How to Communicate the Value of SEO to the C-Suite
SEO can drive sustainable business growth, competitive advantage and a strong ROI. Communicating that value, however, can be challenging.
Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) are facing mounting pressure to achieve greater results with resources.
Recently, marketing budgets have struggled to reach pre-pandemic levels while businesses grapple with inflation. CMOs can navigate budgetary constraints by prioritising ROI and optimising resources to achieve their marketing goals.
400 CMOs and marketing leaders responded to Gartner’s CMO Spend and Strategy Survey. The results below show that marketing budgets have yet to recover to pre-pandemic levels, slipping at the start of 2023 to 9.1% of total revenue.
Facing the challenge of brand awareness, acquisition, and community engagement, 75% of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) are expected to achieve more with less and 71% believe they don’t have the budget to achieve the goals set by the C-suite. They are compelled to focus on tactics that directly result in sales and return on investment (ROI).
So, how can you squeeze more out of your reduced budget and maximise your marketing efforts?
A marketing budget serves as a roadmap for allocating funds. A comprehensive marketing budget helps you:
Reducing investment in marketing resources can negatively impact effectiveness in these areas.
While budgeting, it may be challenging to decide what to cut, but reducing investments in areas such as marketing technology (MarTech) can hinder future innovations. However, pressure to reduce spend on MarTech is felt by 75% of CMOs, with 62% planning to cut investments in optimisation and improvements, as well as halting new solutions.
Marketers must face the challenge of using their current tools effectively to track and enhance ROI. Making informed decisions on technology adoption and sticking to a chosen solution for an extended period are key to avoid wasting expenditures.
Digital platforms provide rich data analytics which should be used to understand your target audience’s preferred platforms and messaging styles. When it comes to increasing ROI, these measures can be taken:
Personalisation: Address customers by their names and tailor messages. This fosters strong relationships and leads to higher engagement.
Optimisation: Respond to changing market dynamics by making real-time adjustments to campaigns based on data insights to save costs.
PPC: Pay when a targeted user clicks on your ad, rather than impressions. These campaigns can be adjusted at any time to ensure maximum ROI.
Attribution: Digital platforms, such as Google Analytics 4, provide evidence of ROI through various attribution models. Attribution helps you to understand the contribution of each marketing channel to the customer’s journey and identify the most effective channels for driving conversions.
Leveraging technology and AI can streamline processes, reduce manual tasks, increase efficiency, and reduce costs. These tools and platforms can help:
Squeeze value out of the time and resources your staff have spent on creating content by repurposing it for other channels and updating outdated posts.
ROI is difficult to achieve at the best of times, but especially when it feels like the walls are closing in. Considering your key performance indicators (KPIs) for each marketing tactic will help to evaluate their effectiveness, and overall ROI.
By effectively tracking your marketing ROI, you can identify underfunded, high performing areas, and vice versa, allowing you to make informed adjustments and squeeze the most out of your marketing efforts. This data-driven approach helps to justify the real impact marketing tactics have on the bottom line of your organisation.
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