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
B2B marketing leaders need to drive demand in creative new ways.
The problem? It can be tough to get creative in a climate of high pressure and low resources. Successful marketers know that tough economic conditions are a cue to double down on proven tactics—like ABM—while also taking smart risks. Read on for the 5 key reasons top performing companies are prioritizing ABM right now, and get a sneak peek of Inverta’s new ABM Starter Pack, which makes it easier than ever to build, launch, optimize, and scale a pilot ABM pilot program.
- ABM provides focus to your sales and marketing teams, so they stop spinning their wheels and start collaborating more effectively to drive demand. By aligning your efforts around a set of target accounts, you can ensure that your teams are working together towards a common goal. This laser focus helps to eliminate the inefficiencies that often arise when sales and marketing are working in silos. What’s more, this collaboration leads to better alignment on messaging and more targeted outreach, which in turn delivers a more cohesive buyer experience. By providing focus and alignment, ABM can help your teams work smarter, not harder, to achieve your revenue goals.
- ABM is an efficient use of budget because you’re only spending money to engage accounts that are your ideal fit. Unlike traditional marketing approaches that cast a wide net and hope to catch some leads, ABM is highly targeted—akin to spear fishing. In fact, in a study by ITSMA, 87% of marketers who measured ROI said that ABM outperformed other marketing investments. By identifying and prioritizing these accounts, you can be sure that you are spending your marketing budget in the most effective way possible. Rather than wasting resources on leads that may never convert, you can concentrate your efforts on engaging the accounts that are most likely to become customers. This targeted approach not only saves money, but it also generates higher quality leads and ultimately, higher returns on your investment.
- ABM increases the value of pipeline opportunities. By focusing on high-potential accounts and delivering personalized content and outreach, ABM can build stronger relationships with prospects which not only increases the likelihood of conversion, but can also boost contract values. According to a study by Alterra Group, companies that implemented ABM saw a 171% increase in their average annual contract value. How? ABM allows marketers (and Sales, too!) to tailor their messaging and approach to the specific needs and pain points of each account, which can lead to a more engaged and receptive audience. In addition, ABM enables companies to target decision-makers directly, expanding the scope of the buying conversation to address organization-wide needs.
- When implemented correctly, ABM is low risk and high impact. One of the most appealing aspects is its low risk, high reward nature. Inverta has helped hundreds of companies, both enterprise and high growth, implement and scale ABM successfully. And with our new ABM Starter Pack, we not only help clients identify high-potential accounts and personalize outreach, but we also set you up with proven ABM platforms to ensure your team is equipped with the necessary tools for success. With the ABM Starter Pack, you can achieve more predictable and consistent revenue growth within six months, without the risk and uncertainty of other traditional marketing tactics.
- It’s easy to prove the ROI of ABM by identifying your key metrics at every account stage. Unlike some other tactics, ABM provides a clear and measurable impact at every step of the sales and marketing process, across three types of KPIs: revenue, relationships, and reputation. This level of visibility allows you to optimize your program and adjust your approach to best serve your target accounts. It also equips you to socialize early engagement metrics with your executives and stakeholders, to demonstrate marketing’s impact long before a new pipeline opportunity is created.
To put it simply, marketers are doubling down on ABM because it works.
How it works is an entirely separate conversation—but we’d be remiss not to mention one critical, but often overlooked aspect of running a successful ABM program. And that’s the marketing technology that makes it all happen behind the scenes, such as:
- identifying priority accounts based on intent signals
- personalizing content and creating custom content experiences
- delivering real-time intelligence to optimize your program design
- coordinating messages and content across channels and stages of the buyer’s journey
Whether you purchase new ABM technology to achieve your goals or work to integrate your existing tools to support your program design will depend on what you currently own and what you’re trying to achieve.. Remember, the end goal is to work smarter, not harder, to drive pipeline., So think through your marketing technology needs and strategy before you launch your program.
If you need support in your account-based marketing strategy, technology, or execution, the ABM Starter Pack can get you up and running quickly, while equipping you with a scalable foundation for growth. If you start now, you can launch an ABM pilot with early results in Q4. Learn more about the ABM Starter Pack today!
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.
Unfortunately, many CMOs are finding themselves on the frontlines of the much-discussed (and uneasily anticipated) economic headwinds of this year. Between employee layoffs and budget cuts in the face of increasing revenue targets, a perfect storm has landed right on the CMO’s doorstep.
If you’re a CMO, the question now remains: What marketing strategies will pave the way for success now and in the future?
To make your existing resources go further, find new growth opportunities amid shifting consumer expectations, and hit revenue targets, something needs to change. In this blog, we’ll break down the challenges CMOs are facing, what top CMOs are doing differently, and how you can think about growth in 2023’s unique market.
Challenges CMOs Are Facing in 2023
While budget inevitably does play a factor in marketing outcomes, strategic planning and execution become even more important during times of uncertainty. Indeed, the problem for many CMOs lies in their organizational processes, core skills, and implementation rather than their wallets.
Underused Tech
What good is adding a new martech tool to your belt if you don’t even use your old tools to their full capacity? (Asking for a friend…well, asking for a lot of friends, actually.) Accordingly to Gartner, marketers used just 42% of their martech stack overall in 2022—a decrease from 58% in 2020.
As more and more tools are emerging, it’s important to remember that your biggest source of untapped potential might be sitting right there in your URL bar. If you’re unsure where to start to get more bang for your buck, try auditing your existing tech stack.
Underdeveloped Skills & Support
There’s a simple reason a greater portion of marketers might be underutilizing their tech stack: they don’t know how. A majority of martech leaders (64%) agree that their teams lack both the technical skills or support required to operate and increase the usage of their martech stack. Plus, as more marketing organizations are taking on the ownership of their tools, this presents a real challenge for internal teams.
Couple this with the talent acquisition and retention issues of late (28% of martech leaders have difficulty identifying and recruiting martech talent), and CMOs have a real problem on their hands.
Where’s the ROI?
Finally, a pervasive problem facing CMOs this year is proving the ROI of their tools and processes. Gartner estimates that, despite marketing budgets allocating 31% of resources to marketing operations (MarOps), 72% of MarOps pursuits aren’t resulting in success.
If CMOs are going to be serious about growth during an era of budget squeeze, ironing out the challenges of ROI for the martech stack AND operations is key for success.
The Solution: A Shifting CMO Role, New Focus, & Smart Growth
If anything, 2023 has demonstrated just how far the CMO role has changed in the last few years. Whereas success used to be more nebulous and targeted to a few small marketing areas of focus, today’s success is much more narrowly defined.
Jim D’Arcangleo, Chief Marketing & Growth Officer of AWeber, says the CMO role of today encompasses much more, including:
- Utilizing dozens of channel options with dozens of media players
- Owning GTM plans from end to end, including client engagement and upsell campaigns
- Purchasing the right tech to enable the strategy
- Ensuring the efficiency and effectiveness of all marketing activity with the data to prove it.
Where CMOs Should Focus Now
So, with all the changes, where is the best place to focus? Bryan Law, CMO at ZoomInfo, believes that it’s in creating a shift in focus from driving volume to driving value instead. That means aligning with sales across metrics, target accounts, campaigns, and outreach.
How can CMOs do this?
- Be consistent and distinctive in your marketing approach to capture mindshare.
- Invest and leverage the right technologies that enable alignment and eliminate silos.
Short-Term Wins, Long-Term Focus
Ultimately, Lisa Ames, CMO at Norwest Venture Partners, gives a word of caution to CMOs making adjustments in 2023 to not get near-sighted. While a focus on ROI-driven performance with short-term demand gen is important, it should be balanced with a long-game effort to improve brand building and market trust.
Between inflation and a recession, customers will be holding on to their wallets a bit more tightly, and brands who can build long-term value during this time of uncertainty will come out better for it in the end.
Final Takeaways: How Inverta Helps CMOs
At the end of the day, CMOs can jumpstart growth in 2023 if they make a few key adjustments to their strategy and teams today. That might look like jumpstarting your existing team by investing in skill development so your martech has additional use cases, doubling down on proving ROI in the areas where you know it works, or bringing on a marketing consultancy to fill in the gaps.
At Inverta, our team of seasoned marketers can help with everything from martech evaluation and implementation to resource augmentation.
Learn More About Inverta
