B2B marketing is trapped in a frustrating and often demoralising cycle. The finance director sees marketing as a cost to cut rather than an investment to make. The sales director is never satisfied; they will always want more leads, and for marketing, the obvious solution is more budget and more headcount, but this alone will never be enough to break the cycle.
I know this because I have been there; forced to focus on immediate-term pressures rather than doing the right thing, keeping internal stakeholders happy rather than focusing on the customer, and aligning marketing activity to a budget rather than driving marketing to an outcome.
Whether you are the CEO or the Head of Marketing, you must break the cycle, or you will never deliver on the aspirations of the business. Marketing is not easy, yet with the right mindset it is the one thing that can propel a business forward; it can be the smartest investment.
So based on too many years of experience and endless conversations with business owners and marketing leaders, here are the five things I believe can break the cycle and drive a 10x improvement in marketing performance.
Stop focusing on prospects who have already decided what to buy
Every salesperson will say they want to get into an opportunity early but will also define the lead they want as someone who is ready to buy now. Time to push back – this makes no sense whatsoever.
| 86% of B2B buyers already have a mental shortlist of who to buy from before they enter their buying cycle |
So, if you chase the 5% of prospects that are already in a buying cycle, the reality is that the majority of these already have their shortlist and 93% of them will buy from someone on that original shortlist – you are simply too late to the party.
Spending all of your effort and budget on finding people currently in a buying cycle may generate you leads, but they will not generate real opportunities or revenue impact.
Where marketing needs to focus is on getting the attention and trust of the 95% who are not in a buying cycle yet, so that when they are, it is you that are on their mental shortlist.
Being Safe is your biggest Risk
Who do we remember? Who do we talk about? It is not the average, it is the exception – the thing or person that generates an emotional response. We may love it or we may hate it, but it is a response that is acknowledged and remembered.
| Between 89-98% of all marketing is simply ignored or instantly forgotten |
The worst thing that any organisation can do is invest in marketing that is ignored, yet everyday this is what is happening because we just play it safe. What stops people from scrolling past an ad is when it is something unexpected – the impact of surprise that makes us engage and take note and another picture of a datacentre, a smiling office worker or a company logo will not do this.
The challenge is internal stakeholders will always prefer safe – it is their world and they are comfortable with it – yet to be noticed you need to generate an emotional reaction that just does not come with safe. You have to be bold, you have to stand-out from the crowd, you need to make that emotional connection – it may not be liked internally, but I can reassure you that the doubters will quickly disappear when it proves to be your most successful campaign ever.
You can’t boil the ocean with small budgets
In all my years in marketing I have never been in the situation where I had a big enough marketing budget and the common trap everyone falls into is trying to spread their marketing budget too thin.
We always underestimate how much persistent exposure is required to each individual target in order to gain awareness, engagement and trust. As such, we make our target audience too big for our budget and fail to scratch the surface.
| It takes a minimum of 3 exposures for you to register with a prospect |
Based on the fact that it takes a minimum of 3 exposures just to register with a prospect and then a further 5-6 exposures to start building engagement and trust, is it better to reach a large audience once or twice or a smaller audience 6-8 times?
Narrowing your sights on which targets you want to win and then doubling down on this smaller aperture will not only ensure your marketing budget has a bigger impact, but it will also enable you to sharpen and align messaging to resonate far better.
The reality here is that those who gain the greatest mindshare wins the greatest market share – it’s a case of doing more to less, rather than less to more.
Don’t chase the wrong metrics
A client of ours uses the expression “don’t count the ones you reach, reach the ones that count” and I really love this. Digital marketing has transformed our world by enabling us to measure so much more; however, the downside is a fixation on trying to measure everything and focusing only on what you can measure.
Effective marketing is integrated marketing – the ultimate outcome of revenue growth does not come from one single element but comes from the collective impact of all marketing. Buyer journeys are more complicated than ever before with an increasing proportion (up to 80%) of the journey being self-served online. This means it is the cumulative impact of all of the touch points that impact effectiveness, not one single source of direct attribution.
| Not everything you can measure has an impact, and not everything that has an impact can be measured |
This danger is in our attempt to justify marketing investment. We are too quick to jump to things we can measure and this can result in making the wrong decisions. It would be easy to double down on that one campaign that shows high conversions with a lower cost per click, however, would that campaign be as effective if we removed organic social and our always-on brand campaigns that generate awareness and trust? On a spreadsheet it would be an easy decision to make, but in reality, it is the wrong decision.
The only true measurement of marketing effectiveness is impact on the business objective, pipeline growth, revenue growth and/or customer retention. Everything else is either an indicator or a vanity metric.
Be curious & go outside for help
The approach “we have always done this in the past” is the fastest way for a business to fail and marketing people to lose the confidence of the board. The world of marketing is moving so fast, in an exciting way, that no one can afford to become stuck in their ways.
ChatGPT is already having a significant impact on how people search for information with some people already predicting the demise of SEO and Google Ads. The shift from long-form white papers to more consumable content has been fast and dramatic over recent years and every day we are seeing more channels evolve to engage with our audience.
It’s no longer sufficient to be a one trick pony; you need to be strategic, creative and ubiquitous with your marketing.
| Spreading the same budget over 5 channels rather than just 1 can generate a 65% uplift in ROI |
Scaling marketing does not come from adding an additional person to the marketing team, it comes from curiosity and expanding the knowledge-pool you can tap into.
I strongly believe that the way organisations use external marketing agencies has to change to drive this curiosity, push the creative boundaries and extend the brain power. Gone are the days where you issue a brief and the agency is focused on a task (that can be done with more internal resource) – where the true value comes from is extending your virtual team by tapping into the skills, experience and creative thinking of an agency.
Learning from what others are doing, gaining an external perspective and challenging old habits has got to be the only way forward.
