I have just read the Frost & Sullivan 2015 Global Survey of Marketing Priorities and it makes interesting reading. The survey includes businesses of all sizes up multi-billion turnovers across public and private sector, and including not for profit. Participants represented a broad range of industries from all across the world. What surprised me was that the top issues marketers are grappling with across all these geographies and markets are the same as I see local SME businesses trying to address here in the West Midlands.
Looking specifically at the top marketing challenges and metrics for B2B businesses shows the top 5 challenges (and their causes) as follows:
Developing a compelling value proposition – due to ineffective communication
Generating and qualifying sales-ready leads – lack of process
Creating content that delivers value to customers – inadequate staffing
Quantifying marketing ROI – ineffective process
Driving Sales’ usage of marketing collateral, tools and resources – lack of team buy-in
As regular readers of this blog (or visitors to our website) will know, we have been working hard over the last few years on our Sales Generator programme, designed for B2B businesses, and I’m delighted to see that it fits perfectly against these global marketing challenges and priorities.
It builds a clear proposition with prospects
It delivers a consistent flow of sales-ready leads through a repeatable process
We work with clients to create content and can provide additional resource if required
Measurement is built in to the programme and ROI can easily be calculated
It unites Sales and Marketing, and by delivering measureable results wins buy-in
Other additional findings from the report are:
Average % of revenue spent on Marketing in B2B businesses is 3%
Of this, 38% is spent on marketing activity, 34% on staffing, 10% on marketing tools and 8% on research
The three top marketing performance metrics are Lead generation, Revenue growth and Website traffic
Areas expected to receive increased investment are videos, case studies, blogs, testimonials and webinars
If you are grappling with similar priorities and challenges and would like to discuss them further, please get in touch.
You can find out more about the Frost and Sullivan survey and other services they provide on their website, and if you would like to discuss digital marketing in a more exotic location, you might want to check out their 2016 Digital Marketing event.
Chris.