? Do an accredited course, share your completion of this course across your networks and social media, and then showcase what you have learned. When you walk out of this quiet patch, you’ll be able to walk into new jobs and explore new opportunities with different clients because of the time you’ve invested into yourself and your business.

Step 04: Focus on your worth

This is a hard one. When times are tough, it’s easy to allow clients to walk over you or for toxic client relationships to evolve. You know you need to do whatever it takes to pay the bills and make ends meet. However, this can potentially burn you out and affect the quality of your work for non-toxic clients. If you don’t have a choice, remember to distance yourself emotionally from a bad client and be ready to replace them with a client that treats you with respect. You are worth more than poor pay from an unpleasant customer.

Step 05: Focus on financials

When you first start out in freelance, you’re not sure when the work will ebb and when it will flow, but as you become more entrenched, you will soon notice a pattern. The first and best plan is to set aside funds every month until you have enough money to cover your business and life expenses for a minimum of six months. If times get tough, you will then have a buffer to get you through the month(s).

Perhaps one of the biggest advantages of this type of savings account is the peace of mind it offers you as a freelancer. You may never need to touch those savings, but you know that if

anything goes wrong, you have a plan in place. Add onto this freelance insurance that covers you if you get sick or something happens to you in the line of work.

Step 06: Focus on the rest

You have worked hard, given your creative and intelligent soul to your clients, and now you’re looking at a quiet patch. Great! Instead of stressing, remember that you deserve a break and that this downtime can be hugely beneficial for you as a freelancer. Use it to recharge and reconnect with why you chose this career in the first place and to recognise how far you’ve come. Lie in, go for a midday run, do yoga at 10am, take the dog for a walk whenever you want, go out for lunch with a friend. Life is for living and working, so take the summer for yourself.

As the song Summertime says, “One of these mornings you’re going to rise up singing.” So rise up singing and remember that ‘Summertime, and the living is easy” is advice as much as it is music.

Posted by & filed under Business.

Marketing is a diverse and complex portfolio of activities comprised of multiple skill sets that ensure every part of a brand’s marketing strategy is aligned and managed correctly. It’s an orchestra of digital, social, copy, content, platform, email, print, and in-person activations and operations that must come together to deliver a symphony of branding. Without the right skills or expertise, without the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) as conductor, the business runs the risk of a fragmented and discordant marketing effort that costs money but fails to deliver value.

This introduces one very simple question: Can marketing and budgets fundamentally change if resources are in-house or outsourced?

There are pros and cons for both.

In-house: The advantages

In-house marketing offers one immediate benefit – it’s a dedicated resource on tap, designed to deliver precisely what’s needed when it’s needed to whoever needs it. Marketing is high-pressure and fast-paced, so having a dedicated team ready to meet incredibly tight deadlines is invaluable.

With in-house employees, you also get a specific team that you’ve chosen. You’ve spent time selecting their talents and skill sets, ensuring that they fit within the business culture, and you’ve hand-picked them from hundreds (if not thousands) of applicants. Right here, sitting in your office is a solid stable of people who want to be there and who are committed to your brand.

Speaking of the brand – in-house people should also be immersed in your brand. They should know what language is allowed, what styles to use and when, and how to cross every t and dot every i as outlined by the brand style guide.

Another challenge, particularly now, is the lack of skills. Talent has become a commodity as skilled marketing professionals change roles, move country and reshape their lives in the wake of the pandemic. Finding and retaining the right people has become a full-time challenge, and there is the growing gap between skills in the market and skills development. Fresh talent is available but lacks the expertise that marketing teams need to fully realise their campaigns and potential, and requires a lot more time and training. Then, as pointed out in a recent article by Marketing Week, digital skills are shrinking which is causing intense pressure on marketing to get results with limited resources.

In-house: The Disadvantages

When you’ve got people in-house, you’ve also got their problems and regulated employment expectations. Your team will often be fractured by sick leave, paid holidays, training, maternity leave, paternity leave, and other similar events or occurrences. Employees are entitled to these benefits, even when a massive deadline is looming.

In-house marketing teams will cost you a lot of money regularly. You have to pay for their benefits and salary packages, which can scale significantly depending on their levels of expertise and how in-demand their skills may be, and you have to pay for their hiring and recruitment. You will also need to cover their onboarding costs, work assets such as laptops and mobile devices, and their bonuses. Plus, as you promote, you have to replace, so you’ll have to go back to recruitment and hiring to fill spaces that people leave behind, which adds that cost back onto your budget.

According to benchmarking data from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the average cost of hiring a new person is nearly $4,700. If you’re hiring for a role that pays $60,000, you will potentially spend as much as $180,000 or more. You’ll also have to repeat this cost if they don’t work out and leave within a few months…

Also, you have to ensure that every employee is made to feel a part of the company culture and that they have clearly defined key performance indicators (KPIs) and performance reviews, so they feel like they have a clear career pathway. People need benchmarks and clear reporting lines, and stable management of expectations.

Outsourced Marketing: The Advantages

An external marketing agency will have all these skills, all these experts and marketing professionals on hand whenever you need them. A third-party marketing service provider can not only fill skills gaps that your organization may not be able to fill, but they can take on work across multiple skill levels so that your teams don’t have to. This can considerably lower the cost to company in terms of hiring highly skilled marketing professionals while making it extremely easy for you to simply grab expertise when you need it. Outsourced is essentially expertise on tap.

Outsourced marketing comes with no sick leave, no maternity leave, no salary packages, or concerns around cultural fits. It doesn’t have expectations around KPIs or management, it doesn’t ask that you provide consistent training, and it doesn’t expect your teams to operate at half capacity on large campaigns because people are away or sick. You have a trusted resource committed to ensuring that you always have talent whenever you need it. The problems of staff management and wellbeing aren’t yours anymore.

You’re guaranteed market-leading solutions, technologies, and approaches when you work with an external marketing agency. To stay competitive in a very challenging market, external marketing companies make it their business to know the business of marketing. They are on top of the trends shaping customer interactions and behaviors and ensure your campaigns take advantage of them (where relevant), so you’re also ahead of the pack.

You can say goodbye to the stressors of training and development, complex relationships, overtime and KPIs, limited team functionality, and the costs of hiring, keeping, and managing talent. Outsourced marketing has it all for you PLUS:

  • The ability to embark on multiple campaigns across multiple touchpoints and markets while ensuring cohesion and consistency
  • The ability to create campaigns on demand, at speed, and on time
  • The ability to project manage campaigns, so you have more time to focus on creatives, approvals, and marketing strategy
  • The ability to deliver internal resources relevant to different markets, campaigns, and media on demand
  • The ability to flex and adapt to your changing needs while adding in reliable expertise and support that brings fresh insights and remarkable talent to your table

Outsourced Marketing: The Disadvantages

Outsourced marketing isn’t perfect – no solution really is – so it does come with some of its own issues. The first is the teething period, where both agency and company get to know one another. Agency talent will still have to learn the brand and its guidelines and spend time with the brand to ensure that campaigns and messaging are correctly aligned. While this also applies to new hires as they learn the brand, with an agency, the learning curve is everyone all at once.

Talent can cycle through the agency, so you may not always have the same people working on your account. This is a mixed blessing as it can introduce the risk of someone getting the brand wrong, but it can also bring fresh insights and perspectives that keep the campaigns and the team fresh.

Of course, you can opt into a hybrid blend of outsourced and in-house marketing. This is time intensive for you as a CMO, as you’ll have to juggle two sets of expectations across multiple teams. Still, it does ensure that you fill gaps around approvals or campaign management that balance some of the disadvantages of both types of marketing team.

Either way, outsourced marketing is an invaluable asset to any business wanting to cut costs, save time, improve efficiencies and revitalize its campaigns.

Discover the value of outsourced skills and marketing expertise with GROW

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Challenge

Laguna Innovation required expert support and guidance in developing its business plan, investor presentation, financial model framework, and ongoing content and marketing expertise to refine and develop its website, brochures, and product deck. The company had limited on-site resources and needed a safe pair of expert hands to help it navigate the creation of these essential materials to attract investors, cement partnerships, and drive market opportunity.

Solution

Laguna Innovation collaborated with GROW to create a comprehensive digital portfolio of presentations and frameworks to meet demanding market and investor expectations. Included within the portfolio was:

  • A business plan: Finely tuned and curated to meet very specific investor and market expectations, the business plan developed by GROW leveraged the unique sustainability and green credentials on offer from Laguna Innovation to create a strategic outline that’s both relevant and insightful. GROW ensured that the plan highlighted the company’s key selling points while showcasing its growth potential.
  • Investor presentation. The presentation included relevant statistics, insights, research, methodologies, and business strategies. Designed using customized graphics, colors, and imagery, the presentation unpacked the Laguna Innovation business proposition in an engaging format. GROW ensured that it included the information and insights investors expect from a high-level presentation.
  • Content development. GROW leveraged its extensive content and marketing development expertise to design, write and launch marketing materials for Laguna Innovation. The team ensured that the color palette translated across the different media and that the content matched the company’s tone, style, and brand identity. The final marketing toolkit delivered to Laguna Innovation included a website, brochure, and client and investor decks.

Results

Developed on WordPress, laid out in an easy-to-read and navigate format, and designed to be easy to update, the new Laguna Innovation website delivered precisely what the customer needed. The sustainability element was the golden thread carefully curated throughout all materials – from the business plan through to the brochures – and emphasized by the right font, color palette, copy, and graphical elements. The copy, design, and development process were smooth, and the final product was relevant and engaging. The company now has a highly visual and appealing website that it can easily update to keep it fresh and vibrant and that captures the full range of the company’s services and solutions.

Testimonial

“The GROW team understood exactly what we needed to ensure that our brand and business model were accurately conveyed and carried throughout our marketing and business materials. Working with them was effortless, and we will continue working with them well into the future.” – Clive Lipchin, CEO and Co-Founder at Laguna Innovation.

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According to McKinsey research, the business can increase its revenue by up to 7% and its profitability by up to 2% with transformed customer experiences.  The firm also found that customer satisfaction was directly connected to the customer journey, especially if the marketing team looks along the entire golden pathway to ensure that every step taken by a customer is smooth and seamless.

It is a sentiment echoed by Gartner, however, from the other side of the customer journey coin – orchestration. For Gartner, this is a mission-critical approach that ensures marketing teams fully realize the potential of their data. Here, in the depths of technology and data lie insights that can refine the touchpoints and pain points of the customer journey, ensuring that every step along the route is shaped according to customer expectations and feedback.

As a recent piece in B2B International highlights, customers are a critical asset; without them, companies are nothing more than ideas. It is the positive customer experience that drive sales, and it is the orchestration and management of the journey that keeps the customers coming back for more.

There is a difference between the management of a customer journey and the orchestration of the customer journey.

Orchestrating the customer journey is defined as: keeping customers consistently engaged with the brand by creating real-time positive experiences throughout the journey. It’s the connection of touchpoints, data points, data sources, and systems in a methodical way that allows the brand to map out actions and create intelligent customer interactions.

Managing the customer journey is defined as: taking customer information from different parts of the customer journey and mapping out how specific audience segments may behave within certain environments. This approach is more about how customers and audiences react within their groupings and markets and doesn’t usually flow in real-time.

Wrapped around the journey, be it orchestration or management, is the customer journey map. This is a definitive breakdown of how the customer undertakes their journey within the brand and maps out (literally) every touchpoint or route that the customer could potentially take. The customer journey map can be focused on a particular part of the customer experience, or it can be used to target a specific element of the sales funnel or sales cycle. This is an invaluable tool that helps the organization to learn more about the customer.

The Customer Journey Map

Right. You’ve decided that you would like to create this golden highway through your business that captures and holds the attention of your customers. Wonderful. Now you need to pick the customer journey map that best suits your brand and the type of customer experience you want to create.

As this is essentially your customer journey GPS, you need to know what touchpoints it has to, well, touch, along with:

  • A flowchart or a visual representation of your golden pathway, your customer journey
  • Every touchpoint that your customer will potentially interact with that can be used to create stickiness
  • The pain points that could possibly cause friction and inhibit customer engagement

Then, once you’ve invested time into collating this essential data, you need to consider three different types of customer journey map. Their flavors are broken down into:

  • The Typical B2B Customer Journey Map offers you a strategic overview of the steps your customer will take throughout their journey and integrates the touchpoints and pain points you’ve already established.
  • The Tactical B2B Customer Journey Map drills down into specific areas of the business to refine a certain touchpoint or address the issues inherent within a certain pain point. This type of map is essential if you want to smooth out the edges of your customer interactions and highlight specific areas of the customer journey.
  • The Performance and Improvement Customer Journey Map takes the tactical map a step further, pulling the marketing team deeper into the customer’s journey and experiences. This type of map is essential if you want to find the pain points causing the most damage to your customer relationships and if you want to unpack those areas of the business that are having the most significant impact on customer perceptions and engagement.

Make sure your investment in journey orchestration is effective and profitable

Now that you’ve unpacked the data, focused on the journey map, and gained a rich understanding of your customer’s golden pathway, you need to test your approaches to ensure that they resolve problems or enhance experiences. You don’t want to create a map and then orchestrate a complex journey only to discover that it added more issues than it resolved.

Your first step is to test your processes with a smaller customer segment to see how well they work and then slowly expand these as they prove successful. Monitor everything and tweak what works or doesn’t work in a constant process of optimization and transformation. This ensures that you’re using the data you’re collating effectively and that every part of your process is aligned to your map, customer, and strategy.

The value of customer journey mapping

This entire process, from orchestration to management to map development, is focused on creating a customer-centric organization and marketing strategy. This is the inherent value of the process and the work that has to go into every part of this process. Using this process, you can sidestep the silos and the traditional limitations of departments and segmentation to create a holistic view that can transform your customer connections.

However, in the B2B market, it is worth remembering that customer experiences and the routes to purchase can be complex and twisty. There are multiple requirements, touchpoints, compliance expectations, and supplier processes that have to be taken into consideration. These are challenging for marketing teams to map and orchestrate and can result in intensely convoluted maps or maps that are too brief to offer much value. You can refine your mapping processes more effectively if you’re aware of these limitations.

Engaged customers on a golden pathway drive long-term strategic growth

Your customers are your greatest admirers. They are your best salespeople. Their engagement and satisfaction will echo down the line to every new customer and recommendation you get. If you can use these tools to create an engaging customer journey mapped to success across multiple funnels, touchpoints, and objectives, you can drive long-term strategic growth.

Build the perfect golden highway to customer success with GROW

Grow_Case_Study_thumb_Corephotonics

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Challenge

Corephotonics wanted to build a website that would better reflect its portfolio of inventive products and solutions, which was more in line with its recent acquisition by Samsung and its role as an innovation center. The company collaborated with GROW to unpack its website strategy across visual presentation, content, and visibility to better showcase the depth of its technology offering.

In addition to becoming a living portfolio of new and existing technology innovation, the website had to serve as a recruitment platform that would attract the right level of talent to its doors. It needed to have a clear balance between portfolio, technology development, and business and fully capture the depth of the brand.

Solution

The GROW team immersed themselves into the company, its technology, and its service offering to ensure that the final website product was aligned to what Corephotonics needed. By fully realizing the brand’s potential and getting to know its ethos, vision, and market, GROW could work more cohesively with Corephotonics in developing a highly visual and engaging website.

The website had to show the depth of the Corephotonics offering and the brand’s incredible achievements in the field of photography and mobile device capability. To this end, the website was designed to be as visual as possible, using extraordinary images and bright colors to immediately convey what the brand represents.

The content created for the site also had to reflect this crystal-clear focus. It had to be sharp, appealing, and relevant, allowing visitors to intuitively navigate the site without impacting the visual experience. GROW’s copy was sharp and to the point, highlighting relevant information in bite-sized chunks that encouraged further reading and engagement.

Results

Developed on WordPress, laid out in an easy-to-read and navigate format, and designed to be easy to update, the new Corephotonics website delivered precisely what the customer needed. The copy, design, and development process was smooth, and the final product was both relevant and engaging. The company now has a highly visual and appealing website that it can easily update to keep it fresh and vibrant and that captures the full range of the company’s services and solutions.

Testimonial

“We thoroughly enjoyed working with the GROW team in planning, designing and developing our website. They immediately understood what we needed and collaborated with us closely to ensure that we got the content, design, and functionality we wanted for our site going forward.” – Eran Kali, VP Sales and Licensing at Corephotonics.

email marketing services israel 

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Success lies in optimization. Constantly fine-tuning and tweaking performance and investment using clear ROI metrics means that campaigns move from underperformers to winners because they learn and evolve. The following benchmarks are the most common when it comes to ensuring that your marketing ROI is up to scratch:

  1. Cost per lead – divide the total campaign spend by the total leads generated.
  2. Conversion rate – assess these per channel and device.
  3. Cost per acquisition or sale – calculate this by dividing the total campaign cost by the sales generated by the campaign.
  4. Customer lifetime value – calculate this with the formula of: average sale per customer x average times they purchase per year x average retention time for a typical customer.

Each of these metrics will help you to gauge the long- and short-term success of campaigns and marketing endeavors. It’s important not to get hung up on them, however, but to instead use them as tools that help you to create more cohesive and capable campaigns.

The next step is to focus on how you can take these calculations and improve your overall marketing ROI. This can be done in numerous ways, most of them quite obvious to the talented marketing team. The first is to go back to the metrics you’ve been using to assess your campaigns and ask if they are the right ones and if perhaps these need to be adjusted to meet more relevant business expectations. Then, play around with the marketing channels on offer to you to see if you can see gains in areas that perhaps you didn’t expect – this can inform future campaign investment and strategy. Further refine this with A/B testing and clear budget outlines that provide clarity around spend and income.

The value of these approaches and methodical analyses cannot be understated as they allow for marketers not just to assess their approaches and campaign successes but to show the C-suite and decision-makers how every step within a campaign’s trajectory has been used to deliver a particular result.

Now you need to calculate your marketing ROI

It’s time to take your marketing ROI beyond the formulae and into fine-tuned perfection that fits your business. You want to create campaigns that really work. That do what you want them to do. And you want to be able to do this on demand, knowing that your choice of channel, tone, and approach is spot on every time.

Marketing ROI is reliant on the cost of your campaign versus the output, so you can start by assessing the ROI of a given marketing program to determine how this will shape investment moving forward. For example, you can use the formulae above to evaluate a campaign’s spend versus output value and then use this insight to gain additional budget. It’s a reliable way of justifying your spending while equally gaining insight into the total ROI your marketing efforts have generated.

The next step is to establish a baseline. This can be where campaigns start against where they end up, thereby proving the value of a campaign approach or particular omnichannel strategy. Or it can be used as a benchmark of success that every campaign needs to reach. Using metrics like A/B testing and cost per lead/acquisition/sale, you can further refine this baseline to ensure that your campaigns achieve their full potential.

Then, you’re going to need a benchmark of the competition. It’s always worth seeing how competitors are faring in your market and what tactics they’re using to capture its attention. Using this data, you can refine your campaigns to fill gaps or improve your approaches.

In addition to these steps, you can unpack your ROI against various calculations. These include your total campaign revenue, gross profit, and net profit and should be added to all the other cost factors such as agency fees, overheads, internal costs, creative costs, media and channel fees, and other unanticipated expenses. All these can then be combined to gain a clear financial picture of how your marketing efforts are performing against their cost to company.

Finally, ask yourself one very important question – what does all this mean in light of the customer? You must always bring the story back to the customer lifetime value, which includes their story within the brand story over their lifetime with the brand. It’s not an impossible metric to measure, and it is one that has proven invaluable to marketing teams in the past. To assess this, simply subtract your customer revenue from the cost of acquiring them, and you’ve got their lifetime value.

This lifetime value is, well, invaluable. Not only is it more expensive to woo new customers, but loyal customers spend more over their lifetime, which means they deliver constant ROI to the brand.

Marketing cost is any incremental cost that’s incurred during campaign execution

No marketing campaign is free. This is what makes the ROI conversation so important. Without return on this often very expensive investment, companies aren’t going to put more spend in the marketing bucket. Nor should they – the cost is too high to drip funds down a well that’s run dry.

Metaphors aside, several costs are impossible to avoid when it comes to building up a genuinely impactful marketing campaign. These are:

  • Pay-per-click
  • Media spend
  • Content production
  • External marketing fees
  • External agency fees
  • Display ad clicks

These costs are factored into the ratio mentioned earlier, the one where if you get 5:1 ROI, you’re doing a great job and should carry on doing what you’re doing (fine tweaks to optimize campaigns aside).  You can use this ratio to squeeze every last tiny drop of value from your spend and to ensure that your campaigns constantly and consistently maximize their impact.

ROI measurements should account for external factors

Earlier, it was highlighted that external factors are not incorporated into the assessments of marketing ROI as often as they should be and that they are too simplistic and lack visibility into long-term gains.

First, don’t use old and outdated models of attribution to assess your success and ROI. They can no longer provide the level of insight required across the multiple channels used by marketing and the new metrics that define marketing’s success. You also need to consider the customer journey and how the touchpoints they go through before they even consider a purchase have increased exponentially alongside digital and omnichannel. Now, the average customer goes through six to ten touch points before they buy, and so measuring this ROI asks that you assess every one of these – both online and offline.

In conclusion…

All of these factors, from the ratio through to the formulae through to granular analysis of every channel and platform, contribute to your marketing ROI and determine its actual value. Using these steps and approaches, you can streamline your marketing and create more efficient campaigns that deliver measurable results. Now, get out there and measure because there’s no time like the present to transform your marketing strategy and spending.

GROW is a full-service marketing agency passionate about helping B2B companies achieve their goals.

Contact us here to learn how we can help you transform your marketing ROI.

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Posted by & filed under Business.

What is Marketing ROI?

This elusive metric can be complex to capture and measure. According to a recent Hubspot analysis, it is a tool that marketers can use to maximize their investments and connect with customers. According to Meltwater, it’s the profitability of your marketing efforts.

The reality sits between the two. Your marketing ROI is a metric by which you can tangibly measure the financial value of your campaigns against customer engagement, strategic objectives, yield, market growth, and sales.

ROI is important to measure because it provides clarity into your marketing strategy and its effectiveness and allows you to refine individual campaigns to better align with onging strategic objectives. Using ROI, you can unpack how well a campaign performs in which channels and how well customers across multiple touchpoints and channels engage with each campaign and brand. It also allows you to understand the profitability of your campaigns against these channels and to refine resource allocation, strategy, and spend.

How do you measure and improve your marketing ROI?

Calculating your ROI depends on the business, the market, and your expectations, but a solid strategy is to divide net profit or loss by the total marketing spend and then multiply by 100 to get a percentage result.

You can also subtract your sales growth from your marketing costs to assess your marketing ROI or subtract organic sales growth from overall sales growth, as expressed in this well-known formula

(Sales Growth – Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost = Marketing ROI 

In some cases, sales growth is not directly linked to marketing spending, and the following formula eliminates organic sales growth from the equation. 

(Sales Growth – Organic Sales Growth – Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost = Marketing ROI

However, a formula is only one part of the ROI equation. You also need to measure your marketing ROI against goals and objectives that reflect how your organization perceives success. One way of doing this is to use the SMART framework that asks you to assess marketing spend and return on that spend against the metrics of: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. These steps cover everything from increasing ROI on social spend, to putting measurable criteria in place, to budget constraints and a clear timeline for achieving your goals.

Then, ensure that all the insights you gain are used to drive future strategies built on the foundations of trusted data and visible metrics.

The challenges of measuring marketing ROI

The problem with most marketing ROI metrics and measurements is that they rarely take in the whole picture and often result in shaky results that don’t reflect the value marketing has gained or the impact it has had. Most marketing metrics are too simple and ignore the multiple external factors that impact a campaign, such as seasons, trends, and events; plus, they often focus on short-term results and don’t fully align success against the entire duration of a campaign.

Another challenge is that the marketing landscape is omnichannel, so customers hurtle through multiple touchpoints before they purchase. This means that often their route to sales is hard to track and difficult to quantify.

What is good marketing ROI?

 If you want an exceptional ROI metric, then you are looking at 10:1, but the average is around 5:1, with anything less than 2:1 falling well below par. This ratio is established using the formula outlined above and assessing the results against overall marketing costs such as overheads, margins, marketing spend, omnichannel investment, brand development, and more.

Why use this ratio? Because it is a very immediate and visible way of assessing marketing activity and using the insights to tweak campaigns and spend appropriately.

Why pay attention to marketing ROI? Because here lies a wealth of information and data that you can use to transform your marketing spend and its success rates. Information can help you optimize your channels and refine your approaches, which can help you constantly tweak and shape your campaigns to achieve sustainable success.

In Part 02 of this series we dig deeper into marketing ROI and the different methodologies, approaches, and strategies you can use to make your marketing spend work for you.

 

GROW is a full-service marketing agency passionate about helping B2B companies achieve their goals.

Contact us here to learn how we can help you transform your marketing ROI.

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Posted by & filed under Case Studies.

Challenge

GOARC collaborated with GROW to develop a vibrant and cohesive strategy with carefully curated messaging that would allow it to stand out as a trusted service provider and innovator in a very traditional market. GOARC blends the latest technology and tech terminology into solutions that address specific pain points for companies operating in industrial environments. However, the market can perceive this as too complicated or threatening.

The sector that GOARC serves has long relied on manual or time-consuming processes built on legacy technology that’s limited in scope and functionality. However, this reliance makes many companies reluctant to step out of their comfort zone – worker and site safety are absolutely critical, and companies don’t want to introduce unnecessary risk. This concern meant that GOARC and GROW had to find an intelligent way of establishing the brand’s capabilities without triggering these pain points.

  • The two companies decided to frame the technology and the smart solutions created by GOARC in a fresh and transparent way, using clear language that informed and advised but didn’t overwhelm or over-complicate. The brand identity, tone, and messaging were then developed in alignment with this objective and ticked the boxes of: straightforward, relevant, simple, and benefits-driven.

Solution

GOARC created a cohesive marketing and branding strategy that aligned with the market’s unique perceptions and brought them together with the GROW service offering. The result was a comprehensive branding exercise that included:

  • Simple and straightforward language and tone
  • The GOARC value proposition and technology innovation framed within the right language
  • Messaging crafted to suit the industry and the solutions on offer
  • Content marketing strategy that included blogs, whitepapers, and PRs to cement GOARC’s reputation and standing
  • Website marketing strategy to reinforce the messaging and brand identity

Results

The GROW ethos of high availability, service, and professionalism ensured GOARC achieved its communication and market penetration goals. The website is bright and engaging with crisp messaging, and clear sales points and content has been regularly curated to address particular industry pain points and GOARC solutions. In addition, the content and website strategies are aligned to ensure that every GOARC touchpoint is consistent across the digital ecosystem.

Today, GOARC and GROW continue to collaborate on a cohesive marketing strategy that evolves alongside market demands and perceptions.

Testimonial

“GROW has done an excellent job crafting engaging content for all our marketing needs. Their team deeply understands the market, they do their research thoroughly, and the daily communication and collaboration are as smooth as possible. Excellent service, very good content and deadlines are never missed. We have built a strong online presence and engaged with the sector in fresh ways thanks to this relationship and look forward to continuing this partnership well into the future.” – Jude Liemberg, Marketing Director of GOARC