If you’re a B2B marketer, answer the following questions quickly:

1) What is your company/organization?

2) What do you help other organizations accomplish? (Here’s a hint – if you’re not helping them either reduce costs or generate revenue, you may be in trouble.)

3) How do you help those organizations accomplish that goal?

4) What types of organizations do you help?

You, and all the members of your marketing and sales team, should be able to answer those questions in 30 seconds or less.  If not, there’s a messaging problem.  In my experience, only 1 of every 4 marketing management types can answer these questions without stumbling. 

If you don’t know your message, why do you expect prospects to understand your message?

So your boss just dropped the following task on you – you need to cut marketing spend, and you also need to figure out how to make that spend work better from an ROI standpoint.  If it makes you feel any better, you’re not alone.  Marketing department heads are getting hit with that same task in every type of organization.

The better news is that this task is really not that difficult, especially if you are using the appropriate tracking mechanisms.  The potential solutions to this problem are endless, yet the implementation can seem complicated.  Here are 3 basic places to start:

1. Assuming you know which marketing vehicles are your most efficient performers from a lead generation or customer acquisition standpoint, cut out the poor performers for the time being and focus on the top performers. If search engine marketing drives leads at half the cost of direct mail (without sacrificing quality of course), then cut direct mail and focus on search engine marketing.  If your affiliate program drives new e-commerce customers at a $20 cost per acquisition while your email marketing program drives new e-commerce customers at a $75 cost per aquisition, cut the email marketing and focus in on the affiliate program.

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