B2B Marketing Failures - Set the Right KPIs

Stop Wasting Time & Money on Mediocre Marketing

Have you experienced this first hand in your business? after a decade of consulting in the digital space this has become the normal.

• They suggest running paid campaigns that only started to diminish in returns. The more you spend the worse the results get, the wrong audience and unqualified leads.
• Then Sales has started to complain about lead quality and you often hear: “These marketing leads suck!”
• You’re constantly stuck in tactics. Everyone wants to run a/b tests, new headlines, new landing pages, more content.
• You’ve transitioned from lead-focused marketing to account-based marketing to building brand awareness with the same results.

No matter what you do – your marketing feels stuck and sales people don't perform. You’ve hit a plateau that’s left you wondering how you can scale and start seeing killer results.

The reality is most B2B and SaaS companies become obsessed with tactics. Looking for better ads, more content, new graphics, new landing pages, and constant A/B tests.

It’s a continual rinse and repeat.

Agencies and vendors are only making it worse.

• Ad agencies always recommend more or better ads
• SEO agencies always recommend you need better SEO and more content
• Account based vendors will convince you to measure on marketing influenced 
• The “new” agency will tell you to measure revenue and brand awareness separately

It assumes that growth occurs through the act of doing marketing. Creating valuable content mapped to pain points, running ads to your target market, tracking results and making adjustments based on performance.

Growth is not something you do – it’s something you attract.

Every company goes out and spouts “why us”. They put their charts and flows front and center on their website. They compile a list of reasons and stats to prove that you should use their solution.

Your buyers don’t buy into your claims and they hear all the same claims from your competitors.

So you tweak your headlines, optimize your ad targeting, and write more content.

These minor adjustments can improve results 1% – 5% while your revenue target is moving at 30% to 100% a year. 

You’re focused on clicks, conversions, and leads, but you’re missing the bigger picture.

The bigger picture is that none of these tactics do anything to create real demand.

The Problem with “Pain Points”

Chances are, many of your campaigns are focused on appealing to your target audience’s “pain points” and reeling them in with content that proposes a solution to their problem.

But most buyers don’t recognize their pain or lack a deep enough understanding of their pain to even care.

Focusing on pain points will never outpace marketing demand.

The best marketing is not about features, benefits, and pain points. It’s about showing the prospect what’s wrong with their current beliefs and habits and the pain and negative consequences that occur if they don’t change.

 This is where Buyer Led Growth comes in.

Imagine running marketing that gives rise to your buyers needs instead of assuming they have a need to begin with.

This is how you beat your competition and 5x your lead volume, create new demand, and drive serious growth.

It’s why 100% of our customers to date have seen positive ROI results. 

If you want to change and update your go to market approach we must look within at the authentic stories, who has been your loyal clients and work with what you have instead of chasing new.

Buyer-Led Growth – Build Real Demand with Your Marketing

Today, the buyer has all the power.

They’re not reaching out to sales to learn about your product or understand why they need it. 

They’re learning about the product on their terms.

Adopting Buyer Led Growth fundamentally shifts how you go-to-market. 

Your marketing isn’t meant to focus on awareness and then telling buyers they need a solution – it’s meant to show why your buyer cares about solving their problems in the first place.

Buyer Led Growth is the key to creating new demand.

The first step is to shift a buyer-centric approach to marketing. 

This sounds minor but so many companies struggle with it.

Companies focus on getting demos because it means sales has more conversations when buyers really want a trial.

They add company size to inbound lead forms so that sales can qualify buyers out before they even have a conversation.

Put pricing behind a sales wall or they create gated ebooks so they can drop unsuspecting buyers into a sales cadence.

You want to “get more” from your marketing spend.

More demo requests from Google Ads. More ebook downloads from LinkedIn & Facebook ads. More leads from your gated 4 minute demo video. More meetings from your ABM direct mail campaigns.

It’s all about you.

In the fight for new customers – you’re actually losing.

Adopting a buyer-centric approach to marketing fundamentally shifts how you market your product.

When you stop spending on what you want you start creating marketing that actively engages and informs buyers.

The second shift starts with establishing your narrative.

When lead-based marketing stops working most companies claim they need to align to revenue by driving more demo and trial requests as well as creating additional brand awareness.

They create case studies, demo ads, G2 quadrants, review websites, and the list goes on. 

But this doesn’t make you stand out as different from your competitors it just makes them aware that you exist.

Most of your competitors run ads and create content that assumes buyers care about solving a problem so everything is focused on convincing them to buy their solution.

“Let me tell you why our product is better”.

This is where you have a major chance to out maneuver your competition and create new demand.

Establishing your narrative is meant to give rise to your buyers needs before they recognize a pain

Focus on the playbook and content with pieces built around establishing your narrative within your target market and giving rise to your buyers needs so they recognize their pain points.

Until your buyer recognizes they have a pain or a pain worth solving you’ll never be able to create the new demand.

This also causes your marketing to shift from focusing on what you’re selling to challenging the way your buyer is operating so that they take action.

The Third Shift Starts With Adjusting Your Metric

When you switch to buyer led growth you can’t measure the typical marketing vanity metrics.

Most of our customers see a decrease in leads in the short term, but a dramatic increase in revenue in the mid and long term.

There’s three buckets of metrics that we measure:

Marketing growth focused metrics – This includes inbound pipeline, inbound revenue, LTV:CAC, and a few other base metrics to help us determine how much revenue marketing is driving consistently.

Sales efficiency metrics – When you execute a buyer led growth framework not only do you drive more inbound volume and close more marketing pipeline, but you see improvements in sales efficiency. This includes tracking marketing win rate, marketing sales cycle length, days to close, and average ARR.

Growth driven metrics – We specifically measure pipeline and revenue from natural occurring growth. When done properly the rate of organic growth should be accelerating without increasing ad spend.

Align Marketing to Buyer Led Growth

We started Buyer Led Growth and building a growth team because we realized most agencies don’t understand how to achieve meaningful growth.

Doing great marketing requires more than an agency that runs Google Ads, and some LinkedIn retargeting. You need to completely update your entire approach to growth.

If you’re looking for incremental progress of better ads, better headlines, and more content so you can get a handful of extra leads a month those agencies are everywhere some try to trick you and say they’re focused on “revenue” or they specialize in brand, but they’re the same.

If you’re ready to re-think your entire approach to growth with an growth team that’s challenging the status quo – you’ve come to the right place.

We’ll run the day to day paid acquisition strategies. We actually crush those results.

But we understand the best marketing isn’t about selling features, benefits, and products. It’s about so much more as we live in a world where the buyer has control of the entire process.

There’s one other thing, you’ll need to be open to brutally honest feedback on your marketing approach including messaging and go-to-market strategy. 

We’re not here to cash a paycheck and tell you what you want to hear, we’re going to tell you what you need to hear.

If you’re ready 100% of our customers see positive ROI.

Article from https://www.elevatedemand.com/start-here/