The New B2B Marketing Reality: More Touches Are Required To Close The Deal

What is the new B2B marketing reality? It’s the fact that in today’s busy world, rife with distractions and fierce competition for attention and dollars, it takes significantly more marketing touches to close a deal.

In 2015, BrightFunnel released a host of statistics that show marketing must work harder than ever and that its efforts span the entire buyer’s journey, from lead to sale.

• It takes 52% more marketing touches to close a deal.
• The total number of touches are evenly split between pre-sales (53%) and the sales cycle (47%).
• The average path to sale for “high growth” tech companies is 512 days from lead to revenue.

This new reality is putting more demands on marketing to measure, optimize and engage customers over longer periods of time, with the average nurture cycle at 12 months. Marketing must work to shorten this sales cycle and do a far better job of tracking, analyzing and forecasting marketing campaigns.

The old B2B marketing mix won’t get you there.

The days are gone when you could issue a press release on a quarterly basis, dabble in the standard social channels (Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), write a promotional blog post, buy some online and print ads, do a monthly webinar and rely on traditional marketing automation nurture cycles (three to 10 touches). These disparate actions simply will not work in today’s environment when it comes to catching the attention and sustaining the engagement of your target audience. This is one of the reasons why marketing tools and applications have seen exponential growth in the last five years.

Yesterday’s marketing tools just won’t work to give marketing the vision and attribution it needs for longer lead-to-revenue cycles. In fact, BrightFunnel reports that most marketers are blind when it comes to 80% of the funnel.

To make matters worse, there are more available products and services than any company needs or wants, putting these weary buyers squarely in the driver's seat. Marketing must work harder than ever before to get and then keep their attention.

There's a new and better way.

So, what if you’re a marketer who is still mixing old marketing tools and campaigns, but you know you must shift to a new way of thinking to survive? B2B marketers must get smarter, and fast, about how they see their funnels and how to effectively engage with them. The first step is to realize that their jobs have changed with longer lead-to-revenue cycles. Here are some practical steps that BrightFunnel recommends:

1. Use past campaign data to get an accurate view of campaign performance. 
2. Assess operational challenges, which includes all relevant leads and contacts, accurate campaign cost data, and what's considered a success.
3. Learn to forecast using a better understanding of marketing’s impact by working with revenue targets, the sales team and historical conversion data. 
4. Plan your content against longer sales cycles and map your content accordingly.
5. Develop and socially promote helpful, interesting and compelling content. Deliver appropriate content that will move prospects through the funnel.

While taking these steps, you can also reassess your tools and research the plethora of new, affordable tools that will help you significantly improve tracking, analyzing and forecasting your marketing campaigns.

Add the new marketing mix into the old.

There are many new ways to engage and compel prospects. One effective way is to add new programs, then test and retest your program mix to find the right combination, offering them at the appropriate times in the nurture cycle. Here’s a checklist of some effective programs to up your B2B marketing game:

1. Social media: Everyone is on social media. If you are not doing social for B2B marketing, add it now, even if you are targeting C-level executives in big enterprise. Figure out where they dwell in the social sphere and start a small program you can grow.
2. Influencer programs: We live in a world where third-party influence makes all the difference for buyers. This is a key place to invest.
3. Byline contributed articles: Publications are hungry for good thought leadership articles, which help spread your message.
4. Podcasts and video: These are easier than ever to produce, even if they have low-production value. They can be used for both social media and in nurture campaigns.
5. News (not press) releases: If you are a startup and can’t satisfy the criteria of a serious PR firm for news, consider putting out news releases online. They help SEO and fill in press release gaps.
6. Goodwill e-papers: Consider writing short e-papers that provide goodwill to prospects (e.g. “Buyer’s Guide to CRM”). They get something from you that is practical and you get their attention because you are not selling to them.
7. Visual content: Visualizing content is the high fructose corn syrup for prospects, and it gets them quickly. They get information they need without having to read a white paper or long-form content.
8. Intimate events: Don’t underestimate the power of low-cost, but intimate (four to 10) person events (baseball games, golf, or lunch at a nice restaurant) in a sales person’s region. Of course, these are good for later in the lead-to-revenue cycle, too.

The time is now to get on board with revamping how you manage your lead-to-revenue cycle. Remember, engaging prospects today is a longer and more difficult process. However, if you take advantage of the new tools at your disposal and add new programs to your marketing mix, you can get ahead of your old-school B2B marketing brethren.