By Pat Spenner & Karl Schmidt
As part of our work for CEB’s Marketing & Communications practice, we are privileged to regularly work with the senior marketing executives of our nearly 800 members on their biggest challenges. Over the last few years, the CMOs of these B2B companies have increasingly focused on proving returns from two key investments: content marketing and marketing automation.
In 2015, we expect marketers will begin to exploit the combined power of content marketing and marketing automation and finally get paid for their investments. However, our research indicates it will require a new approach. This is being driven by three key trends:
Trend #1 – Growing investment in content marketing = Increasing pressure to prove ROI
Most marketing executives appreciate the critical importance of content marketing to reach customers during the 57% of their purchase process before those customers are willing to talk to Sales. Unfortunately, even when marketers have success getting prospects to engage with their content, demonstrating commercial impact has proven problematic. Did that customer ultimately buy because they downloaded my whitepaper? Attribution remains hard for B2C marketers, but is even worse for B2B where consensus buying has continued to increase and the average buying group now has 5.4 decision makers. Even if all stakeholders read the whitepaper, how well can we predict that they will be ready to buy as a group?
In 2015, marketers will increasingly find success using their content to equip mobilizers within the customer buying group to advocate for purchase and drive consensus. The shift from content for engagement to content for mobilizing action will be an increasing trend for 2015 and beyond.
Trend #2 – Marketing automation’s promise goes beyond marketing efficiency to commercial results
With the increase in content marketing came a painful reality – it is very difficult to produce, manage and deliver all of the new content.
Marketing automation promised to help Marketing organizations manage their functions cost effectively. However, these solutions aren’t cheap. And merely improving marketing efficiency often isn’t enough to satisfy the CFO on ROI. This year, marketers will look to answer the question, “How do I prove commercial returns from my marketing automation investment?”
Fortunately, all of the data produced by marketing automation is now ready to feed predictive analytics to inform marketing strategies and demonstrate ROI.
Trend #3 – Marketers fix their demand generation engines
The average Marketing organization only converts 3-5% of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) into sales. This might have been expected a few years ago when lead sensing was often limited to prospects dropping a business card in a fish bowl to win an iPod. In 2015, with the vast amount of data left behind by customers as they consume content (see above), should a Marketing organization be satisfied with a 4% MQL conversion rate even if their industry average is 3%?
Even if Marketing was willing to accept 4% as good enough, Sales reps aren’t, and it’s hard to blame them for not getting excited about pursuing opportunities that fail 96 times out of 100.
Marketing now has the tools to not just improve conversion rates from 3% to 4%, but to 14% or maybe even 40%. In 2015, Marketing will begin making the revolutionary changes to reap the rewards from the big investments in content and automation by following two key steps:
1) Lead Scoring - Revise lead scoring to sense not just consideration by the customer as one of three suppliers, but identify when they are first of three. Focusing on these preferred leads with higher conversion rates will improve conversion rates (and sales partnerships). Even more important will be culling those leads when a supplier is third of three and just invited to drive down the price from the preferred vendor. The new priority will be fewer, but higher quality leads.
2) Content of the Content - Scoring systems are only as good as Marketing’s ability to sense both where a customer is in the buying process and the customer’s ultimate intent. This requires content that doesn’t just measure engagement, but also disrupts the customer’s buying criteria. By tracking consumption of this disruptive content, Marketing can identify prospects that are not just ready to buy from some supplier, but can discern which prospects have had their criteria shifted in favor of the marketer’s offering. Only then will Marketing be able to identify leads where the supplier is truly the first choice and not just invited as the third choice in a price bake-off to put price pressure on another vendor. This will be the beginning of the end of the comprehensive whitepaper that can’t differentiate between a B-school student prepping for an interview and a buyer who appreciates the supplier’s unique benefits and wants to handle likely objections from a colleague.
This will be the year when marketers are no longer willing to accept MQL conversion rates in the single digits and exploit the power of their content and automation investments to start doing something about it.
Stay tuned for more on how we will explore this challenge (and other major commercial topics) in 2015.
Karl Schmidt is the practice manager of CEB's Marketing & Communications practice.
