4 Ways Marketo Can Reduce Marketing Costs

Plus 3 strategies to streamline your marketing budget

Marketers face constant pressure to reduce costs, even in favourable economic conditions. And when growth slows, marketing budgets are often first on the chopping block. 

Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey found that marketing budgets plummeted from 11% of overall company revenue to just 6.4% in 12 months.

Econsultancy revealed that, as of September 2021, up to 30% of B2C companies hadn’t reached pre-pandemic levels of customer experience, judged on factors like timely response rates and availability of support.

Whether we like it or not, marketers need to find efficiencies to boost ROI and justify their investments with relevant data.

That’s why more growth-obsessed organisations are turning to automation platforms like Marketo Engage. A smart investment in Marketo can yield significant rewards for savvy marketers. 

3 strategies for reducing costs and protecting marketing budgets 

1. Obsess over value 

Why? Because your C-Suite is.

Providing greater visibility of marketing ROI will help defend against knee-jerk decisions to cut budgets. 

• Focus on hard metrics that matter to your C-Suite

Figures like revenue and leads in the pipeline connect with the broader business goals. Linking marketing activity to customer value is the most effective way to prove ROI. 

• Demonstrate Marketing’s capacity for collaboration

Coordinated strategies like account-based marketing (ABM) that involve sales, marketing, and operations teams will show how a coordinated approach brings in more business. 

Read our Practical Guide to Sales and Marketing Alignment to find out how it’s done.

• Streamline your supply chain 

If your marketing team operates out of multiple budget centres, now is a good time to review costs. Transparency and a unified approach help to scale back rogue agency spending, reduce contract duplication, simplify procurement, and boost your buying power.

2. Make rational investment decisions 

Strategic martech investments can transform your operations over time. As tech and training mature internal capabilities, you can reduce costs by:

• Scaling down to a few trusted partners

Adopt a joint-delivery approach to get agency assistance for big strategies and programs (e.g. an ABM program) while upskilling your team to run campaigns in-house.

• Unifying martech

Bring CRM, email, social, advertising, and other digital channels together under one platform like Marketo that serves multiple marketing needs and skill sets. Rationalising your martech ecosystem can bring performance improvements and productivity gains.

• Investing in your most significant asset

Get more value out of your martech investments by empowering your people. Organise training, work to their strengths, and incentivise ideas that improve productivity. 

4. Demand more from your martech

While automation isn’t a silver bullet, you should seize any opportunity to increase productivity by reducing manual operations. 

It might seem like productivity and personalised customer experiences are at odds. But not when you use a marketing automation platform like Marketo Engage that leverages economies of scale to do things like:

• Automated segmentation
• Dynamic content
• Reusing successful nurture programs

Be ruthless about your current activities. A good implementation partner will ask challenging questions about your processes to help you streamline for efficiency instead of adding another heavy tool.

How is Marketo used to reduce marketing costs?

1. Automating time-consuming tasks 

Marketo is built on intelligence that automates data-driven decisions. You remain in control of the rules and parameters while Marketo crunches the numbers and performs operations that optimise productivity.

Adobe’s AI works behind the scenes to:

• Build predictive audiences and account lists
• Automate personalised cross-channel content
• Sync marketing and sales
• Surface value-adding insights

Whether you’re running an inbound campaign or ABM strategy, the dual benefits of time savings and targeted content streamline operations at every stage.

2. Enabling Sales and Marketing alignment

TAP CXM helped a large software company overhaul its multi-geography lead scoring program using Marketo Engage. This enabled the team to direct sales and marketing activities towards higher-potential clients exhibiting consistent engagement behaviours..

A crucial part of projects like this is repositioning Marketing as a revenue generator rather than a cost centre.

Once that’s agreed, Marketo syncs marketing and sales activities so they act as a single revenue team focused on connecting with the right people and increasing customer value. Marketo’s AI bookends this process, building best-fit account lists and automating personalised communications for better end-to-end customer journeys.

3. Simplifying reporting

Data is the lifeblood of informed decisions. But if you’re likely to get carried away with novel-length campaign reports, remember to focus on the C-Suite’s goals. 

Marketo is loaded with features that let you look beyond high-level metrics and generate reports your C-Suite actually cares about. 

You can measure every touchpoint, build a custom dashboard of key pipeline and revenue metrics, filter and segment data, and get multi-touch attribution insights. This means your reporting goes beyond presenting the facts.

Using Marketo, you can continually enhance your strategy to deliver better customer experiences across the channel mix.

4. Surfacing value-adding insight

TAP CXM recently provided advanced Marketo reporting consulting for a financial services client. We magnified the power of their revenue and attribution data through a comprehensive Marketo audit that used:

• Revenue Explorer to clarify marketing’s influence on revenue and make better investment decisions
• Success Path Analyser to enable the client to dig deeper into their sales funnel, identify sticking points, and improve processes for a better buying experience
• Performance Insights to build a comprehensive dashboard so the client can access granular data when analysing which channels and programs had the biggest impact on revenue and pipeline
• Opportunity Influence Analyser to set up the account and program structures to enable the client to track attribution throughout the sales cycle across all opportunities

The outcomes not only gave the client more access to their data, but also upskilled the team to become more independent.

If that sounds like something your business needs, we’re waiting to hear from you.

TAP CXM provides value-adding customer experience management consulting for brands and agencies. Our deep product expertise and business insight help our clients reduce costs, optimise operations, and bring in more business.

You can learn more about our CXM consulting services or speak with our teams in London and New York.