B2B Marketing Goals: How to Break Them Down
We need to discuss B2B marketing goals.
In any business venture, revenue is a key financial metric. Whilst revenue doesn't accurately represent the health of a business (turnover is vanity, afterall), the top line income is often a reflection of the attractiveness of a business to its client base, and the reward of the marketing efforts that came before it (growth).
Without marketing, however, revenue growth is but a distant dream. How else are you going to generate the volume of leads necessary to even begin to achieve your target? What even is your target volume of leads? You do know how to calculate that, right?
It's OK, your secret is safe with me. You wouldn't be alone in not understanding how to work out your targets - it's scary business to look at a revenue target without truly knowing what it takes to make it happen. (This is true for any goal by the way, and is why our unique OSKAR system is bulletproof.)
The trick to building confidence here is to work backwards, breaking down your goal into manageable milestones and numbers that you'll understand.
To establish your B2B marketing goals, you'll need the following:
Revenue goal
Average Order Value (AOV)
New Customers needed
Average Opportunity-to-Customer conversion rate
Number of Opportunities needed
Average Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)-to-Opportunity conversion rate
Number of MQLs needed
Average % of Leads who become MQLs
Number of Leads required
The formula for working it all out is this: take your revenue goal, divide by your AOV to figure out how many customers you need. Divide that number by your conversion rate of Opportunity-to-Customer to figure out how many Opportunities you need. Divide that by conversion rate of MQL-to-Opportunity to figure out how many MQLs you need. Lastly, divide that by the conversion rate of Lead-to-MQL to figure out how many leads you need.
If that hurts your head, here is a table to help make it a little easier on the brain:
Revenue goal
£1,000,000
Average Order Value (AOV)
£25,000
New Customers needed
40
Average Opp-to-Customer conversion rate
25%
Number of Opps needed
160
Average MQL-to-Opp conversion rate
40%
Number of MQLs needed
400
Average % of Leads who become MQLs
75%
Number of Leads required
533
As you can see, breaking your goal down means it's now much easier to digest. Rather than having a million pound target, you only actually need to achieve 40 new customers. And to do that you'll need 160 opportunities, and so forth.
From here, you can begin to assign targets for each marketing channel that you want to deploy in order to hit your goals. Whilst one channel might do the job, it's highly likely you'll be using a few to maximise your brand's visibility and to reach your customers more effectively.
It's therefore important to build marketing systems that continuously drive new leads to your business. The rest of this post is slightly biased based on our expertise.
There are plenty of other channels and tactics that you could use, but we're super proud of how effective we are at setting goals and achieving them in a measurable and accountable way.
Check out some insanely effective mini case studies on how search marketing can transform your business below.
SEO
B2B SEO traffic increase
Proven channels such as SEO can build sustainable and scalable leads for your business, but should be viewed with a long-term outlook. Breaking your B2B marketing goals down and assigning a year-on-year increase to SEO is a wise move given its longevity as a strategy for your business.
With 89% of all purchasing decisions beginning with a search engine (Fleishman-Hillard), ranking for the keywords that are important to your business is a sure way to capture those potential customers at key stages throughout their decision making process.
Taking our work for Hanson UK as a case study of this, we set out to reach one of their audiences for a set of keywords that weren't being explored by our client.
To reach this market, we created content that improved upon all competitors and added plenty of informative content to help our client's customers to make decisions. The result was a staggering increase in the number of keyword variations that now rank.
And this has driven significant traffic for our client, filling the top of their funnel with new potential leads that will filter through to opportunities and, ultimately, customers.
As you can see from the traffic graph below, the jump is pretty phenomenal and highlights the power of having a well-defined B2B marketing strategy and executing on it.
B2B SEO marketing strategies - keyword rankings
If your SEO agency isn't helping you to achieve your B2B marketing goals, then speak to us about how we could partner up with your business to fulfil your aspirations.
PPC
Supplementing the long-term patience of SEO with PPC is, in our humble opinion, the holy grail of transformative B2B digital marketing.
PPC is fast and provides immediate feedback as to what is and isn't working. It requires a deep understanding of the platforms involved, and the analysis of patterns and trends to adjust each lever as required. It's a fine balance of driving new clicks (at a cost) and achieving conversions at the price you want (Cost Per Conversion).
The problem usually occurs when businesses try to take it on themselves, without the time or skill to really tame the beast. And it normally ends in tears. New leads? Yes. At an unsustainably high cost? Yes.
Taking a look at how we manage our PPC campaigns here at Zest might give you some food for thought.
Firstly, most of the work we do happens outside of the platforms that you might be used to. Take Google Ads for example - the platform is often slow and clicking around can be a soul destroying waste of time.
Instead, we'll export the data to a spreadsheet, where our team diligently looks for key patterns that might influence how that particular keyword, ad, group, or campaign, can be improved. We'll compare data against our spend projections to ensure that we're on track towards hitting our targets.
PPC spend projection graph
Limitations within the platforms themselves can also affect the ability to effectively maximise the results of your PPC campaigns. This is why we have created our own automations to help businesses to save a tonne of time and exponentially increase their ability to win with PPC.
The image below shows an example of our 24/7 bidding script where our clients can apply bidding adjustments by the hour, meaning that they can capitalise on peak hours, whilst saving budget during quiet periods.
Zest's 24/7 PPC Bidding Script
This kind of flexibility gives us the ability to work towards B2B marketing goals with control far beyond the platforms themselves. Add these kind of tools to your arsenal and you'll be much more likely to succeed in delivering a steady stream of B2B marketing conversions for your business.
A secondary benefit of PPC is that the fast data acquired can be passed on to your SEO team with the knowledge that a particular keyword is likely to convert.
This shared knowledge creates smart and predictable marketing, and will take you a step closer towards achieving your B2B marketing goals. To set your own digital marketing objectives, jump over to our interactive Growth Calculator and forecast your future revenue.
If you're interested in talking to us about a new partnership, why don't you book in a free Strategy Call.
