In today’s fast-paced business environment, the role of marketing has evolved significantly. Gone are the days when marketing teams were solely responsible for generating leads and passing them onto the sales department. With advancements in technology and access to information, the vast majority of buyers have already made their purchasing decisions before they even engage with a sales representative. Recent research from 6sense reveals that a staggering 84% of buyers have made up their minds by the time they talk to sales. This paradigm shift places a significant responsibility on marketing leaders to seize the opportunity and ensure victory in closing deals.
Understanding the Account Buyer’s Journey
To fully grasp the power behind this statistic, it is crucial to understand the modern account buyer’s journey. In the past, buyers heavily relied on salespeople to provide information and guide them through the decision-making process. However, now buyers have access to an abundance of information online, empowering them to research extensively before ever engaging with a salesperson. Marketing leaders must recognize this shift and adapt their strategies accordingly.
Leveraging Digital Marketing Channels
In this digital age, marketers possess an array of channels through which they can reach potential buyers. By harnessing the power of content creation, social media, and email marketing, marketing leaders can capitalize on this critical stage of the account buyer’s journey. Therefore, by crafting highly relevant and valuable content that addresses the pain points and challenges faced by potential buyers, marketers can establish themselves as trusted advisors and thought leaders in the industry.
Creating Engaging Content
Additionally, one of the foundational pillars of successful marketing is the ability to create engaging content. It is essential to employ creative and unique approaches that captivate the attention of your target audience. From compelling blog articles, informative videos, interactive webinars, to visually appealing infographics – there are countless ways to deliver valuable insights that resonate with your audience. After all, a diverse content strategy ensures that your message reaches potential buyers through multiple touchpoints, which can increase the likelihood that they will make their decision in your favor.
Building Trust and Credibility
As buyers navigate the decision-making process independently, trust and credibility play a pivotal role in winning their business. Marketing leaders must establish their brand as a reliable source of information and solutions. Testimonials, case studies, and reviews from satisfied customers can greatly enhance your credibility and instill confidence in potential buyers. Leveraging social proof through testimonials and showcasing industry awards or certifications can help solidify your position as a trusted partner for their needs.
Nurturing Relationships
While buyers may have already made up their minds, it is crucial to remember that the account buyer’s journey continues even after the initial purchase decision. Marketing leaders should focus on nurturing relationships with existing customers to encourage long-term loyalty and customer advocacy. By proactively engaging with clients through personalized emails, surveys, and exceptional customer service, marketers can secure repeat business and positive referrals.
Victory in Closing Deals
To summarize, in today’s digital landscape, marketing leaders must adapt to the changing dynamics of the account buyer’s journey. With the vast majority of buyers having made their decisions before speaking with sales, it is clear that marketing holds the key to success. By leveraging engaging content, building trust, and nurturing customer relationships, marketing leaders position themselves for victory in closing deals.
Learn More About Inverta
- Interested in how Inverta can help you with the account buyer’s journey? Contact us here.
- Peruse through our webpage specific to the account buyer’s journey that contains assets and resources.
The pressure to prove your marketing efforts are driving value is on. With 41% of marketers feeling the squeeze to demonstrate value, having an ace in your marketing strategy’s back pocket is less a stroke of luck than a requirement to play the game.
Leveraging intent data can be your ace. Not only do marketers who wield intent data say they’re more confident in proving the value of data-driven marketing programs (61% vs. 37%), they’re also more confident in delivering value with lead quality, refining their target audience, and content/campaign effectiveness.
Despite the benefits, only 38% of marketers report using intent data. Clearly, intent data is a treasure trove of information just waiting to be plundered. As more sophisticated AI and machine learning (ML) technology becomes commonplace, intent data is only becoming more accurate and timely.
Let’s examine what it is, why it matters, how to apply it, and how a data-savvy partner can help you increase your confidence and your results by applying intent data.
What Intent Data Shows & Why it Matters
Intent data gives insights into customer behavior, preferences, and purchase intentions. It’s like a story drawn out from the amalgamation of a user’s online activity in order to predict what they’ll do next. And that’s not all.
Quality intent data gives insights into a prospect’s research history, including specific competitors or products, and informs messaging strategies and marketing tactics to stay ahead of the competition. It also serves to define roles across marketing and sales functions, keeping both teams in sync when it comes to delivering the right message to the right audience at the right time.
Awesome, right? But with so many other types of data out there, why does applying intent data matter so much?
While it’s true that marketers who use data at all report a 3x increase in revenues and 78% increase in budgets, marketers using intent data see even better results.
Intent data is highly impactful if you want to drive more pipeline with more high quality leads:
- 97% of marketers said intent data drives more pipeline than non-intent data leads.
- 94% of marketers said intent data leads are high quality.
- 35% of marketers who experienced significant revenue growth in the last year said intent data had the biggest impact on driving leads.
Using intent data is an untapped opportunity that more and more marketers are planning to invest in — 63% to be exact. To stay ahead of the competition and compete in today’s economic climate, using intent data is table stakes.
Apply Intent Data to These 4 Areas to Unlock Growth
This begs the question, “how and where can I use intent data effectively?”
We’re so glad you asked. Intent data provides an opportunity for sales and marketing teams to go beyond account identification and prioritization. The difference is using intent data to identify and align your buyer’s needs with customized and contextual messaging when they’re ready for it.
Here are four different use cases to consider for your intent data:
- Demand Generation Campaigns: Intent data can be used to create personalized and targeted campaigns along the buyer journey.
- Lead Generation: Intent data can improve lead generation and customer acquisition efforts by accurately identifying potential customers who are actively searching and tailoring messaging to resonate with their specific needs.
- Retention and Upselling: Intent data can be used to monitor signals indicating a customer’s likelihood to churn or add more products or services. This enhances customer retention and upselling, making it easier for marketers to strengthen customer loyalty and increase revenue passively.
- Content: Intent data is a gold mine for fueling content marketing strategies. Creating compelling content that speaks to your customer’s pain points increases visibility, improves trust, and attracts the right type of buyer in the first place.
How Inverta Can Help You Apply Intent Data ASAP
When it comes to choosing a data partner, marketers care twice as much about finding a partner who can deliver across a breadth of topics rather than delivering results in one area alone. Inverta is a well-rounded martech agency with the capabilities to help you find intent data as well as put it to use.
Learn More About Inverta
- If you’re ready to invest in a player, coach, and trusted advisor who can move the needle for your demand generation campaigns, contact us here.
- Get more insight to intent data! Click here to access a unique asset experience that is a compilation of thought-leadership tactics, helpful tools, and useful reference guides
If your marketing activities these days feel more like a giant game of whack-a-mole than a series of intentional strategic moves, you’re not alone. In an economic climate that’s so up in the air, it’s common for marketers to shift their focus to projects that need more attention in the moment over long-term strategic planning for the future.
After all, without quick wins to remind leaders of their importance, marketing budgets can easily find themselves on the cutting board. Gaining and maintaining stakeholder support is a concern for 16% of marketers in 2023, demonstrating just how important it is for marketing to prove its worth in the midst of uncertain times.
However, the frenetic focus on day-to-day activities leaves little room to think about long-term strategy. Without a way to implement smart and efficient campaign planning, building for the future can seem impossible without additional headcount.
Let’s break down the most common challenges facing marketing campaigns today, as well as Inverta’s new Campaign in a Box solution that can launch demand generation campaigns in as quickly as eight weeks.
Challenges Facing Marketers in 2023
Marketers have their work cut out for them in 2023. With increasingly limited budgets, leaders are being forced to get creative and do more with less. Indeed, 17% of marketers anticipate pivoting on strategy as their biggest challenge this year. Making changes at the drop of a hat and doing them well is especially difficult when it comes to driving traffic and putting data to good use.
Driving Traffic, Pipeline, & ROI Is Becoming More Complex
- A 2022 CMO survey found 80% of marketers see generating predictable pipelines as their top challenge in 2023.
- 19% of marketers say generating traffic and leads are the biggest challenge of 2023.
- 20% of senior marketers say proving ROI on marketing expenses is one of their top challenges.
Siloed Data & Processes Are Limiting Productivity in 2023
- 17% of senior marketers say they need more actionable insights from their data.
- Focusing on retention in addition to upselling and expansion is becoming more important.
- Too many tech stacks are built in silos, and focusing on meeting business needs rather than features will be the key to success this year.
The challenges facing marketers this year are many and varied. In order to succeed now and in the future, finding a way to address these challenges in a cost-effective and timely manner is essential.
How Inverta’s Campaign in a Box Can Help
Inverta’s team of marketing consultants have been in your shoes. We know what challenges are headed your way in 2023, and that’s why we asked ourselves, what if our clients had a turnkey solution at their disposal for their next demand generation campaign?
That would be a pretty useful tactic to have in their toolkit.
The result? Inverta’s Campaign in a Box. It’s exactly what it sounds like: a tailored and customized campaign designed to boost your pipeline without exhausting your internal resources.
What does it include? We’re so glad you asked.
- Program Design: Account selection, personalized messaging, customized channels, and tactics
- Technology Augmentation: Buyer intent surge data, keyword optimization, targeted display advertising, and more
- Program Setup and Launch: Full-service execution of the program design
- Monitoring and Optimization: Weekly assessment of campaign performance and engagement data
- Performance Reporting: Visibility into engagement data and content intelligence, rolled up to socialize with stakeholders
Campaign in a Box can help if:
- You need to generate revenue, quickly
- Your campaigns aren’t benefiting from technology
- You don’t have the data you need to optimize your demand strategy
- You’re under pressure to demonstrate ROI
- You need to stretch your budget
- Your teams are feeling overwhelmed
- You need a new way to inject life into your pipeline
In short, if you’re feeling the heat of increasing your pipeline without the budget to up your resources, Campaign in a Box is a great solution to work smarter when it comes to campaign planning.
Launch a Demand Gen Campaign in Just 8 Weeks With Inverta
The best part about Campaign in a Box? It’s fast. In just eight weeks, we’ll have your campaign ready to launch. By six months, you’ll start seeing tangible results reflected in your pipeline.
Learn More About Inverta
- If you’re ready to invest in a player, coach, and trusted advisor who can move the needle for your demand generation campaigns, Inverta’s new Campaign in a Box offering can deliver. Contact us here.
- Learn more about our new campaign in a box solution – click here to access.
When times are tough, costs must be cut and spending must be justified. Yet, outcomes must continue, business as usual. This conundrum puts CMOs between a rock and a hard place. How do you deliver results with a tighter budget? More importantly, how can you tie those results to your budget effectively?
The majority of CMOs are turning to a little metric called return on investment (ROI). As macroeconomic uncertainty results in tighter budgets, marketing spend is under more scrutiny than usual. Every dollar spent needs to be correlated with a healthy return, and fast — 77% of CMOs say they’re under pressure to prove increased short-term ROI on marketing campaigns.
In this blog, we’ll break down why ROI matters right now, what a focus on ROI changes about marketing activity, and how to start delivering ROI despite the current economic climate.
CMOs Must Track & Prove ROI Faster Than Ever
In the face of a looming recession following several years of pandemic-related upheaval, a laser focus on ROI is a pretty natural response for company leadership. After all, when so much is uncertain, doubling down on the things that are working is a no-brainer.
This certainly seems to be the case. Nearly 37% of marketers report that tracking ROI is becoming increasingly front-and-center, especially for larger organizations. Indeed, ROI has risen to the top of company leaders’ priority list.
Marketers report the top metrics for their CEO, CFO, and board members are:
- ROI: 48.4%
- Delivering business outcomes: 39.9%
- New customer acquisition: 35.8%
Couple this with shifting customer behavior due to inflation, and it’s never been trickier for CMOs to deliver on leaderships’ expectations. As recent Gartner research has identified, the burden to deliver ROI falls heavily on the CMO’s shoulders.
“In order to meet the enterprise mandate of driving growth amid continued disruption, CMOs must act decisively to prioritize their investments and their strategy for the year ahead [2023],” said Ewan McIntyre, Gartner Marketing’s Chief of Research.
The Impact of an ROI Focus on Marketing Objectives & Outcomes
Prioritizing ROI impacts CMOs’ decisions around marketing activity and outcomes in a variety of ways. Beyond the pressure to deliver ROI in the short term, the current environment has led marketing leaders to worry about their strategy as a whole. 31% of marketing leaders are concerned they’ll have to curb creative campaigns, with an additional 30% worrying they’ll have to operate more reactively instead of proactively.
This new focus on tying marketing activity to clear-cut returns can be new territory for many marketing activities, presenting challenges for marketers and CMOs alike. For example, when analyzing marketing campaign effectiveness, only 28.4% of marketers report measuring ROI to do so. In fact, 45.7% of marketers say their brand is “too focused” on ROI.
Clearly, there is a large disconnect between the metrics the CEO and CFO want to see and what marketers believe is important. In bridging that gap, CMOs have their jobs cut out for them.
In today’s climate, an ROI focus means CMOs have to more or less accomplish all of the following:
- Work smarter with a tighter budget in order to deliver the same outcomes as before.
- Help the CEO and CFO understand what ROI means for marketing, and help marketers understand what ROI means according to the CEO and CFO.
- Ensure a focus on ROI doesn’t distract from impactful marketing activities where ROI is difficult to measure, in both the short and long term.
In short, doing all this with fewer resources is a tall order for CMOs and the organizations they lead.
How To Retain Budget, Maximize Marketing Activity, & Prove ROI
One of the most important things CMOs can do to successfully lead their marketing organizations through uncertain times is learning how to strengthen value calculations that prove marketing’s importance. Although it may seem counterintuitive, this often means moving beyond ROI as an end-all metric and making the case to evaluate budgets on various other inputs instead.
For example, the ROI of your marketing tech stack can be difficult to tie directly to pipeline numbers, yet it’s essential to marketing activities that do influence revenue. Likewise, long-term strategies may not have an immediate ROI, but they do pay off with time. Striking the right balance between what’s essential for both now and later can be difficult on your own.
Learn More About Inverta
Inverta acts as a player, coach, and trusted advisor when it comes to helping CMOs measure and deliver ROI. Our new campaign-in-a-box solution can build short-term wins while we set up your organization for future success.
- Interested in how Inverta can help coach you through a campaign planning strategy? Contact us here.
- Learn more about our new campaign in a box solution – click here to access.
Check out Conquering Barriers to Activation: The Strategic Chief Marketing Technologist
Just like there’s no “I” in team, there’s no “I” in ABM. No one individual can do it alone. And, just like with any sports team, it takes a combination of vision, leadership, and a team mentality to beat the competition and find success.
Unfortunately, many marketing teams approach ABM as separate components working toward separate ends rather than as a unified team where each person plays a part in achieving the same goal. Indeed, despite 52% of marketers spending 6-15% of their budgets on ABM, 26% of ABM programs don’t follow basic ABM best practices. In an increasingly budget-tight climate, low-performing ABM programs are at risk of getting cut.
Input and planning need to be a concerted team effort between everyone involved in an ABM program: one complete with the right leadership, essential frameworks, thoughtful strategy, and the right skills to make it happen. So, what makes up a winning team, and how does that apply to ABM? Let’s break it down.
What Makes a Winning Team?
In sports, a successful team requires both players and a coach. However, not just any coach or players will do. More specifically, a winning team needs a coach and players who understand their intended roles and how they come together to achieve their goals.
Winning coaches are responsible for:
- Setting the goals. A good coach creates the vision and plans for how the team will accomplish what it sets out to do — win the championship.
- Inspiring the team, getting them excited, and helping all players believe in themselves.
- Building and teaching a playbook that demonstrates how and why all the players must work together to accomplish their goals.
In short, the coach ensures their team knows that no one individual star can achieve their goal alone. It takes a team effort, and the coach’s role is to rally and lead the team together toward their common cause.
Likewise, winning players are responsible for:
- Committing to the goal and believing in the plan.
- Showing up every day ready to put the work in.
- Living with a team mentality — no one likes a ball hog.
- Playing to their strengths.
- Excelling at communication, both on and off the field.
While all great teams have excellent coaches and players, teams that excel and end up winning the championship tend to have one ingredient that stands out above all others: culture. Only the select few teams who truly get along, inspire one another, lift each other up, and have fun along the way will make it to the end.
Applying Leadership, Teamwork, & Heart to Your ABM Program
As with sports, applying a team mentality can make a world of difference for your ABM program. Everyone has a role to play. Thinking of your ABM efforts as a championship game can clarify each person’s role and motivate your team to achieve more together than they could alone.
With ABM, you need leaders who are responsible for:
- Setting the goals and vision for ABM. Your ABM leaders need to communicate where they feel ABM will have the most significant impact on the business, their expectations, and what they hope to achieve with the ABM program.
- Bringing the team together and getting them excited about the ABM program. Leaders should show their team that the business is invested in this program and believes it can have a substantial impact on growth goals.
- Building an ABM charter that clearly outlines each person’s role, how they should work together, and when they should leverage the tools in their toolbox.
There’s not a single star player that can get a team to win a championship. The AE or Sales rep alone can not get ABM to work, nor can one individual “ABM marketer.” Each person on the ABM team is essential.
With ABM, you need skilled marketers and team members who:
- Believe in the vision and are committed to doing their part to achieve the goals that the leaders have outlined.
- Own each of their individual pieces of the overall playbook and work to collaborate. No one individual or department should try to take it from start to finish.
- Develop a RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted, informed) chart and follow it.
- Excel at cross-department communication.
So, what sets the greatest championship teams apart from all of their opponents? The secret ingredient of culture. The same holds true in the corporate world when it comes to ABM.
What do we mean by that? Getting your target accounts to engage, take meetings, and lean into your ideas is a payoff that rallies the team around the ABM approach. It’s that feeling of scoring the game-winning goal — it’s motivating, thrilling and exciting!
The Magic of Making ABM Win
A team-minded ABM strategy is an investment in your team’s full potential; 76% of marketers saw higher ROI with ABM than any other strategy. Indeed, the greatest ABM programs become highly successful when everyone across marketing, sales, and customer success is aligned, has bought in, is communicating, and is having fun — just like with any successful sports team.
Keeping competitors at bay and winning over your competitors happens when ABM programs go from disparate efforts to a united front. If you’re ready to take your ABM team to the next level, Inverta can act as the coach or a key player to help you win.
Learn More About Inverta
- Interested in how Inverta can help coach you through an ABM strategy? Contact us here.
- Peruse through our ABM-specific content including our latest eBook on ABM Readiness.
