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How are leading marketers acting on new priorities? We partnered with eConsultancy and learned that top companies are employing three key trends, in which they:

• Use first-party data to forge stronger connection to consumers.
• Apply estimates or proxies to link real-time metrics with outcomes.
• Dedicate time and budget to strategic experimentation."

New research indicates where to focus digital investments so that they will reap rewards in online and face-to-face channels.

The right approach for SAS was a ground up renovation to better integrate channels and create a new customer-centric view of the market. We needed a way to monitor all of the campaigns in a centralized fashion. This meant creating unified experiences across all channels to deliver to customers the personalized attention they are asking for. And we started by establishing an Analytical Marketing Functional Framework that would serve as the foundational structure.

Learn about the newest member of the Demand Waterfall family and how it can help b-to-b companies
drive demand and revenue creation performance optimization throughout their organization.

The challenge is to break down traditional silos by engineering engaging, omni-channel experiences that exceed customer expectations. Differentiation in the B2B marketplace is not just about product. It requires leveraging data, knowledge, and technology in order to create a virtual crystal ball that presents customers with the right information at the right moment.

A fully integrated B2B platform — one that goes beyond e-commerce to include customer data, marketing assets, content management, campaign orchestration, and analytics — provides a roadmap for customer engagement by providing real-time context about the person interacting with specific company content. That context then becomes a powerful tool for enabling highly targeted content delivery that offers customized solutions and product options.

Today’s B2B companies need a marketing platform that provides users with a rich digital buying experience that facilitates engagement and makes it easy to use. That means providing customers, sales reps, distributors, and service technicians with desktop and mobile apps that offer real-time access to marketing collateral, automated sales processes, and key sales systems that streamline purchasing and fulfillment.

"More than half of consumers across the U.S., Europe and Canada say company websites and e-mail remain their go-to channels — a sign one CMO Council exec says the “arrogance” of B2B marketers must come to an end.

While 38 per cent of respondents said brands are “getting there and know me better today than before,” the survey suggested mismanaging marketing channels or failing to invest in them could be costly. If they experience common frustrations such as not being treated like loyal customers (cited by 36 per cent of respondents) or deal with slow service from reps who don’t recognize them (33 per cent), they’re not afraid to walk. In fact, 47 per cent of customers said they would stop doing business with a brand that continues to frustrate them, and 45 per cent said they would spend their money with another brand."

Improving digital strategies and innovation remain a challenge

Learn the top ways B2B marketers are reaching successfully reaching their customers this year.

The core cause of the B2B sales prospecting epidemic is an inability to create opportunities when buyers aren’t looking to buy. The reality is 90+% of potential buyers in your market aren’t actively looking.

A second reality exacerbates this situation. Professional purchasing agents have given way to teams of buyers. The 6 to 8 people on these teams typically represent multiple functional groups. Often they have never conducted a similar procurement process before.

A third reality complicates this situation. The digital trend to ubiquitous online information has produced self-educating buyers.

B2B is high stakes team buying. It’s a very different buying dynamic. If your marketing team isn’t clear and honest about these differences, and have a compelling strategy to address them, you’re probably in even deeper trouble than you think.

This is not a sales rep problem, per se. It is a business and sales leadership problem. B2B sellers must create value for customers through the way you sell. This starts with the way you create opportunities with prospective buyers who aren’t actively looking to buy what you are selling.

Finding out your favorite marketing byword is a lie can be as upsetting as learning there’s no tooth fairy. These 8 marketing myths are the worst offenders.

Check out trends in, and stats about, performance marketing - i.e., when the advertiser pays only if there are measurable results, such as a click or a lead-form completion - in Europe.

Regardless of where a new tool or piece of technology fits in the overall landscape it is it is important to ensure that it is visible across the organization for a number of reasons:

• To manage the security risk of implementing new technology that accidentally exposes or corrupts customer data.
• To enable teams to learn from each other’s experience with any given technology and to increase efficiency by distributing product qualification tasks.
• To reduce spend by identifying redundant products or opportunities to lower spend by negotiating a single contract for the enterprise.

This is where the marketing stack comes in.

Marketing stacks showcase the technology in use across the organization and their relationship to one another. Stacks can be developed at the project, team, functional or enterprise level. They can be used to track products in use, in test and that have been retired.

There’s no right or wrong way to construct a stack — each stack ends up being unique to the organization and the objectives it serves. You just have to look at the Stackies submissions for the last two years to see how unique stacks can be. Stacks are a great way to audit and manage the technology in place and ensure technology visibility across the enterprise.

Despite the reach of email, asking in person is the significantly more effective approach; you need to ask six people in person to equal the power of a 200-recipient email blast. Still, most people tend to think the email ask will be more effective.

In research Mahdi Roghanizad of Western University and I conducted, recently published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, we have found that people tend to overestimate the power of their persuasiveness via text-based communication, and underestimate the power of their persuasiveness via face-to-face communication.

We found that people were much more likely to agree to complete a survey when they were asked in-person as opposed to over email. These findings are consistent with previous research showing that people are more likely to comply with requests in person than over email.

An Overview of Common Digital Marketing Channels
Paid Acquisition

SEO

Email Marketing

Content Marketing

Virality and Referral

Sales

Business Development & Partnerships

Emerging Channels

There are a few tenets that we repeatedly find to be true in choosing and scaling channels:

• Choose channels with high ROI that have the ability to scale.
• Focus on few channels rather than spreading yourself too thin.
• Adapt and experiment. Channels and their effectiveness change.
• Look for emerging channels. The blue ocean is where you can find cheap customers at scale and beat your larger competitors.

1. Create granular content assets
Implementation tip: LinkedIn provides granular targeting options that enable you to target subsets of your audience either through position, job function, seniority level or title. 

2. Build your top-of-funnel prospect list
Implementation tip: Launch a social ad campaign in Facebook and Twitter to drive engagement with your content. Build a remarketing list in AdWords or AdRoll with these social top-of-funnel visitors and deploy a remarketing strategy that helps to educate.

3. Integrate remarketing & lead nurturing
Implementation tip: When a prospect engages with content, move them to the next stage, your remarketing list. 

4. Appeal to each persona

Marketing technology has become a fact of life, as new data from digital agency Squiz attests. Roughly two-thirds of senior marketers surveyed in Australia, the UK and the US have invested heavily in marketing technology over the past year, the study shows.

Another third of respondents said they have either invested a little to add to their existing marketing technology stack, or have taken their first steps in marketing technology.