Jason Cardillo

When digital marketing teams feel overwhelmed, prioritization is key, but it has to be meaningful prioritization. Pre-defined, objective, and transparent goals provide the clarity required for meaningful prioritization. Assess your task backlog based on urgency (immediate, short-term, or long-term), potential impact on pipeline (or other objective), and dependencies (larger programs or projects that are dependent on your team's tasks). A matrix comparing urgency and impact visually guides which tasks to postpone. As a leader, communicate transparently with stakeholders about deferred tasks and the strategic reasoning behind it. This reduces stress on your team while building trust and alignment within and beyond the team.

In larger businesses, your digital marketing budget is often pre-set. Using this number as a starting point, immediately carve off 10% for experimentation. Now with your working budget, you can break it down into budgets for each pipeline source and any other required divisions (product, territory, new vs renewal vs expansion, month/quarter, etc..) This is where knowing your stage conversion rates, CAC, and LTV will be important. Model out different scenarios to maximize ROI against revenue. Your initial budget for the year is not a static number. Review and optimize regularly, adjusting based on results of your programs and experiments. Demonstrating a repeatable process with +3x ROI against revenue can unlock additional budget.

Auditing your existing processes and identifying areas for automation will create your largest improvements to efficiency. Aligning tools with your process will boost those results. The first step with tools is to eliminate where possible. A streamlined tech stack reduces maintenance, removes potential bottlenecks, and makes it easier to keep data clean. Start integrating tools where it supports automation, removing existing work. Then move on to use cases that expand your team's capabilities. Finally evaluate use cases that connect your team's work with other teams.

Metrics like impressions, clicks, and conversions give you a sense of whether or not your message is resonating. Conversion and cost metrics can be combined to understand if you're reaching the audience efficiently. Combining those with pipeline and revenue numbers tell you if you're efficiently reaching the right audience with the right message. Deliver more value to your business by optimizing for the end result, i.e. revenue or pipeline. For example, a campaign may have a very high CTR and a low cost per conversion (CPC), but if those leads never create opportunities or close, that campaign was wasted spend. Focusing your optimization on downstream metrics will ensure a higher return on investment (ROI) for the campaign.

Did your analysis show a gap? That's where your potential for growth lies. Consider a scenario where you're refining a digital ad campaign. Modern testing tools with AI capabilities allow you to move beyond just testing two ad variations and waiting for the results; you're now able to generate many more variations and predict which version will perform best for different audience segments, using analysis of your historical data and user interactions in real-time to dynamically serve the headline more likely to drive engagement for each viewer.

While external benchmarks can be useful, especially in early stage companies, they are often too broad and miss the specifics of your business. It's smarter to dive into your own historical data. This is where you'll find the gold – spotting trends, setting goals, and measuring what really matters to you. For example, using data from previous years' campaigns for a particular product, adjusted for current market dynamics, can provide a much more realistic and useful benchmark than general industry or competitive data which lacks context. Your strategy should be as unique as your brand, not a one-size-fits-all from the market.