Benchmarker

There are benchmarks, and then there are really great benchmarks. Here’s what sets them apart

If you published a whitepaper/ebook/any gated content this quarter, how did you do compared to these benchmarks? ?? Gated content items published [Median range 6-10] ?? Monthly unique views for a gated content item [Median range 501-1000] ?? Form submissions for gated content items [Median range 501-750] SOURCE: Benchmarker B2B SaaS Digital Marketing Benchmarks Study N = 265

I've now benchmarked several clients who are publishing more content than 60-80% of their peers in B2B SaaS, but have less than average lead conversion rates. What's happening here? These clients aren't laggards. They have an adequate budget set aside for marketing, and like most B2B SaaS companies, spend most of it on paid search and paid social where they perform well. They have large email databases and a content team that's putting out high quality assets that are beating the benchmarks for views and engagement. On the surface, they're doing everything right. If this sounds like your company, here's what I would check first to diagnose the problem: 1. Are you targeting enterprise customers? Most benchmarks on the internet come from smaller companies that are selling to other midsize or small companies. Benchmarker research found that companies, (especially B2B SaaS) that sell to the enterprise have lower conversion rates (almost 30-50% less) from typical digital funnels (web -> email -> nurture -> call). Plus, a lot of the lead activity and engagement takes place offline (events, meetings, cold calls) given the large contract sizes and longer sales cycles. These heavily sales-led motions can be too complex to track in a linear way, and typical benchmarks don't always apply. 2. Are you casting too wide a net with content? Companies have an incentive to publish a lot of content. Keep the brand top of mind, drive views and traffic and generate leads. But at some point, you are under pressure to publish so much, it becomes hard to stay focused on your target customer (especially high level enterprise buyers) so you start publishing stuff that attracts buyers who aren't exactly your target audience. It's still good brand awareness, but it's not going to convert lower down your funnel. Instead you get high traffic, which lowers your conversion percentage even more. 3. Are sales and marketing not aligned with each other? If you're getting decent conversion rates at the top of the funnel, but dropping off at the marketing-qualified lead to sales-qualified lead stage, you either have a systems problem (leads getting lost in the CRM, improper tagging, lack of automated transfer) or an alignment problem, which is worse. This means sales and marketing can't agree on what a good lead or opportunity looks like. The lead scoring algorithm may be weighted too much towards titles and engagement, rather than demographic or firmographic information. Or the sales team may not be following the right protocol for following up on a SQL. These are the tough discussions that need to be had with trust, clarity and without finger-pointing. The best use of marketing benchmarks is to diagnose a holistic problem, rather than improving any single channel in isolation. Try to get data on companies just like yours instead of generic numbers from tech vendors, and even then use them as a guide, not a scorecard to beat.

What’s the ROI of a LinkedIn ad? We have the data for B2B SaaS companies https://lnkd.in/diNX5RYC

[NEW RESEARCH] How well are you converting MQLs to SQLs? Here's a deep dive into which go-to-market approach (SLG vs. PLG) performs better

[NEW RESEARCH] How many whitepapers are B2B SaaS companies producing every quarter? According to our research at Benchmarker 42% of B2B SaaS companies produce between 1 and 5 gated content items in a quarter. That’s a lot of PDFs. Putting aside the content fatigue a lot of buyers are experiencing in the B2B SaaS world, here’s something else to consider. Are PDFs good for getting recommended by the (future) ultimate online authority? It's 2024. Of course companies are just asking ChatGPT to tell them who the top 5 solutions are for any given business challenge. The question is how do you get Chat GPT or any other AI system to recommend you? It’s a good bet to use the same mechanism as trying to get on the first page of a Google search. Publish relevant, authoritative content, use the right keywords, etc. But here’s one key consideration. Don’t do it all in gated PDFs. Web crawlers like Google and ChatGPT don’t really like gated PDFs. They’re hard to access, and they aren’t produced in the structured HTML markup format that is easier for AI models to parse and understand. Additionally, the more graphics and images in your PDF, the harder it is to extract text from it. Turns out that executive summary you’re writing on your whitepapers’s download page might be more valuable than the actual PDF. All of this isn’t to say don’t publish PDFs. For the most part they’re still authority-building and valuable for regular humans (remember those?) But consider diversifying where your relevant content and copy is going. Blog posts, social posts, backlinks and SEO are all still relevant. But don’t forget that earned media plays a huge role in building authority for gen AI. Time to invite that comms team back to the digital marketing strategy. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Interested in benchmarking your digital and content marketing performance against companies of the same size and revenue? Get in touch or visit https://lnkd.in/gHUm93M2 hashtag #b2bmarketing hashtag #B2BSaaS hashtag #contentmarketing hashtag #marketingbenchmarks

At?Benchmarker, we surveyed 200+ B2B SaaS companies to see how they were distributing their digital marketing budgets. Guess which channel came out on top? B2B SaaS companies devoted an average of 19.3% of their resources to email, the workhorse of the digital marketing world. This was followed by paid social (16.86%), content marketing (16.05%), display ads (15.95%) and paid search (15.73%). About 12.34% of the budget went into technology integrations and implementations, with less than 4% of the budget left over for other line items. This distribution indicates that email is still highly effective, although perhaps not as much as it used to be. For B2B companies at all stages, getting the customer's email is the first, more crucial step to all demand gen activities, and also the most cost efficient way to communicate with a prospect across the buying journey. B2B SaaS marketers also favor a pretty even distribution across other channels, with a slight bias towards content marketing and paid social (which really just means LinkedIn in B2B). Like email, content marketing is an effective way to acquire leads, while also building a brand. LinkedIn ads are also favored for their enhanced customer targeting ability. Paid search and display are slightly lower down the list, which, given the higher costs involved in advertising, makes sense. When I compared companies that exceeded their revenue targets against companies that missed their targets, I found that high performers were more likely to pay for advertising than low performers, even though they both spent similar percentages of their revenue on marketing. Low performers (21.38%) spent slightly more on email marketing compared to high performers (19.25%). However, low performers spent LESS than high performers when it came to: - Paid search(14.62% compared to 17%) - Paid social ( 12.42% compared to 17.86%) - Display ads ( 12.65% compared to 15.55%) That would indicate that while it's smart to invest in cost efficient email and content marketing, you can't sleep on paying for clicks. The customer acquisition costs may be higher, and you might end up with a few junky leads, but ads still work, and the winners have the results to validate it. ------------------------------------------------ If you want to benchmark your B2B SaaS company against marketing benchmarks from 200+ companies that look like yours, get in touch!?Benchmarker?has the most recent and reliable data on what good, bad and average digital marketing looks like. https://lnkd.in/gHUm93M2

We surveyed 200+ B2B SaaS companies to find out how they spend their marketing budget on their most important goals. How does your company spend in comparison? We found a key difference between high performing and low performing companies. The high performers spent more on brand, the low performers spent more on demand. Low performers were also less likely to spend on sales enablement. One explanation is that low performing companies were also more likely to be smaller in size and less mature, and its likely they don't have the means to up spending on brand and sales enablement. However, the data is an important reminder that spending on brand is integral to growth, and companies neglect it at their peril. Interested in receiving more B2B SaaS marketing benchmarks? Get in touch here! https://lnkd.in/gBPwuc6H

Hi friends, thanks for joining! I’ll be posting weekly on this page, mostly with relevant data point for B2B marketing leaders from our own research as well as from sources around the web.