I’m here at the MarketingSherpa B2B Demand Generation Summit in Boston. The opening session was by Sean Donahue, Senior Editor for B-to-B Marketing at MarketingSherpa. In it, he shared the top five challenges faced by B2B marketers. I was especially intrigued by challenges 3, 4, and 5.
1. The Growing Committee
Even at small companies (100-500 employees), the average
number of people involved in a decision is 6.8. You need to answer all those
people’s questions, and each has different concerns. This means you need to
tailor your marketing materials to each of them. In fact, 77% of respondents to
Marketing Sherpa’s survey say that targeting the content to their job role
makes the content somewhat or significantly more valuable.
2. Use the Right Content at the Right Time
Not only do you need different content for each buyer role,
you need to customize content for each stage in the buying cycle. This is also
true since different buying roles tend to be more involved at different stages.
3. Getting Landing Pages Built & Tested
Marketers say the top reason why people don’t create landing
pages is that they don’t have the time or resources. However, as Marketing
Sherpa points out, using and optimizing your landing pages can improve
conversion rates by 40% or more. Think about it: getting 40% more conversions
for the same spending is a lot smarter than spending 40% more!
4. Being Everywhere
80% of decision makers say that they found the vendor. Does
this mean you should give up or cut your marketing budget by 80%? Of course
not. What matters today in marketing is to be findable when people are looking.
This, of course, means being everywhere they might possibly be when they start
searching.
There are two interesting implications to this. First, it implies lots of cross-media,
low-volume campaign all year long rather than spending your budget on one or
two big programs. This way you can spread your budget across time period and
channels.
Second, you need to focus your efforts where people look –
and by far, this means managing your search engine marketing campaigns, especially
on Google.
5. Handing Off the Right Leads
Just how clean is your data? Identify where your data requires attention, allowing you to choose which areas to improve.
Less than 25% of the leads on your website are ready to
speak with a sales rep. That’s why the best companies score their leads and
then use lead nurturing to build relationships with qualified prospects who are
not yet ready to speak with Sales. This means:Get Free Email Append Test from AverickMedia
The ability to dialog with qualified prospects through
automated “drip marketing” campaigns
Lead analytics to understand and score the prospect’s
interests and intent
Tight integration with SFA to automate tasks and track sales
follow-up
To demonstrate the ROI of lead nurturing, Marketing Sherpa
compared the results of all companies versus “best practice” marketers. They
found that best practice companies pass only 12% of leads to sales (vs. 17% on
average). But, 40% of those leads convert to prospects (vs. 34% on average) and
to sales at 20% (vs. 16% average). The result is 9.6 sales per 1,000 leads, vs.
9.2 sales per 1,000 leads – which means more revenue. Also, they save costs as
well, since they don’t waste as many high-cost resources like the direct sales
channel.
Article From: blog.marketo.com
Article From: blog.marketo.com
