Unlocking Big Results with Small Changes: How to Maximize Your Marketing ROI

When it comes to marketing, small adjustments can lead to significant impacts—if you know where to focus. Today, we’ll explore a common area of marketing inefficiency and share actionable insights to help your team trim waste and reallocate resources for better outcomes.

Why Small Changes Matter

At the heart of this approach lies the Pareto Principle, which suggests that 20% of your efforts often drive 80% of your results. Identifying and optimizing these key efforts can significantly improve your ROI without requiring drastic changes to your strategy.

I’m Dan Saavedra, founder of MergerData, a signal analytics firm that identifies critical data points to help businesses predict buyer behavior. With over 12 years of experience in data analytics, I’ve seen firsthand how small, smart decisions can transform marketing performance. Let’s dive into a specific area of focus that could make a big difference.

Who Should Pay Attention?

This post is especially relevant for:

• Marketing leaders managing large budgets and under pressure to demonstrate ROI.
• Small marketing teams (2–6 members) juggling limited resources and oversight.

If you’ve ever struggled to tie marketing activities directly to revenue, this one’s for you.

The Problem: Wasted Marketing Spend on Paid Search

One of the most common areas where marketing budgets are wasted is in paid search campaigns. For many small to mid-sized B2B companies, paid search often delivers lower ROI than other channels. Here’s why:

1. Overwhelming or inaccessible data: Marketers often deal with too much data spread across multiple systems, making it hard to extract actionable insights.
2. Ineffective campaigns: Paid search campaigns frequently have low conversion rates—often 4-5x lower than other channels.
3. Branded search inefficiencies: Paying for clicks on branded keywords (e.g., your company’s name) is often unnecessary if you already rank high organically.

The Solution: Refine, Reduce, or Eliminate Paid Search

Instead of overhauling your entire data ecosystem, focus on pinpointing underperforming campaigns within paid search. Here's how to approach this step-by-step:

1. Analyze Your Data

For HubSpot users, start with these metrics:

• Original Source: Look at contacts sourced from paid search.
• Latest Source: Identify contacts that interacted with paid search at any point.

Break down these contacts further:

• Drill-Down Metrics: Use HubSpot’s “Drill Down 1” and “Drill Down 2” fields to categorize campaigns and ad sets.
• Conversion Metrics: Track the number of SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads), customers, and revenue generated from these sources.

2. Identify Problem Areas

• Compare the conversion rates of paid search to other channels. A common pattern: 13% conversion for other channels vs. 2-3% for paid search.
• Check for campaigns that rely heavily on branded search clicks, which may be redundant if you already rank well organically.

3. Refine or Cut Incrementally

• Start by eliminating specific underperforming campaigns or ad sets.
• Monitor results over time to ensure changes don’t negatively impact revenue.
• Gradually scale back further based on data.

Measuring the Impact

Once you’ve refined your paid search efforts, calculate these metrics to evaluate performance:

• Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): Measures revenue generated per dollar spent on ads.
• Fully Loaded ROI: Includes headcount costs for sales and marketing teams involved.
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) Payback Period: Tracks how long it takes to recover your marketing investment.

What’s Next?

By addressing inefficiencies in paid search, you can free up resources to invest in higher-performing channels or experiments. Use tools like signal analytics to measure the impact of these changes, and double down on what works.

Remember, the key is incremental improvement. Small, focused changes, when guided by the right data, can deliver outsized results over time.

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