B2B Excellence - The brand investment dilemma

B2B Excellence is a weekly newsletter that curates the best B2B marketing content from the brightest minds in our industry.

?We include the perspectives from a variety of enterprise marketers, stories from fast-growth businesses challenging the conventional ways of working and thinking, and the top 1% of B2B marketers shaping modern-day practices.

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Article 1 - Global B2B Marketing Report

?Our colleagues over at EssenceMediacom have put together a new report based on 188 Fortune 500 senior B2B marketing leaders.

?This report focused on the role of the senior marketer, their challenges, focus and considerations for the future.

?The core challenges reflect the behaviours I also see, Consisting of internal alignment, cross sharing, measurement and their evolving roles and responsibilities.?

?To get a better understanding to role of senior marketers at enterprise businesses, check out their report here.

• More than half of respondents (57%) identified ‘Proving ROI’ as the top-3 biggest challenge
• 80% of survey respondents said customer centricity has become ‘much more’ or ‘more important’ to their organisation over the past 2-3 years.?
• Only half prioritise sharing audience understanding across departments that develop content, and less than 30% prioritise team structures aligned to customer needs (rather than LOB or marketing channels).
• Increasing importance of core Marketing responsibilities – Content development and distribution second only to Measurement

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Article 2 - The brand investment dilemma - senior leadership buy-in

?“Convincing senior leadership of the benefits of brand building in B2B is still a struggle for many marketers.”

?Despite a plethora of data, insight, research and case studies that reinforce the importance of long-term brand building and the impact it has on driving business growth, brand investment remains one of the hardest tasks to get collective buy-in.

?The challenges reflect what we saw in our study above, which derive from a lack of understanding of how B2B marketing has evolved from wider stakeholders, the complexity of measuring it and the engrained perception of the short-term lead fallacy.

?I like the contributions from the folks over at Service Now and EY.

?Keep your friends close, but those in finance even closer.

?I loved the example around price elasticity, and how you can leverage brand to pricing power. A great point when keeping your finance directors on side and excited. Speak money, to the money people.

Nice piece over at Marketing Week

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Conversations, posts or articles I liked this week

?A day in the life at Wavemaker?

Are you accountable for the quality of your leads

Thought of the week - Rory Sutherland?

Old vs New Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

Marketing Mix Modelling for B2B businesses

How to avoid putting all your B2B creative eggs in one fragile basket

“Don’t rent your audience on LinkedIn. It’s better to build your email list instead.” or is it?

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