Marketing Profs

Never before have business-to-business (B2B) marketers faced such enormous pressure in their jobs. With competition intensifying and prospective customers becoming increasingly elusive, companies are demanding that marketers deliver measurable results. Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) are now expected to demonstrate the impact of their actions and the return on their investments.

The failure of so many marketing executives to rigorously and successfully defend their decisions partly explains why the average tenure of top CMOs is now less than 23 months.¹

Several factors have dramatically altered the landscape of B2B marketing in recent years, forcing marketing practitioners to rethink their tactics and reinvest their resources to achieve superior outcomes. Among the key drivers are accountability, measurability and automation.

This rise in accountability has placed marketing measurement as the key requirement for assessing performance. New tools are being introduced that enable marketers to track, test, and analyze with evermore precision, across multiple channels.

Marketers can now draw clear correlations between their marketing campaigns and sales results. These findings not only help them to justify their actions but also allow them to invest more effectively over time.

At the same time, marketing is being changed—and enhanced—by automation. Just as enterprise resource planning (ERP) automated the back office and sales force automation (SFA) automated the sales process, powerful new marketing automation systems delivered as a service enable marketers to quickly scale their most successful campaigns to drive a larger flow of qualified leads.

This enables organizations to engage prospective customers in a personalized, one-to-one fashion, enhancing customer acquisition, improving cross-selling and up-selling, and strengthening loyalty.

The Top Challenges B2B Marketing Organizations Now Face

These forces of change are having enormous impact on marketers' efforts to overcome some very key challenges:

• Reaching the right prospects in a relevant and effective way. Due to the flood of messages attempting to reach today's decision-makers and influencers, it has become increasingly difficult to gain their attention. Sixty-six percent of B2B marketers agree that reaching decision-makers is their top challenge, according to Forrester Research.² Yet many marketers cannot execute the kind of coordinated, integrated, cross-channel marketing campaign required to grab the attention of hard-to-reach buyers.
  
  Identifying the right channels and the right messages for a campaign requires a much deeper understanding of prospective customers. If the valuable data for behavioral, response, and preference analysis remains locked in silos, it's simply impossible to enhance marketing effectiveness, produce impressive results, and form the trusted relationships so critical in today's business sales.