B2B Excellence - “The most important search is still the one in your mind”

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.

Grab yourself a cup of tea and review our archived entries at ?https://www.b2bexcellence.co/

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1* “The most important search is still the one in your mind”

Profound statement within the foreword of this thought-provoking opinion piece.

This is a healthy reminder of the role of the marketeer.

Lots of value from this article. Here are the things I loved.

• Memory-generated brands are the starting points for the buying process
• Category entry points in a B2B world
• The correlation between CEP and buying influence?
• Measuring the effectiveness of building CEPs

2 * Are you stuck on the 2010 B2B marketing playbook?

Does your marketing performance hinge on how many MQLs you have driven from your eBook campaign?

Does your pay rise and bonus rely on you sending 1000s of emails a week in the hope you capture one or two people interested in a meeting?

Does collecting insight mean going onto Salesforce to what channels drove the most efficient MQLs this week?

This is The B2B Hamster Wheel Playbook. Once you're spinning it’s hard to get off.

the B2B buyers have evolved, and it’s time your marketing did too.

The transition.

?Measurement and internal expectations set what is expected from marketing.

Your job is to change that narrative and remove the shackles of a dated measurement framework.

1- Focus your time on obsessing over your buyer. Talk to them, listen to sales calls and immerse yourself in the platforms they engage with.

2- Plot your buyer's journey, and acknowledge most of your buyers are not ready to buy. Adopt the 95/5 rule

3- Build a measurement framework that takes into account multiple data points, they can include

* Marketing data from marketing platforms (CTR’s, video views, post likes)

* Revenue (Qualified pipeline , closed-won)

* Behavioural Data (website dwell time, return visitors)

* Qualitative Data (self-reporting, LinkedIn comments, key buyer's social engagement)

You need a mixture of leading indicators, qualitative insight, behavioural data and revenue metrics.

4 - Slowly transition your marketing efforts, you don’t have to change them overnight.?

*Align with your sales team and set clear expectations from one another

*Start to ungate content slowly

*Incorporate more metrics when you report back to your internal stakeholders

*More focus on your content engine

*Amplify your content and distribution channels with more intent on content consumption

5 - Manage expectations that MQLs will start to decrease, with the expectations more qualified opportunities will start trickling in

3 *?How to utilise webinar content

How most people run webinars:

- Promote webinar

- Run Webinar

- Send Webinar out Via Email

- Post to Website

How you should run webinars:

- Everything above, then...

- Cut into short clips

- Distribute via paid and organic

Check out this healthy reminder of how you should be approaching your webinar strategy.

Conversations / Articles?You Should Read

Provoking view on creating demand

There is no secret distribution channel.?

This is what purpose driven marketing gets wrong?

Marketing teams need to work better with creative teams

Create content to help your audience go from A to B

Tools, Platform, Events or Podcasts

Each week I share a tool I find interesting, an event I’m attending or a podcast I have listed too.

A reliable and cost-efficient email delivery tool. Post Mark

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