With an increased focus on ROI, marketers have become challenged not only to produce results, but to prove them.  This makes operational efficiency extremely important for your marketing department.  Here are just a few tips to make your B2B marketing team more efficient.

Content Calendar

Keeping an updated content calendar has many benefits to your marketing team.  The ability to view in progress content across multiple channels, track content across different products and verticals and to organize the content creation schedule are just some of the benefits of using a content calendar.  They also help to ensure you don’t repeat subject matter too often and can give you a library of resources to repurpose when the time is right.  Calendars should be kept for blog writing, social media posts, premium content and any other content that your company regularly produces.

Collaborate With Sales

Your sales team likely has the most direct contact with your prospects and customers.  Regularly interviewing them can give you valuable insights that can be used for more highly targeted marketing campaigns.  It is also possible that your sales team has a vast network of customers, prospects and partners.  Leveraging their networks to distribute your marketing content can greatly increase the reach of your messaging.

Account Based Marketing

While there are many definitions, account-based marketing is essentially taking a particular company, industry, vertical or micro-vertical and treating it as a market of one.  Meaning you dissect every level of the organization and perform personalized and targeted outreach to each level.  Narrowing your target market and putting every effort into selling your most important accounts will improve the efficiency of your campaigns as they will be more targeted and personalized.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation platforms such as HubSpot and SharpSpring have greatly increased the efficiency of marketing campaigns through the use of content creation, distribution and email tools.  Being able to automate responses to marketing triggers greatly reduces the manpower needed to qualify and nurture leads.  Additionally, having access to detailed analytics that can measure any aspect of a campaign allows for greater A/B testing and allows marketers to better identify what tactics are working best.

Strategic Outsourcing

Even if you have a strong marketing team, outsourcing certain tasks can allow for greater bandwidth, and as a result, more creative and effective campaigns.  Outsourcing things like content creation, SEO and social media will allow your team more room for strategizing and personalized outreach.  Additionally, having an experienced outsourcing partner can provide you with guidance and the resources needed to make your campaigns more effective.