According to LinkedIn report on ‘Rethinking the B2B Buyer’s Journey’, B2B marketing teams waste 20% of their budgets on bad choices in strategies and tactics. The issue is not about marketing money being wasted, but understanding the leakage points.
Some of the common leakage areas that can be resolved include:
Content for the Sake of Content
Inbound and content marketing exploded on the B2B marketing scene for, almost a decade ago. It is no surprise that B2B marketers have adopted strategies that promise leads in exchange for focusing on publishing content across paid and owned channels.
Content cannot deliver ROI unless there is a real strategy behind it. This means precisely knowing the target audience and creating content that addresses its needs and pain points. Though this sounds great in theory, it proves complicated in practice. Today, so many marketing teams publish content for the sake of ‘publishing content and the content surplus it has generated has cut on the opportunities and the marketing budgets start getting wasted.
Experts believe that investing in purchase intent data can help sharpen the content marketing strategy. Rather than basing decisions on high-level buyer personas, marketers can gain real insight into the targeted buyers. The more specific one can make the content strategy, the easier it is to eliminate waste in this area of the marketing budget.
Casting a Wide Net in Digital Advertising
Traditional high-volume lead generation strategies cannot be applied to digital ad placements. While casting a wide net of digital ads might seem easy to get the messages out there, it ends up gaining impressions from people who never think of buying a product from the business. By leveraging intent data, marketers can narrow the focus, maximize the effectiveness, and eliminate waste.
The right intent data enables to improve Ad Context, go beyond keyword research and provide details of what exactly the target prospects are searching. This helps in getting settings that are more granular in campaigns and improve placements. Intent data also paves the way to target the right accounts at the right time to eliminate digital ad waste.
Focusing on lead quantity and not account the quality
Lack of alignment with marketing budgets is a critical challenge, which often becomes an area of waste. Traditional lead-centric marketing results in wasted budgets as B2B buyers now have more control. With the choices available, it is crucial to take higher account-centric approaches to drive more deals.
There is a need to bridge the gap between lead generation and ABM. This requires using lead gen strategies to engage particular contacts within the buying teams of the target accounts. Intent data insights provide a clear picture of the total active demand and granular information for every account within a target buying team.
This leads to more personalized lead generation tactics that are better aligned with sales teams focused on closing deals and building relationships.
