INSIGHTS

More than 40% of the senior marketing managers who took our recent survey said their current marketing budget was bigger than the previous year’s. (They’re either good, lucky or both!)

Most of our respondents, though, weren’t so fortunate. Nearly one-quarter reported a dip in budget, and 8% of respondents saw big cuts. Twenty-nine percent white-knuckled it, simply holding steady from the previous year’s marketing budget.  

Whether you’re feeling flush or flat, you know it’s critical to maximize what you do have. And that requires measuring the impact of your marketing efforts—aka return on investment (ROI). It also means that you’ll want to carefully prioritize where you put your dollars in trying to reach and engage public safety organizations. 

Here’s what that might look like in action: Let’s say your current strategy includes placing digital ads on Google and LinkedIn as well as on a variety of public-safety media sites. You also plan to hold a series of three webinars. Your goals are to expand brand awareness but also generate X number of leads into the sales pipeline. 

As you track the performance of these tactics, you find that the webinars are dramatically outperforming the ads. You’re getting more qualified leads from webinar attendees and those who watch the recording, and quite a few are further along the sales funnel. That’s actionable information. While the digital ads are driving more awareness, you may decide to pause the ads for the time being or pull back on the spend altogether (though it’s worth mentioning that digital marketing efforts tend to take time to bear fruit).

If you’re not sure where to put those precious dollars, our recommendation is doing small tests for a quick assessment of what’s working and what’s not. These often deliver more insight (and results) for existing budget than dropping a lot into one or two big efforts (unless, of course, those tactics are tried-and-tested). Quickly determining what’s working can also help you justify a bump in your marketing budget. Simply put, test small and fast, and pivot when it makes sense to. 

When it comes to measuring what you do, here are some words of advice drawn from our long experience helping organizations like yours document and improve the ROI of their efforts to reach public safety leaders and influencers:

• Set up a landing page. Driving digital ads to a homepage can leave a prospect flailing, wondering what to do next. Instead, we typically recommend that our clients set up a dedicated landing page on their site with a clear call to action for each campaign. Adding the UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) code to the landing page URL will track key metrics that tell you how this campaign performed, including the specific campaign, source (where the traffic originates, such as LinkedIn), medium, content and term, among other parameters.
• Maximize your CRM. You may already have a customer relationship management system like Salesforce or HubSpot in place. If not, you’ll want to set one up to track your prospects and the action(s) they take from first website visit to sale (or “Close Lost”). Yes, it takes effort and money to do this, but this is a must for every organization we work with at Redflash Group. Why? A CRM gives you unparalleled insight into what is actually happening: Who not only opened an email but clicked specific links within it? What did they do next? How did they get to you? Where did they get waylayed along the sales journey? 
• Move money around. No, we aren’t suggesting you open an offshore account in the Cayman Islands. As mentioned earlier, when something is working for you, keep doing it and consider doing more of it. In other words, allocate more dollars to the efforts you can see are getting you closer to your goals and stop, pause or pull back on those that aren’t. You may find, for example, that a lead form on LinkedIn to download your latest white paper is working much better than a similar form on your own site. Or vice versa, in which case the squeeze (spending money for the LinkedIn form) just isn’t worth the juice. 

And then, of course, when you do have successes to show, be sure to share them with the powers-that-be, helping to ensure your next marketing budget reflects those successes.

Download the full survey results in our Ebook, “Tapping Into the Marketing Trends of Organizations Serving Public Safety.”