Economy
7 B2B Lead Generation Challenges Today
The most successful B2B marketing organizations in 2018 are those which figure out how to solve both the big and small challenges – assembling the right skill sets, marketing tech and processes in a way that creates a compelling, multi-channel customer journey. David Crane’s review is about each of the current challenges, especially the lead generation.
1. Creating Quality Educational Content
For most organizations, “quality content” in 2018 involves quite a bit more than eBooks, white papers and blogs. Content Marketing Research Institute’s annual B2B survey revealed the average organization used eight different tactics in 2017. The most commonly reported content tactics included:- Social Media (83%)
- Blogs (80%)
- Email (77%)
- In-Person Events (68%)
- eBooks/White Papers (65%)
- Video (60%)
- Infographics (58%)
- Webinars (58%)
2. Managing Lead Sources
Generating traffic and leads is the most commonly reported challenge among today’s marketing professionals, according to the 2017 State of Inbound Report by HubSpot. At many demand organizations, top-of-funnel lead sources involve many paid and owned sources which makes management a time-consuming task. While it’s technically possible to manually manage and measure many different lead sources individually, it’s not practical or efficient. Trying to manually compare the contributions of your events, webinars, third-party lead gen vendors and call centers in a way that contributes to a 360-degree view of top-of-funnel performance is time-consuming and resource draining. Adopting solutions that automate top-of-funnel efforts and centralize lead source management can provide marketers with an efficient view of performance. To learn more about automating top-funnel demand gen processes, read “The Guide to Demand Orchestration Software”3. Lead Quality Issues
How much does a bad lead cost? A lot, especially if it’s a lead that can’t be qualified due to data quality issues. Research by Integrate reveals that up to 40% of B2B marketing databases include bad lead data. This measure of bad data includes issues such as:- Duplicate records (15%)
- Invalid formatting or values (11%)
- Missing fields (8%)
- Invalid email or physical addresses (6%)
4. Scaling Efficiency
As demand marketers hit their KPIs and prove the ROI of their B2B marketing activities, they may be given more budget. Those who are given a budget increase can hire new staff, acquire new technology or outsource some of their marketing activities in the year to come. While your system may work well with eight staff members, can it scale to accommodate twelve contributors and a third-party agency? The challenge of scaling efficiency while maintaining forward motion during periods of rapid growth isn’t unique to demand marketers, but it is common. The solution to make an ever-increasing number of puzzle pieces fit is technology and processes. Even the most sophisticated software for orchestrating demand generation can’t compensate for communication issues or a lack of executive buy-in to new demand marketing solutions. Similarly, even the smartest processes can’t scale if you’re too busy doing manual data entry to execute them or think about how they fit into a holistic demand gen strategy. The secret to scaling efficiency is in the right balance of processes and MarTech.5. Walking the Quality Tightrope
Algorithms on search and social media networks are increasingly attuned to content quality as a signal for ranking content. B2B decision-makers are also faced with a plethora of choice. If your content isn’t as good as your competitor, you could be categorized as less trustworthy or authoritative than other brands in your category. B2B marketers can’t afford to be apathetic when it comes to marketing quality. While the idea of quality is well-understood, what’s less understood is the risks associated with raging perfectionism. This can result in analysis paralysis. Amanda Zantal-Wiener, a Senior Staff Writer at HubSpot, admits she was once afflicted by a tendency to over-analyze her own efforts. She writes, “No one’s work is perfect…mine certainly isn’t.” Good and finished is better than unfinished in the name of perfection.6. Maintaining Positive Working Relationships
The full-funnel mindset that drives B2B demand generation requires full-funnel collaboration. Marketers are called upon to work closely with sales and customer success teams, while maintaining frequent communications and support from the c-suite. Maintaining good relationships with sales, customer success, IT and the c-suite is critical to the success of the entire organization. Back in 2006, Doctors Philip Kotler, Neil Rackham and Suj Krishnaswamy – all renowned academics and authors in the field of marketing – published an article in the Harvard Business Review titled, “Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing.” In this article, they called for marketing teams to move beyond alignment to integration. They defined the concept of integration between marketing, sales and customer service as a relationship where teams “share structures, systems, and rewards…develop and implement shared metrics” and create a “rise or fall together” culture. Habits of the best-aligned customer-focused B2B organizations include:- Regular, structured inter-departmental meetings
- Shared assignments
- Joint success metrics
- Assignment of a marketing team member to act as liaison to sales and customer success teams
- Shared working space, via an open office layout or collaborative spaces
- Improved avenues for feedback
- Shared systems for rewards