For B2B marketers, the pressure to
bring in new leads is palpable.
According to a recent study by the
Content Marketing Institute (pdf), 85 percent of B2B marketers rank lead
generation as their top goal for the next year — but it’s easier said than
done. A separate study of B2B marketers found that less than one-third feel
their
demand generation process effectively meets their organizations’ needs.
As technology dominates the
marketing space, successful lead generation becomes as much of a science as an
art. Here are six lessons to help
B2B marketing leaders master it from both perspectives:
1. Always Be Testing
As a B2B marketing executive, you
should always test to identify your optimal messaging, creative direction and
marketing spend. However, it's the results of the tests you wind up
implementing that matter the most.
Too many marketing professionals
test everything then lose themselves in minutia, never understanding which
precise test (and variable) made the most positive impact on the business.
2. Crawl, Walk, Run
Most marketing automation
technology adoption fails because the appetite for everything you can do is so
much greater than the reality of what you can implement.
Marketing automation tools are
plentiful, and make big promises. Trying to deploy multiple systems at once is
the quickest route to chaos.
Start with one or two smaller
implementations in order to see immediate results. Once you’re comfortable with
the outcome, it’s time to pursue the next project. With a phased approach, you
can mitigate the risk of investing in expensive tools only to use a fraction of
its features, or finding that you lack the internal resources required to
maximize performance.
3. Identify the Right Metrics
Too much data creates analysis
paralysis and gets in the way of gleaning meaningful results. Make sure you
have an in-depth understanding of what metrics you need to make informed
decisions. Often, the more diverse data a marketer has at their disposal, the
less they know how to interpret or act upon it.
Maintain a condensed, centralized
dashboard with your organization’s key metrics and use it weekly for ongoing
consistency. Keeping your metrics (and how they’re visualized) simple and
action-oriented makes it more digestible for you, and the stakeholders you
share them with.
4. Take Risks, and Learn From
Failure
The internet has become a
marketing lab for B2B and B2C companies alike. Unless you push yourself to
experiment with new and uncharted campaigns, you’re not going to move the
needle as far as you’d like.
Try new things and get comfortable
with the fact that not all tests will work out. The key is to make sure that
you have clear metrics in place before you experiment so you have an objective,
pre-determined view of whether or not something was a true success. When you do
fail, conduct a thorough post-mortem to understand how to avoid the same
outcome in the future.
5. Unclutter Your Toolkit
Almost 200 marketing automation
and lead management programs are available today on the market. B2B marketers
have more options than ever when it comes to demand generation apps, but this
crowded landscape makes it difficult to separate tools that create value from
those that add to the noise.
When I joined OneLogin, for
example, we used a lead scoring tool to help better target customer segments.
After digging into the tool, I found out we weren’t using the data it generated
for decision-making purposes at all, they were simply static numbers in a
spreadsheet.
6. Avoid Benchmark Bias
Almost everyone in B2B marketing
uses a variation of marketing-qualified leads, sales-qualified leads and
opportunities to shape their sales and marketing funnel. As a result, many
marketers believe that once they’ve seen the numbers in one company, they’ve
seen the benchmark for everyone else. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Every company I’ve worked for
constructs their sales and marketing funnel differently: Do you include all
customer segments or do you only start at a certain company size? Do you
include all opportunity values or do you use the probability percentage to
adjust your numbers?
Just how clean is your data? Identify where your data requires attention, allowing you to choose which areas to improve.
When someone asks for your
marketing qualified lead to sales qualified lead conversion rate, you can’t
just say 12 percent — it’s all relative to the specifics of your funnel. I’ve
seen everything from 6 to 20 percent be considered “best in class.”
Keep in mind that, when
communicating with executives and board members who have worked for (or
advised) several companies, they may believe that the highest number they hear
is the benchmark. It’s critical that you, as the marketing leader, educate your
audience on precisely what your numbers are based upon. Unless you provide this
context, the effectiveness of your efforts becomes an apples to oranges
comparison.
Article From: cmswire.com
