Kate Athmer

Want a 429% better chance at demand generation success?

According to a study by Convince & Convert, here's the secret: Set clear goals.

You might be thinking, "How do I set concrete goals?" That's a smart question.

Email is still among the most effective B2B marketing channels, but that doesn’t mean game-changing marketers are using the same email tactics that worked in 2014.

According to a recent Ascend2 survey, “Improving the quality of leads generated is a top priority for 58 percent marketing influencers, ahead of all other lead generation goals.” That’s right – ahead of increasing the number of leads, improving analytics, measuring ROI and even increasing conversions.  

The good news: Today’s marketing leaders are focusing on quality over quantity.

The bad news: Not knowing how to address quality concerns, many marketing leaders revert back to overspending on quantity to make up for low-quality leads.

The goal of this post is to outline three steps marketers can take today, without spending more money, to start improving the quality of their lead data.

According to Gartner's 2017-2018 CMO Spend Survey, marketing budgets have seen a 6% year-over-year reduction. Analysts say B2B marketers must embrace a new focus on smarter performance optimization.

Chris Pemberton, Partner and Digital Content Lead at Echo Group, writes on the Gartner blog:

“It’s time to assume accountability for business performance and show that marketing can grow the business while making hard choices.”

Increasingly, executives assess B2B marketing team performance on

When 160 multi-industry marketing executives were surveyed on how they intended to invest marketing resources, many cited new marketing technology (MarTech) purchases.

The most common technologies demand generation marketers will test and deploy this year include account-based marketing technology (58%), multichannel lead-nurturing (41%) and content planning/syndication tools (37%).  However, before expanding your technology stack with newer solutions such as these, it’s important to make sure your current tech ecosystem comprises the foundational systems needed to ensure such investments will work.  

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategic approach to driving engagement with target accounts. Jon Miller, CEO and Co-Founder at Engagio, defines ABM as,

As B2B marketing and sales organizations prioritize account-based revenue strategies, traditional inbound tactics alone can’t provide the quantity or quality of decision-makers to convert target accounts. You simply can’t wait for prospects to find your website through inbound marketing tactics – it won’t scale quickly enough to hit goals. That’s where 3^rd-party demand generation and content syndication come in.

As Dawn Colossi, CMO at FocusVision, once said, successful revenue marketing requires “Paying attention to other sites and treating them like our own – thoughtful of the content we put on them, what they were doing and how they are performing – is key to our strategy’s success.”

Unfortunately, 3^rd-party programs can be incredibly time-consuming and frustrating to manage without the right tools, making it very tempting to take shortcuts or “guess” instead of dedicating the time required to properly plan, launch, measure, and evolve content syndication programs. Does the phrase “We have to move quickly” sound familiar?

Here’s a list of the 10 most-common content syndication mistakes we see our customers make, as well as some guidance on how to get it right.

The top priority of B2B marketing executives in 2018 is to improve lead quality over quantity.

According to DemandGen Report’s 2018 Benchmark Survey Report, improving the percentage of leads considered ‘qualified’ ranked as the top organizational focus, followed by improving conversion rates and campaign results, then generating increased lead volume.

Lead nurturing should be one of the most effective aspects of your demand generation strategies. In fact, 81% of B2B marketing executives ranked email as the most effective tactic for engagement with later-stage prospects, according to the 2018 Benchmark Survey Report. 

This is likely because email heavily supports lead nurturing – a critical component of the demand generation engine. Without lead nurturing to convert more contacts into sales opportunities, your pipeline can't scale.

The number of channels you use is not as important as a cohesive message. Your customers don’t care if you're using twelve different channels for generating B2B demand last year. According to Harvard Business Review, B2B buyers are surrounded by information. In fact, the Review reports that buyers are: 

“increasingly overwhelmed and often more paralyzed than empowered.”

To stand out among the noise, however, it's critically important that you adeptly leverage a number of channels to get your content in front of your target audiences. Further, all these marketing channels must work together in harmony to create an integrated and consistent audience experience. Otherwise, you’re just adding to the overwhelming noise in your prospects’ and customers' ears.

If there are areas of your demand generation programs draining your resources, it’s wise to consider the best ways to take the weight off your team.

Many manual, time-consuming marketing problems can be solved with technology; the right marketing tech will simplify complex tasks and improve results, such as by helping you meet new data-privacy compliance requirements or automating time-consuming lead data processing.

Unfortunately, MarTech can’t cure a lack of talent, substitute for broken processes or make up for a bad B2B marketing strategy. Depending on your specific circumstances, outsourcing certain demand gen activities to an agency or consultant may be good choice. 

Read on to see whether any of the these seven demand generation services may be right for your team's needs.

What is measured can be improved.

There’s rarely a shortage of data for B2B marketers to compile. Demand marketers, especially, are drowning in data. But, data is only as valuable as the actionable insights you can extract from it.

How do you know which metrics matter and how to combine the right insights to improve your program?

How do you avoid “vanity metrics” that only serve as a distraction?

When it comes to demand generation, focusing on the metrics that matter can provide helpful insights to improve the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and give a boost to your results.

But, what metrics actually matter?

According to Certain’s Event Marketing Benchmark Report, over half of B2B marketers spend 25% or more of their budget on in-person events. Whether a large conference, regional seminar, or intimate dinner, events take a lot of resources from both the marketing and sales teams to pull off.

With that much invested, it’s critical that event leads convert to measurable sales pipeline. However, unlike digital programs in which leads flow smoothly through measurable nurture stages and into sales’ hands, events create a messy, manual data problem from start to finish. And this problem can’t be solved without a high level of participation from the sales team itself.

Below are some tricks we’ve found help keep marketing and sales in lock-step surrounding events, regardless of how much wine is consumed. If you're left wanting more tips at the end of this post, consider checking out this upcoming live chat.

On August 23rd I was fortunate enough to host a webinar with two event marketing game changers: Emily Wingrove from Synthio and Frances McCutchon...

As B2B marketers, we often buy technology to do one thing, and end up needing it to do something else. Or more realistically: we...