With These 8 Tips, You Can Increase Your Marketing Efficiency

1. What and how can you increase the efficiency of your marketing?
2. Conclusion on ERP interfaces
3. Conclusion: Marketing too is data-driven

Do you finally want to turn off the watering can in marketing and get to know efficiency in the marketing department? Then you are in the right place in this article.

The marketing departments and agencies have paid too much attention to beauty and creativity for too long. And I say that, an advertiser who started his professional life as a filmmaker. Nothing works without key figures in our agency and we are looking for measurability everywhere.

With good marketing efficiency, you achieve a better conversion rate, but also better thousand-contact prices (TKP). Minimizing the cost per customer should be the goal of any good marketing department. And an agency, the professionals of marketing as well.

But what is the marketing efficiency actually and what does it say?

The term marketing efficiency describes the relationship between marketing success and the related costs.

What and how can you increase the efficiency of your marketing?

Increasing marketing efficiency offers great potential for the growth and cost efficiency of a company.

You should particularly keep an eye on KPI’s for marketing activities in B2B. This includes all measures from a company that have an influence on positioning your company towards business customers.

To improve the efficiency of individual marketing, you should ask yourself what goals you are pursuing with your marketing. Based on this, the analysis to increase your marketing efficiency begins.

After you have asked yourself these questions, you should take a closer look at your current strategies. The following 8 tips will help you on your way to marketing efficiency.

Tip 1: Reduce your communication to the efficient channels.

You should ask yourself: Where is my target group on the go and where do I reach the most people? Here, of course, the famous personas can come into play. They are often created from the gut. However, if you have already had experience with your customers, this decision should be based on current data from your marketing. Market research data can also help to find the right channel.

In the spirit of the agile start-up mentality, you should best test different channels and measure the respective success and effectiveness. You should always ask yourself whether you can achieve the greatest possible success with the least effort.

Tip 2: Uses KPIs for consistent optimization of marketing measures

Many advertisers and creative agencies still consider KPI’s the great enemy. The fact is, however, the best idea is worthless without KPI’s. Constant optimization of advertisements, the landing page, content on social media or the design of videos based on KPI’s is crucial.

An important ingredient in KPI marketing controlling is, for example, the interaction rate. The interaction rate works independently of the reach. This means that it works in relation to reach and can be used even with small reaches, e.g., when the Instagram channel has just started.

At the same time, it is also an important factor for reach on social media. A post that quickly gets a lot of interactions is played out better by the algorithm. For the interaction rate, we look at any kind of interaction with the advertising media, which can also be the opening rate in email marketing.

In the efficiency and effectiveness criteria, you should eliminate activities that are not effective after thorough checking and evaluation.

In the target conformity, measures, activities and projects that do not specifically contribute to strategic priorities are also deleted.

So if the goal is to increase brand awareness, then you should also cancel advertising measures that achieve good results, but contribute nothing to the strategic goal.

You should consider all cost drivers holistically; this way you can precisely identify all efficiency reserves such as processes, tools, service providers and agencies in addition to communication.

Tip 3: Automates your processes

In this tip, the radical managing director speaks to me. Every process where an employee still has to actively work should be analyzed to see how much more cost-efficient this process can be taken over by a tool.

A tool that can help you is Brevo (ehemals Sendinblue), which we have linked to our platform via the API, for example. We send mails to the users automatically. From the welcome mail to tips and tricks about influencer marketing to the birthday mail, our customers are played automatically.

Also HubSpot Marketing Hub can support lead generation. The all-in-one solution provides all the necessary tools from the landing page to the CRM system to the newsletter client. Including all necessary analytics and clear reporting.

And your social media channels can also be played much more efficiently if the responsible person sits focused on the postings for the next four weeks for one day, plans these and then no longer has to worry about them.

The tool Hootsuite is suitable for this. With this you play all channels of your company and get the necessary analytics in clear reporting. In addition, there is the possibility of centrally managing the community at one location for all linked channels.

If you want to become active on social media beyond your own channels and carry out influencer campaigns, then the German tool Leadnow is your best choice. With Leadnow you have the perfect support to automate your influencer marketing and your user-generated content production. Leadnow also makes influencer marketing measurable and is therefore suitable for KPI analysis.

Tip 4: Trying out takes precedence over extensive planning

Just doing it is most efficient than planning for a long and then failing. As long as you don't act completely unthoughtfully, hardly anything can go wrong. The worst result is bad KPI’s.

It is important to test different variants on each channel. Posting a video on Instagram and then finding out that videos don't work for you on Instagram is usually very rash. Here it also helps to go deeper into the analytics and for example to look at where viewers stop the video and change this part in further videos.

The same applies to newsletters, it is also worth taking a close look at why the newsletter might not work. After several variants have been tested, a decision can be made about the channel based on the overall result.

Tip 5: Pay attention to your landing page

I often hear: Advertisements, social media or newsletters don't work. I don't get any purchases! Then the content is polished and optimized or, in the worst case, the channel is deleted without going one step further in the funnel.

A good and converting landing page is absolutely necessary. Creating a standing out landing page is very easy today. There are many tools that can help you create your own converting landing pages. We have put together a few tools for you.

• Unbounce
• NOSTO
• trbo
• Google Optimize

Efficient marketing also means making it easy. With good search engine optimization, you save a lot of costs in acquiring new customers. With the tool Seobility you can analyze your website, optimize it directly and monitor it in the long term. Same incl. Backlink analysis.

Tip 6: Makes social media easier

Planning posts on social media is unfortunately not enough. First, the content must be created. This depends on the skill set that the person for social media is equipped with.

If you decide to employ social media internally, a certain level of visual and editorial skills should be available. However, the tool Canva Pro can still support. With the different templates and existing shapes, elements and icons, it is almost difficult to miss a bad post.

Nevertheless, it is advisable to involve an agency for the first steps on social media. This way you achieve a professional, serious and platform-appropriate external effect on social media from the start.

Tip 7: Uses meaningful ERP interfaces

With ERP interfaces, analyses can be determined across the various channels and areas of marketing. With an ERP system, you gain a common database.ERP-Systeme are modular and network data from different areas of the company. Warehouse management and warehousing, marketing, sales and project management can call up relevant data from the other areas.

Many of our customers use Xentral ERP as ERP software. The tool is made for e-commerce and offers accounting integration.

Xentral can be directly linked to shops, payment providers or shipping service providers. Marketplaces such as Amazon can also be docked via interface. All important areas are also consolidated in the system.

This creates a place where you can work reliably with all current data. All employees can receive access to customer, project, product as well as purchasing and sales data in real time. Especially if you have an online shop and are active in the Amazon marketplace, the data from both platforms is consolidated here and you can create the invoices centrally.

You also save time in bookkeeping. Especially when you have different payment flows like Paypal, Amazon, Klarna or Stripe, all data now comes together in the ERP system and can be exported for your tax advisor with a click in DATEV format.

Likewise, you will also be able to manage your analysis data centrally at one location. This allows you to oversee the entire process of your customer experience, from the first touchpoint to the arrival of the product. This will help you analyze the relevant marketing channels.

With these results, we are back at the beginning of these tips, choosing the right KPI’s and optimizing marketing measures based on the resulting results.

Tip 8: It has to “humanize”

The best efficiency and the best technical know-how behind your communication measures are of no use to you if your communication is not going well. You have probably heard the sentence “communication has to humanize.”

In today's age, it no longer helps to communicate as a company shell and with a lot of distance. It's about realizing authentic direct communication in the sense of human-to-human communication. Especially on digital channels, you should allow a look into your company.

Conclusion on ERP interfaces

ERP is an abbreviation and stands for Enterprise Resource Planning, this is a software solution for resource planning in a company or organization. You find all the data you need for good customer relation management in one place.

The analysis of successful communication channels is easier for you or is even automated. This helps you to really become efficient in your marketing.

Conclusion: Marketing too is data-driven

Marketing efficiency is not a question of ideology. It is about saving a lot of money with the right levers and making your company agile. Your goal is to become faster and more innovative than the competition.

KPI’s help with this, so you invest your capacities in the channels and content that are most efficient. Marketing today is data-driven and no longer just the department that creates the pretty pictures. We can say very precisely today what added value we deliver and where we save costs and make profits.