Most finance leaders know how important it is to have a good understanding of the finances of a growing organization. Studies have shown that only 55% of businesses make it to the 5 year mark – and often this is because they have not planned or managed their finances well.
Spend visibility is the ability to see where all of a company’s money is being spent in order to make more informed decisions about budgeting and resource allocation.
There are many advantages to being able to see your spending. The most important may be finding and getting rid of wasteful spending, which can free up money to reinvest in the company or use to improve your finances.
Additionally, better understanding your company’s spending can help you make more strategic decisions about where to expand and invest. By understanding your company’s spending patterns, you can identify opportunities for cost savings.
Do you have a close overview of all the money your company is spending? If you aren’t sure, it might be time to think about your strategy for monitoring company spending. Keep reading to learn everything you need to know about this important business idea.
What is Spend Visibility?
The degree to which you can see where company funds are being spent is called spend visibility. Your finance team can have a real-time understanding of this by looking at detailed financial reports or using software that tracks spending in real-time.
The benefits of being able to see how much money is being spent are numerous. If a company can’t see how its money is being spent, it can lead to wasted time and money, as well as decreased efficiency and organizational chaos. However, a company that can see how its money is being spent can make better, more informed decisions about where to allocate its resources.
Some companies achieve spend visibility by using a simple spreadsheet to track income and expenses, while others require more sophisticated tools such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) software or big data analytics.
What Is Spend Optimization? High vs Low Spend Visibility
A company that can see where its money is being spent can make better decisions and save money by reducing waste.
Spending visibility is the ability to track spending in a meaningful way. Low spend visibility makes it difficult to track spending, which can lead to wasted time and money, decreased efficiency, and organizational chaos.
Many companies fall somewhere in between having perfect visibility into their spending and having no visibility at all. In these companies, it is still possible to track some aspects of spending, although it may be more difficult to get a complete picture.
Elements of Spend Visibility
Even though spend analysis is primarily about finances, it’s not just about numbers and calculations. To achieve this comprehensive view, three core elements are needed:
- Data capture: The ability to track and record spending as it occurs
- Spend Analysis: The ability to make sense of the spend data, e.g. identify savings opportunities
- Reporting: The ability to share the findings with relevant stakeholders
The three elements work together to create a system that shows the entire purchase cycle. This is important for organizations so they can see what needs improvement and make better decisions about where to spend their resources.
Why Does Spend Visibility Matter?
25 percent of CMOs said that they are confident in quantifying ROI. Even though 10 percent of every spent company dollar is wasted, that equals to one million business dollars wasted every second globally.
It is important to be able to see where money is being spent so that informed decisions can be made about resource allocation and how effective these measures are.
This means that if you have poor spend analysis, you will waste resources and miss opportunities. However, if you have high spend visibility, you will be able to make more informed and accurate decisions about where to invest marketing dollars.
The Benefits of Spend Visibility
Now that we know what increased visibility is, let’s talk about how it can help your business.
Pinpoint Opportunities and Inefficiencies
Improved spend management allows you to identify opportunities and inefficiencies in your spending, so that you can reallocate resources to more successful campaigns.
Reduce Wasted Resources
If you have a better understanding of where your money is being spent, you can reduce the amount of resources that are wasted. This means that you could optimize your spending on marketing campaigns that are not giving you the desired results. You could also renegotiate supplier contracts that are not giving you good value for your money.
Optimize Your Marketing Strategy
Visible spending can also help you improve your marketing strategy as a whole by understanding which channels are most effective and focusing your efforts on the channels that provide the best return on investment.
Streamline Your Business Processes
Would you benefit from automation in your business processes? Improved spend visibility will help you answer this question.
Spend management is essential for making data-driven decisions about where to allocate resources. If you want your business to be successful, you need to have good visibility of your spending – so how do you go about it?
How to Develop a B2B Content Marketing Strategy
After reading the text, you should have a general understanding of the five steps necessary to develop a content marketing strategy for your business. However, each business will have different needs, so it is important to tailor your approach to fit your product or service.
Figure Out Your Brand Positioning
It’s simple: You can’t convince anyone to buy if you don’t know exactly what you’re selling. You need to know what you’re selling and who your target audience is before you can develop a strategy. What specific problem would you be solving for them? Why should they choose your product over your competitors?
To correctly position your brand, you must be able to articulate what makes your offer unique, and who your target audience is. Your brand position should be a call to action for your target audience, letting them know that you have the solution to their problem.
Don’t Skip Buyer Research
Audience research is essential in understanding who your ideal customer is and helps to focus your marketing efforts. Creating a buyer persona allows you to have a profile of your ideal customer which makes marketing more efficient.
In order to create better content marketing strategy results, Brent recommends doing more research at the beginning instead of rushing into content planning and creation.
Focus on the Customer
More customer insight can be gained. Content marketing that focuses on serving the customer results in the best outcomes.
If you want to generate content ideas, it can be helpful to focus on your customers. Joshua Oakes, creator and principal of Who First, believes that many content marketers don’t make use of this potential source of ideas.
If you focus on creating content that appeals to your customers, it is more likely to be successful than content that is not customer-focused.
Harness Teamwork
As a content marketer, you may not have as much contact with customers as you would like. This can make it harder to create useful content. The content we imagine will be popular may not always be successful. Let your team help you with areas you are not as familiar with.
According to Robin Nichols, it is important to communicate with all departments in your company as well as your customers to understand why your product is successful, what features they enjoy, and what is being planned for the future.
Use the Entire Marketing Funnel
Everyone wants to increase sales, but B2B marketing takes time and effort. To be successful, you need to use every part of your content marketing funnel effectively.
John Short, CEO of Compound Growth Marketing, says that a common blindspot among marketers is failing to see the big picture.
Sprinkle your content with a little experiment and your customers will be surprised. Keep your customers in mind as you do this.
B2B Content Marketing Best Practices in 2022
So far we have covered a lot of B2B content marketing tips, but there is more to come. If you’re building a strategy, keep these best practices in mind:
Use SEO
Did you think that we would not mention search engine optimization (SEO) in this article? Search engines are here to stay and organic traffic is important for many top B2B sites. In this digital age, many professionals learn by searching the internet.
SEO goes hand in hand with backlinks, so building backlinks should be a part of your B2B digital marketing strategy. Some ways you can use search engines to improve your content include:
and consider creating content that covers that topic. To figure out what your audience is looking for information about, do keyword research using tools like Semrush and Ahrefs. Based on what you find, consider creating content that covers that topic.
Conducting market research to see what your competitors are doing in relation to the subject matter and identify any areas where you can improve.
, helps you to know when people are talking about you or your competitors. Creating Google alerts for relevant industry keywords, as Estelle Barthes does at PickYourSkills, can help you stay informed about when people are talking about you or your competitors.
According to Barthes, she regularly takes advantage of a helpful Google service that sends her a dozen automated emails containing news on various topics. This has enabled her to create original pieces of content.
Don’t Rely on SEO Alone
SEO is powerful, but should not be your only content strategy. Content that is not designed to be appealing to search engines can still be useful to your audience. For example, thought leadership content is becoming increasingly popular with readers and can help a B2B company build trust with potential customers. However, not all thought leadership content will be successful in gaining Google’s approval.
Do not stuff keywords into your sentences or write in a way that sounds unnatural just to fit in keywords. This will make your content difficult to read and turn away readers. Additionally, this will cause your bounce rate to go up and your search engine ratings to go down.
Choose the Right Channel for You
Michael Keenan believes that it is a mistake for marketers to blindly pursue the “next shiny marketing channel” without considering whether their target customers are actually present on that channel. While there is no harm in experimenting with new channels, marketers should base their decisions on data rather than following the crowd.
You shouldn’t try to do too much at once when you’re first starting out. Stick to one or two marketing channels and get them down before moving on to new ones.
Play the Long Game
We all love quick and easy wins, but content marketing is a long-term strategy.
Great content can help with lead generation, but it can also do other things.
Casale believes that companies should invest more in strategies that will pay off in the long run, such as retaining existing customers, rather than focusing on acquiring new customers. While it is important to make short-term investments, such as social media content or bottom-of-the-funnel content, companies should not neglect investments that will take longer to pay off.
Audit Existing Content
Do you check your content’s performance metrics?It’s good to use multiple channels and create content regularly, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t know which types of content are most popular with your audience.
See how your current content is performing on search engines, and refresh it as needed. Try to focus on more productive channels. Google Analytics can help you track your current content.
THE PROBLEM: YOUR BUSINESS ISN’T GROWING AS FAST AS IT SHOULD!
Your sales have stagnated or decreased, and you can’t figure out why. Discover what’s holding you back from achieving predictable sales growth in your business.
If you want to grow your business, you need a proven plan and framework. That’s what you get with the 2X Your Sales Discovery Session.
Want to learn about a formula for Predictable Growth that will put your business on a 90-day path to 2X Your Sales?