marketing strategy

Frog Capital + Your Allies = GTM Due Diligence Toolkit

06/06/2024 by Linsay Duncan

Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy and execution are crucial success factors for any scaling software business. When Your Allies sets out to support founders and leadership teams in growing their business, we begin by looking under the hood at their GTM plans.

Through a shared and deep interest in all-things GTM, Your Allies and Frog Capital put their heads together to build a practical resource for scaling businesses. Frog Capital is known for its success in investing in European purpose-led software scale-ups and providing them with world-class operational support. To help inform the industry and support people tasked with scaling, Frog has developed a set of helpful, practical toolkits.

In this co-created How to Scale toolkit, Frog’s Operating Partner James Bagan and Your Allies founder Linsay Duncan outline:

Which core areas should be covered in a GTM due diligence process – across Marketing, Partners, Sales and Customer Success
How Frog Capital conducts due diligence and how they identify risks and opportunities
A comprehensive checklist to help you assess your own GTM and prepare for investor due diligence.

Frog Capital and Your Allies GTM due diligence toolkit

Download now to understand which areas across Sales, Marketing, Partners and Customer Success your GTM due diligence should focus on… and much more.

Access more GTM insights here.

12 Lessons from a Fractional CMO

09/10/2023 by Kalon Nelson

1. 7 x GTM WHYs

Know the answers to these seven WHYs and use them to inform your most crucial GTM decisions.

Why are customers buying from you? Why are they not? Why are those specific competitors shortlisted against you? Why are your products/services needed now? Why are they different? Why do customers return? And why do they not?

Find answers to these you can have confidence in, and you have valuable intel to decide exactly where to play, and who to focus sales and marketing efforts on. You’re all set to explain who your products/services are for and why yours is the best, and you’re armed to set yourself apart from other players. These are some of the most valuable of GMT insights that form the backbone of any sound scaleup marketing strategy.

2. De-Risk your Marketing

Be brutal in attacking any grey areas. If the return on any significant marketing spend or activity isn’t delivering an obvious outcome, prioritise understanding why – and consider pausing while you do so*. No one wants a leaky bucket. Scaling businesses need to protect every precious marketing penny, all the more so given the current climate.

* CAVEAT: Before chucking any activity out the window, ensure the way you’ve been measuring the impact of that activity is rigorous enough in the first place and that you can confidently stand behind your review process. We often we see costly activities, particularly events, being disregarded because expectations were either wrong, unrealistic or too vague in the first place.

3. Exec level commitment

Until Marketing has an equal seat on a scaleup’s Exec table, it’s highly unlikely Marketing will ever perform to its maximum capability. Without the right representation from the right senior Marketer, decisions will be made for Marketing by non-marketing professionals. And there is great risk that comes from this.

More often than not scaleups start out life being either been Sales-led or Product-led. And Marketing can often be on the back foot, on catch-up as a result. Your Allies has typically come into level up Marketing functions because Marketing either hasn’t been prioritised early on enough, or has been led by someone without sufficient scaleup marketing experience.

By committing to the guidance and experience an Exec-level Marketer can bring, gives a Marketing function the best chance of delivering what the business needs. But more than that, the right Marketer at the helm will add far greater value to a scaling business – for example, by identifying new market opportunities, by fortifying partner relationships through win-win comarketing, or turning a brand into a powerful strength.

4. Place Marketing at the Frontline

The highest performing marketing functions are the ones joined at the hip with Sales, Product and Customer Success; on the frontline with Customers and Partners; and with a direct line into competitor and market intel. A constant flow of information between these part of your business and the market will feed marketing with crucial customer intel. Insights needed to shape the high-impact campaigns and big ideas ambitious scaleups need to survive, and thrive.

5. Prioritise home-grown ambassadors

Allowing your Marketers to lead the wider business as Brand Ambassadors will help to:

Educate employees on how to talk and write about your brand
Protect your brand and IP
Shape spokespeople, influencers and broadcasters to amplify your company’s voice.

More often than not it’s a scaleup’s spokespeople who will see greater traction from their social media activity versus the social media activity of the company itself. The marketing function that successfully nurtures brand ambassadors from within can expect to see a wealth of good outcomes as a result.

6. Content: Invest and Repurpose

It now takes on average 26 touchpoints* before a B2B decision-maker is ready to engage with a supplier. And with anything between 65% and 80% of the buyer journey taking place online, the one thing you can’t skimp on is content.

Allowing prospective buyers to learn about how your business is relevant to them and how you can help them win, by consuming content received at the right time and in the right format is genuinely one of the toughest marketing challenges.

But it can feel like a big, vague, wide open thing, can’t it? For scaleups content usually encompasses the following:

– The articles, reports, whitepapers, points of view, talking heads, and other lead pieces you use to educate and bring your audience closer.

– The backbone of and outputs from your webinars, events, podcasts and round table discussions.

– The collateral you arm sales with (playbooks, explainer videos, brochures, cheat-sheets, case studies, ROI calculators, competitor comparison tables…)

We’ve seen without fail every business that’s gone light on content take a hit on sales and marketing performance. Without sufficient content, a slippery road lies ahead:

– Marketing may have to rely on just one or two hits or touchpoints, to count as a lead or MQL.

– Sales lose faith in following up leads and MQLs which simply aren’t qualified enough.

– Moving opportunities through the sales process feels like pushing water uphill.

– Justice is not being done to the incredible product/service that’s been built. It’s not being allowed to shine through via content.

But it’s not all about new-new content. We see Marketers missing smart opportunities to repurpose existing content to make it work harder, go farther and tap into a wider audience all the time. Repurposing must be a firm feature of any good scaleup content plan.

7. **Understand what good really looks like**

As well as cost per acquisition, ROI and revenue contribution being key measures of success, find a way to capture and analyse other high-value outcomes such as:

The first impression your brand and demand gen campaigns
The impact of lead spokespeople engaging with the market (e.g. speaking at events, joining expert panels, sharing insights on LinkedIn…)
The ripple effect from Partners, Customers and industry experts talking about your company

There are untold gems to be found analysing these types of these seemingly less tangible outcomes.

8. Compare yourself

An exercise in our view which is not run frequently enough, and is often forgotten, is lining up the competition’s websites and lead collateral alongside yours. Same to be said for looking at other Players in your space – companies you admire, companies which might complement your offering, companies your customers rate.

And we mean literally line them up – screenshots of websites, visuals, straplines placed alongside one another can point us to a wealth of insights.

How do you look compared to theirs – visually, proposition-wise, and from a UX perspective? Are you well differentiated enough? Are you proud of how you stand alongside? What do their lead messages tell you? How have they decided to present their products and services and to which segments of the market – by industry by buyer persona, by challenge or need? What are they doing which you aren’t or could do better? What themes are they hanging their hat on this year? What content, CTAs, events, customers and partners can you find out about?

These are just some of the questions to drive valuable learnings from to ensure your marketing stands out, and much more. (Of course what this exercise doesn’t tell you is how well their website and lead collateral performs. But better to have part of the picture than none at all.)

9. Take the easy route with Social Selling

Through the Your Allies LinkedIn Accelerator over 450 B2B professionals have gone through our social selling, LinkedIn and Sales Navigator training. Time-poor Exec Teams, seasoned SaaS/Tech Sales Gurus, hungry Bizdev Teams, sceptical IT Professionals and Dev Teams – we’ve coached them all. (And loved every second of it.)

To help social selling initiatives get going in the early stages, the frictionless route is the best way forward. By identifying the already-social-media-savvy individuals, or those who are simply motivated and eager to learn, you’ll find a more direct route to the outcomes you want to achieve.

Social selling and LinkedIn marketing isn’t for everyone. And nor should it be. Every employee has the right to decide whether they do or don’t engage on behalf of their company. Naturally, it might be a fair expectation for salespeople and company spokespeople to take the lead here.

But back to our point – kitting out your most eager of brand advocates with the skills, advice and content they need to drive social selling and LinkedIn marketing initiatives forwards is a smart move because:

Precious coaching time is spent on getting to the good stuff rather than convincing sceptics of something they may never be ready to do.
These individuals may often already be well connected on LinkedIn, meaning when they do ramp activity up their network is already receptive and/or has expansive reach.
They have the appetite to put your advice into action and are therefore most likely to be instrumental in making your initiative fly.
By showcasing the success of these individuals, others may be inspired to follow. Even the more healthily sceptical ones.

And a word of thanks – without those who have challenged our social selling advice and reasons for focusing on LinkedIn, we’ve been able to respond and in turn paint a realistic picture to the teams we’ve coached. We begin every session reminding people in the room that we must sprinkle a very healthy dose of salt over all of this this. Social selling is but one tactic, and LinkedIn is but one of many channels, that B2B scaleup marketing must embrace. (When have you ever heard a salesperson month-on-month describe LinkedIn as being the reason they’re smashing their sales target?)

10. Phone a friend

Whether it’s warm friendly customer supporters, company alumni you have retained strong bonds with, or industry partners you simply just click with… don’t be shy in asking for their take on things. Before putting marketing messaging, big themes or thought-leadership out into the world, tap into trusted individuals who know your business, and importantly who are in your Customers’ world.

These checkpoints are often overlooked. The more you can look at your business through the customer and industry lens, the sharper you set yourself up to be.

Provided these asks are done respectfully and without becoming a burden, phoning a friend will deliver countless benefits. And of course you can find a way to thank them.

11. Don’t write-off proprietary GTM research

Scaleups rarely have the luxury of having reems of customer references to draw on. Customer intel that deeply defines and clearly clarifies Product Market Fit is the Holy Grail in this stage of a business’s journey.

But there is another way to sidestep this by running your own smart, proprietary research. A few options include:

Investing into polls and surveys run into well-profiled audiences which align to your target buyers, run by an external market research partner (take a look at Censuswide and Pollfish for starters)*.
Hosting small, self-run focus groups consisting of existing customers**.
Running in-depth telephone or virtual interviews with Senior/C-Suite of your Ideal Customer Business, you’re able to access*.

* These polls can allow you to ask anything from 5 to 15 questions for a reasonable price tag (ballpark as of Sep23 = £1k – £5k). Of course the more senior you go, the harder they are to reach/the higher the cost of the survey will be. The other beauty here is that you receive the analysis and exec summary for the poll – hard-lifting all taken care of.

** These two options are (more resource-intensive a you’re doing the heavy-lifting here, from start to finish).

Whilst this won’t equal firsthand responses from your own, broad customer base, this fills a crucial gap helping you understand where you fit and why within prospective target audiences. And there are a tonne of uses for the results and analysis from these polls – informing GTM approach, polishing value props and messaging, shaping content themes, producing blogs and thought-leadership – and that’s just for starters.

This is a big subject we’re not going to cover in one article. Drop us a line if you’re interested in hearing more about how this can work for your business. We genuinely thing it’s one of the best things a scaleup can invest in.

12. Stand on the shoulders of Giants

We see many missed opportunities when it comes to comarketing and joining forces with Partners to go to market. Doing everything from scratch, on your own as a scaling company isn’t the smartest move.

There are efficiencies and gains to come from teaming up with Partners and Allies in the right way, including:

Amplifying your reach through a stronger more established Partner brand
Earning kudos by association with the right Partner, their products and services
Media and journalists taking a closer look
Reaching prospective customers sat in your Partner’s marketing database
Tapping into their market expertise and understanding to drive forward stand-out comarketing initiatives.

If any of these ring true for your scaleup, or have sparked off some ideas, talk to us – we’d love to help you Scale through Marketing.

* Content Marketing Institute 2022 research

Champion tactics for seriously effective B2B content: be brave, team up, go long

05/09/2018 by Linsay Duncan

Ok, so it’s unlikely a hilarious Times Square flash-mob video promoting your products or a slick, TV ad with George Clooney on voiceover will be signed off by your MD in your next strategy meeting. So what other options are there? Here’s some seriously smart approaches to generating and sharing content in a way that will grab your audience’s attention and boost brand presence.

1. Be outspoken, be memorable

Take a good look around. What are your competitors, industry spokespeople and thought-leaders talking about? And what’s NOT being said? Find a unique perspective or angle on trends and topics your clients care about. Consider how you can be memorable and become known for sharing B2B content that makes people sit up and listen, while others are saying the same old, same old.

And what if you don’t take the time to understand who’s doing what with their content marketing in your industry? Well, the risk is you churn out the same stuff as everyone else, or slightly different versions of it. How can you develop stand-out B2B content without knowing what’s around? Sounds obvious, but it’s a step many marketers still miss.

Brave some controversy

A company voice itself can also be memorable, be it heard through company communications or through the language of its spokespeople and employees. Stepping up to the mic with either a strong tone of voice or controversial take on things can really pay off. Explore how you can be thought-provoking, or challenge current thinking in a meaningful way? Of course, this only works when backed with substance.

Point in case… which of these blog titles are you more likely to read?

“Driving business growth with artificial intelligence”
OR
“90% of AI spend has zero lasting value – so why bother with AI at all?”

“How to connect with busy professionals”
OR
“Why successful people are douchebags”

Consider building a choir of voices, using multiple spokespeople to tackle industry topics and share a range of insights, debate and thought-provoking angles. If you’re communicating with numerous buyer personas this well worth a look-in, as you can align spokespeople to appeal to each buyer group.

But back it up

This approach can be nerve-wracking for the marketer at the helm. So, back it up with checkpoints. Especially at the start, ensure the right eyes are on any outspoken, challenging content you’re putting out. Ready your spokespeople with responses for any retort that may come. Weigh up any potential risks versus the end result of improved brand authenticity, increased reach and shareability of your content.

Some good examples of people putting their mark on the world through brave approaches to their content marketing are: Gary Vaynerchuk, Liz Ryan & Doug Kessler. And then there’s Trump… leading the way in some respect but no doubt causing heart failure daily for his poor PR team.

2. Team up and turn up the volume

Primary research and insights can be gold dust for building unique, valuable B2B content. However, conducting interviews, running surveys and then compiling all the data into a cohesive, compelling whitepaper that excites is time and resource intensive (not to mention chews through budget).

Look then to your network, your partners or industry influencers in your space that complement what you do. Teaming up with other (bigger) brands or people who serve a similar audience, with points of view that work together with yours, can increase the success of your content marketing efforts tenfold. Provided you and your partners have a keen eye on what the market wants to hear – this can be an excellent way to create highly valuable B2B content.

Not only can you benefit from the wisdom of experts outside your business, but the amplification from their outreach, audience and networks will get you heard where you wouldn’t otherwise. Joining budgets on research or content initiatives will also typically help your marketing bucks go further.

Let’s move onto look at what you can do in terms of content format. Having an attention-grabbing approach, and dream team of partners to build content with will only take you so far. Being Google-savvy must be a key tactic with content creation.

3. Go long-form

We are drowning in information overload, with over 2 million new blog posts being created every day (oooof)! Almost quickly as a question pops up, we can Google it and have reems of instant answers. The challenge here is this can lead to information fatigue. Your prospects and clients are tiring of content that’s general, or just slightly helpful – stuff they could find anywhere. They’re seeking out (and expect) high calibre articles that resonate with them. Content which helps solve their issues, shed new light while entertaining them in some way too. They’re looking for new takes and unique insights, backed by expertise and credibility.

For even the most skilled copywriters, coming up with content that addresses all these needs in short blogs or articles is incredibly challenging. How can you truly get to the crux of a matter or explore a topic deeply in so few words? Couple with that the shift in how 500-800 word blogs perform compared to longer, more in-depth pieces of content and we see it’s time pay attention to long-form.

In this article, Neil Patel shares why long-form is so powerful. Research also tells us that long-form blog posts can generate 9x more leads than short form posts and strengthen or build your authority as a thought-leader.

This will boost your SEO health too. As search engine algorithms have become smarter (as in AI smart) they now better understand user intent which eliminates the need to try to rank for every long-tail keyword.

Instead of creating lots of different blog posts for each long-tail keyword, build a few high-quality ‘pillar’ posts for your business’s key search themes (i.e. those main topics your audience would search for). Enrich them with detail, optimise them for conversions and link them to secondary B2B content. That secondary content should relate to topics similar to your pillar keyword. This link is important both for SEO and to help your website visitors to navigate your content. HubSpot explains this nice and simply in this video.

Revisit and repurpose

Take a look back at previous content. What here could be built out to a long-form piece, and repurposed with a new tone or standpoint?

“Hungry for the detail?” We’re merely pointing you in the right direction here, rather than giving you the full rundown on how to manage and execute these approaches. Naturally, there’s lots more to making B2B content marketing stand out using these methods, including having the right thinking, processes and channel mix behind it.

To hear more about how we can drive your content marketing in a new, attention-grabbing direction – drop us a line.

Sources

Why Successful People Are Douchebags – June14, QuickSprout

100+ Internet Stats and Facts for 2018 – Feb18, Web Hosting Rating

Generate More Leads with Data-Driven Content Marketing – Curata

Why 3000+ Word Blog Posts Get More Traffic (A Data Driven Answer) – Neil Patel

Topic Clusters: The Next Evolution of Content Strategy – Jul17, HubSpot

The Future of Content Strategy – HubSpot

SMEs on YouTube: How Small Business can utilise the platform and grow – Feb17, Your Allies

5 (often overlooked) tactics to set you up for B2B referral marketing success

02/21/2018 by Linsay Duncan

We see lots of growing businesses dive head first into digital marketing but neglect the more traditional referral route. A route which can pay far greater dividends.

“People influence people. Nothing influences people more than a recommendation from a trusted friend. A trusted referral influences people more than the best broadcast message. A trusted referral is the Holy Grail of advertising.” – Mark Zuckerberg, CEO

It really is that simple. As Zuckerberg says, people rely on recommendations from friends and peers. But how do you capture that, and fold it into your overall B2B marketing mix?

1) If you do just one thing, connect

Ok, that’s not strictly true. First you need to do a stellar job. Whether it’s a product or service you’re offering, it’s got to be stand-out so that people are moved enough to talk about it. This underpins all word of mouth and B2B referral activity. (Read Marketo’s “7 Questions to Ask Before Launching a B2B Referral Program” to check you’re ready to go.)

Now you need to get connected. Consider how important LinkedIn is as a platform for your target audience (arguably the most relevant B2B social network), and other relevant forums or networks. Next, go through your address book / email contact list, wherever you store your contacts and send invites to connect with:

− Happy client contacts – particularly those from flagship brands or who have strong networks and social influence.
− Partners.
− Suppliers.
− Industry peers.

No need to limit this to people you’re currently dealing with. Take care to consider who from your past you’ve got good relationships with or had positive dealings with. You never know who they’re going to know and who might come knocking on their door about something that relates to your business.

As you then connect to new prospects and other contacts on LinkedIn you’re going to find 2nd and 3rd connections popping up. It can be a pretty small world, this B2B space.

Let’s also clarify who we’re talking about here? The key members of your leadership team, your sales force and other customer-facing staff. The more the better when it comes to word of mouth and referrals, as success relies greatly on having outreach.

2) Make it part of your day-to-day

Whilst this might sound incredibly basic and obvious, we regularly speak to business leaders and their sales people and find they’ve not taken a thorough approach to connecting. Where it’s not been a focus, we recommend investing time upfront in every sales person rigorously connecting with clients, prospects, partners etc. Moving forward, it becomes less resource intensive.

Book a weekly 15-minute diary slot asking your sales people to connect with new people they’ve engaged with that week, and that’s it taken care of.

From here your business is a step closer to enjoying the ripple effect that can happen through word of mouth and referrals.

3) Stay front of mind

Sharing relevant, engaging content – on LinkedIn and other relevant networks and platforms – is then one way of ensuring your business is subtly front of mind. If you’re not out there, being relevant and part of the conversation, you’re unlikely to maximise the power of referrals and word of mouth.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised to have generated new business directly – from contacts not previously unknown to me – on the back of some advice I shared on LinkedIn. It does work.

4) Don’t ask, don’t get

You’re now joined up to your “client champions” and other influential connections. Ready for new introductions and referrals to be thrown your way. The checkpoints now are:

− Asking for clients (and others) to think about who in their network they might be open to introducing you to. Now or at a time that works for them.
− Might they even be open to sharing a short post on social media referencing the good work you’ve done?
− Perhaps some will go as far as flicking through their address book thinking of who they could drop a short note to, mentioning your creds.
− Your true advocates might be game for receiving a call or two from prospects.
− Drop partners and suppliers a line, asking who they know they can put you in touch with – and of course, you’ll do the same in return.

Approach this in a respectful way and you’ll see things happening. Not always instantly, but this sets the wheels in motion.

How you thank them is up to you. Whether it’s a well-worded note, a lunch, something extra thrown into their next renewal… acknowledge their efforts here, as positive referrals and word of mouth are marketing gold-dust.

5) Reciprocate – because business karma says so

We’re firm believers in doing business in a genuine way. Do unto others as you’d have them do to you. The strong partnerships Your Allies now has are built on a genuine interest in helping one another’s businesses out and doing the right thing for our customers. Similarly, we make efforts to think about the good work our clients do, and who we’re able to refer them on to.

What goes around comes around. Put good things out there and you’ll see good things come back to you.

Good people, doing good things. That’s what makes the world go round.

Have questions about improving your B2B Referral Marketing? If you’d like advice on how to ramp your referral marketing up or need pointers to get those referral requests just right, drop us a line.

Your Allies in James Caan’s Your Business magazine on “How to choose the right marketing resource”.

12/11/2017 by Linsay Duncan

No one said it would be easy. There are tough decisions that very business owner faces in their first couple of years of building a business. You want to do everything, be seen everywhere, but know that the business doesn’t have the resource (time nor money) to do it all!

So, where should you be focusing your marketing efforts?

This is a topic we discuss often with clients and on our blog. Recently we were invited to contribute to James Caan’s ‘Your Business Magazine‘ which is designed to help entrepreneurs and growing UK businesses make more informed decisions in their early years.

For the Autumn edition, James has brought together experienced contributors to share their practical advice on how to structure a business plan, how to recruit the right people and tips on using social media to your advantage.

Your Allies (formerly Marke2ing) contributed to the feature focusing on how to grow your audience and spread your business concept like wild fire! Founder Linsay Duncan, shared insights into how much businesses should spend on their marketing activities, and on which channels investment should be made. This touches on blogging being both an essential tool for establishing authority in a marketplace and for driving quality traffic to your website. She also shared tips for intelligently using advertising and sponsorship to accelerate brand awareness. Read more of the ten tips here.

In a separate article, we share our experience of how to approach selecting the right marketing resource for your business. Whether choosing an agency, freelancer or full or part-time employee, we outline the key questions to ask. These will help you to establish not only the quality of the candidate in front of you, but also how well they will fit into your company culture. Here’s how to choose the right marketing resource.

Sources, stats & benchmarks for your 2018 B2B marketing strategies and tactics

11/19/2017 by Linsay Duncan

It’s that time of year again. Not only the busiest quarter for many B2B businesses, but one that’s also cut short by the festive period. On top of that, there’s 2018 marketing strategies and tactics to be built. If only we could buy ourselves a couple of extra weeks!

Aside from finding the time to do it, there are unique challenges that come with assessing the many pieces of information you need for your next marketing strategy. Objectives and financial targets; budgets, changes in business direction/markets/products; developments in your market (Brexit implications); evolving marketing technologies; marketing people and resource… the list goes on. A complex group of internal and external influencing factors to consider.

Your strategy must continue to support bottom-line growth and well as have buy-in from senior managers. Plus, you need to predict what will continue to be successful in the following year. But where do you start when time is not on your side?

Fast forward to the best bits (i.e. the latest B2B marketing insights)

To help short-cut some of that research and thinking time, we’ve brought together valuable, up-to-date B2B marketing research and resources that will help:

inform your 2018 B2B marketing strategies and tactics – your budget, channel mix and content strategy
demonstrate the proof behind your decision-making.

Whilst this blog post won’t offer up all the answers for your unique situation, it will give you a sound and credible base to work from.

What B2B marketing investment looks like now

According to Katapult, B2B marketing budgets are growing, now taking an 11.3% piece of the overall company budget and averaging at 7.5% of overall company revenue.

This aligns with advice from Forbes & entrepreneur that suggests that established business invest between 6-12% of their gross revenue in marketing. Higher levels of investment should be considered (up to 20%) if you’re in a younger business.

For more guidance on figuring out on the right budget for your business read “Just what should my B2B marketing budget be?”.

2017 best performing B2B marketing channels

As well as a bottom-down approach in calculating necessary investment levels, there’s thinking to be done on how to allocate that across your channel mix. Using past performance is a good place to start but what if your data is incomplete, unreliable or you’re planning a complete marketing pivot?

Whilst, marketing spend is increasing, what that budget is spent on is highly varied across the B2B space. Thankfully BizBible shines some light on this, revealing the best performing channels in 2017 across different B2B industries.

(Image source: BizBible’s best performing B2B marketing channels article)

No big surprises seeing content marketing & SEO and WoM/referrals up there. These must be high up on any B2B marketers list of marketing priorities for 2018. But you’ll know best how to apply your own experience here and weigh these benchmarks up against the results you’ve seen each channel deliver.

Can’t get away from ABM and Growth Marketing

Account Based Marketing has exploded this year, but has actually been around for yonks. Key account marketing being one of its previous guises. Essentially, this is focusing marketing efforts on specific “hot” accounts. Growth marketing has received a lot of airtime in 2017 too. This means not just focusing on filling the top of your lead funnel but on concerted efforts to nurture the rest, in a measured way.

If ABM will feature in your mix and you want to better track performance, BizBible’s download is full of practical pointers: How to Measure ABM.

And PropelGrowth is an excellent port of call if you need to remind yourself of conversion rates for B2B marketing leads as they move from marketing inquiry, to marketing qualified lead (MQL), to sales accepted lead (SAL), to sales qualified lead SQL), through to sale.

(Image source: PropelGrowth’s B2B lead conversion rate article)

Getting your content marketing mix right

We’re advocates of inbound marketing being the backbone of any robust B2B marketing strategy. What’s more, this is backed up by data from PropelGrowth (and a host of other sources) which shows that content marketing and SEO is by far the most effective channel for B2B lead conversions. This is especially true for tech and software businesses. It’s also highlighted in this research infographic neatly presented by Bubblegum Search.

Not content with your content mix? (What type is most effective?)

Once clear on the part inbound marketing strategy will play in your overall strategy, next is to decide how to do this effectively. With so many different content options where should you focus your efforts for maximum return?

(Image source: Marketing Prof’s Top Digital Channels for generating B2B leads article)

According to Marketing Professionals, white papers drive the most leads for B2B businesses (at 53%) these are closely followed by webinars (50%) and case studies (44%).

Similarly, SmartInsights reveals that research reports are the most effective content type for lead generation. Closely followed by video (at 44%) and social media content (42%).

(Image source: SmartInsight’s Which content type generates the most leads article)

That said content marketing isn’t a clean-cut marketing tactic with VenueHarbour reporting that 48% of businesses have long buying cycles. And so, it’s likely that your B2B customer’s journey is complex, involving many touchpoints and potentially involving more than one person in the decision-making process. We cannot stress enough therefore, how vital it is to prioritise lead nurturing and follow-up processes. The B2B marketer ready to serve up answers, in the right format, to buyer questions at each stage of the cycle is well ahead of the game.

Good news here! HubSpot offers up sane, backed-up steer on the types of content which are useful at different stages of the B2B buying cycle.

Calculating the effectiveness of your lead generation activities

Early on in strategy building you’ll be setting KPIs, measurements and targets. There are three ways B2B marketing directors typically approach this:

Using in-house benchmarks based on reliable results from previous marketing performance.
Where in-house intelligence is lacking, industry and/or B2B marketing benchmarks can be applied to estimate likely leads, sales, ROI etc (see resources section below).
If approach 1 or 2 throws up some gaps, or leaves you with uncertainty (if the figures don’t look right go with your gut-feel), combine the two approaches and make some sane thumb-in-the-air estimates. Having something to begin benchmarking performance against is better than having no checkpoint!

This calculator by PropelGrowth can help create your own benchmarks for the number of prospects needed in your sales and marketing funnels in order to achieve your company’s revenue targets. All based on current B2B marketing conversion stats.

STOP! Ironpaper points out some important considerations if you’re basing lead estimates purely on industry benchmarks. As this is not a fool proof approach, be aware of the risks and consider their sane advice.

Time running out or have you hit a brick wall?

If time is slipping through your fingers and an extra set of hands pulling your marketing strategy together would help – drop us a line. Or if you’ve hit a brick wall with your planning, or are tackling a B2B marketing strategy for the first time, we can help. Just a few hours of our time might be all you need to be 2018-ready.

And finally… a bunch more B2B marketing insights

Sources on 2017 B2B marketing channels

The Top Digital Channels for Generating B2B Leads – Mar17, MarketingProfs

B2B digital marketing: the statistics & benchmarks that will impact your strategy – Sep17, by Your Allies

B2B Marketing resources – updated regularly with all sorts of juicy B2B marketing insights, by B2BMarketing.net

Sources on pipeline marketing and ABM

The 2017 State of Pipeline Marketing Report – 2017 by BizBible

In here you’ll find insights on budgeting and planning, marketing data management, top revenue generating channels, performance measurement and sales and marketing alignment. Phew!

How to Measure ABM – by BizBible

The 2017 State of Pipeline Marketing Report – 2017, by BizBible

Sources for B2B conversion rates and lead calculations

B2B Lead Conversion Rates – by PropelGrowth

B2B marketing tools and resources (including B2B lead calculator) – by PropelGrowth

What is a Good Conversion Rate? A Guide for B2B Marketers – Apr17, by Ironpaper

NB We strongly recommend you read this if you’re building lead estimates from scratch, based on industry benchmarks. This article points out the flaws in this approach and offers up considered ways in which to tackle this.

Sources on B2B marketing budgeting and investment

Five wise ways to invest your B2B marketing budget – Mar17, by Your Allies

Sources on B2B content marketing & lead nurturing

Which content type generates the most leads? – Sep17, by SmartInsights

How to Create Content for Every Stage of the Buyer’s Journey – Aug16, by HubSpot

20 Lead Nurturing Statistics & Charts for 2017 – Sep17, by Venture Harbour