Adetem b2 b marketing mix with siriusdecisions 2015 the pulse european demand generation

Notes de l'éditeur

1. Good morning and welcome. It’s a pleasure to be here My name is …. from SiriusDecisions, a global B2B focused research and advisory firm. At Sirius, it’s our mission to provide marketing, sales and product leaders the actionable intelligence they need to outperform. As part of that mission, we regularly develop and primary research that tracks the current state of play in key areas. Demand Generation is one of these areas and I am very excited to unveil today this first look at the state of Demand Generation in Europe today. Directrice de la Recherche en Creation de la Demande chez SiriusDecisions
2. Our business is focused on three primary offerings that enable high performance execution. As I stated our 3 core capabilities are the underpinnings of each offering. The SiriusDecisions solution starts with our primary offer, Advisory Services. Our Advisory Services are designed for the executive team and direct reports to help craft, define and support your strategy while leveraging our three core capabilities and access to our thought leaders. Once the organization has decided to standardize on these best practices, our learning practice is here to certify that your team has the skills and knowledge necessary to implement and execute on these best practices. And 3rd our consulting practice is complementary and supportive of our advisory business and learning offerings. Our research-informed consulting practice is focused on providing project-based engagements that support revenue-generating functions on their journey to operational alignment.
3. As I was planning this study, it struck me just how many marketing tactics marketers have to chose from today. When I first started out in Marketing many years ago, the only choices I had were my brochures, my website, emails, events, direct mail, and some directory listings and that was it. Today’s marketers have a much more complex task ahead of them. Not only do they need to be experts in all of these, they need to understand how to combine them to drive pipeline creation.
4. And that means marketers have to struggle with a couple of things Understanding buyer behavior and their preferences Understanding which tactics will work with which buyers at what points in the buying cycle Understanding who they can look to for help in executing those tactics and delivering pipeline What I will share with you today is a view of how European marketers are allocating their demand generation budgets Insight into which tactics markets rate as most effective and when An understand of how european organisations are supporting demand generation activities internally
5. But first, let me tell you about our study.
6. A lot has changes since the first time we ran this study – the economies of many European countries has improved Companies have started to focus on growth In both difficult and strong economic types, budget is the ultimate expression of strategy. And the percentage of the marketing budget dedicated to demand creation is a strong indicator of the contribution marketing makes to that strategy. When we examined the results we say that on average across Europe, the %age of budgets allocated to demand had dropped only 1.5% from 34.4% to 32.9% in the two years since our last study. Considering the changes that have occurred since the market started to move upwards in 2013, that is a very positive sign. When we looked at the break-down by country, we see however that the story is a little more varied but we are still near or above the 30% mark which is a good benchmark for investment. Looking at the breakdown by industry, we see the figure varies even more but possibly predictably with financial services and SaaS SW companies leading on this spend metric. The take-away here is that investment in marketing is strong and therefore focus on demand generation remains a priority.
7. For reference, when I refer to the buyers journey, I mean something like this from SiriusDecisions. Regardless of where you start, there are 3 phases Education, Solution and Selection. While this is drawn in a linear fashion, it Is worth knowing that a buyer’s journey is not sequential (Buyers can jump around) and episodic (Buyers can be informing two stages at once). Knowing this is key to understanding what tactics are best suited for each stage.
8. So let’s see how marketers are spending those budgets. We saw two really interesting findings That marketers are allocating their biggest spend amounts to creating content and offers to share within their social communities. By social communities we mean both own hosted and private communities as well as publically hosted communities on social media sites such as LinkedIn and Twitter. We saw that marketers are spending more marketing dollars with associations as a targeted and focused way to reach the individuals they want to speak to. These two findings support the shift I am seeing every day in the industry to move away from generic marketing messages to persona-focused marketing Other interesting items; On offers, we can see that marketers are gaining confidence in using digital media to provide buyers with quotes and offers as way both help prospects self-select and help entice prospects to learn more. We also see video moving up the ranks as a versatile content piece. It can be used in a variety of ways both long and short, in email, ads or video channels, as sales enablement tools or events. It can powerfully convey brand, message, intent. Youtube is prediciting that almost 70% of the world’s internet’s traffic will be video by 2018. On delivery mechanisms, we see direct mail and contact list rentals return. Direct mail is making a comeback in small volume, targeted ABM strategies. Contact lists are targeted list provided by or augmented by 3rd party providers using publically available information that can be mined from websites, financial reports, new articles, etc.
9. Next we wanted to understand how things had changed over time. Social communities remains at the top but Price quotes and incentives has replaced newsletters on the number 2 spot. Price quotes and incentives can help people progress down the buying journey quickly and their rise in popularity is likely linked to the work many marketers have been doing to map their content to the buyers journey. Also we see Trials move off the list and be replaced instead by demos. There has been a lot of talk around the value of a free trial to attract and capture prospects. Unfortunately, the freemium strategy is not something that can be executed by one group on it’s own. It requires close and on-going collaboration between product, marketing, sales and operations teams to execute and this is often lacking. In companies where that level of collaboration is not possible or desireable, then demos are a good alternative to provide a customer proxy experience. If you can drive that close collaboration, trials can be very powerful.
10. Let’s start by comparing spend to effectiveness We see that while marketers are spending money developing price quotes and incentives, they aren’t yet reporting it as an effective technique. They are in fact in the top 10 which is ok but not great. In speaking with clients, we feel that this is still new territory for many B2B organizations and they are still experimenting with the best way to develop and use these as a tool to progress the buyers journey. Similarly, with video, marketers are still testing the best format for messaging in video and how best to deliver it to the buyer at the right time in the process. We would consider both of these as investments for the future. Newsletters on the other hand is a tried and true method but producing newsletters is becoming more and more cost effective and the advent of persona based marketing is making this relative low cost and versatile tactic more productive year over year. On the other hand, with whitepapers, these can still be costly to create but our buyer insights study has identified how important analyst and seller subject matter expert opinions are to a buyer and whitepapers are the perfect vehicle for this type of information.
11. Now if we go one level deeper, we can see where these tactics are at their strongest in the buying cycle. Social communities are seen as most effective in 3 of the four stages, all but the Solution stage where the information needed to truly understand the different solution categories requires more in depth information than is typically provided via social forums. Social forums work well for awareness, education and advocacy / client testimonials. Newsletters are seen as strong attraction and educational materials but Demos are seen as stronger Solution and Selection decisions tools Demos and virtual tours are seen as better at attracting prospects than the more detailled whitepapers but once engaged, white papers become a valuable way to get across more in depth information.
12. If we look at how things have changed over the past two years, we see Social Communities are the biggest winners Demos have gone up in the later stages of the buyers journey Virtual tours have gone up as a cheaper alternative, along side demos, to a trial as an education and facilitation aid.
13. And before we move off content, we took a moment to ask about content localization. We saw that not only are marketers getting more savvy with their content but they are also investing the time / money required to localize it for their markets.
14. So let’s see how marketers are spending those budgets. We saw two really interesting findings That marketers are allocating their biggest spend amounts to creating content and offers to share within their social communities. By social communities we mean both own hosted and private communities as well as publically hosted communities on social media sites such as LinkedIn and Twitter. We saw that marketers are spending more marketing dollars with associations as a targeted and focused way to reach the individuals they want to speak to. These two findings support the shift I am seeing every day in the industry to move away from generic marketing messages to persona-focused marketing Other interesting items; On offers, we can see that marketers are gaining confidence in using digital media to provide buyers with quotes and offers as way both help prospects self-select and help entice prospects to learn more. We also see video moving up the ranks as a versatile content piece. It can be used in a variety of ways both long and short, in email, ads or video channels, as sales enablement tools or events. It can powerfully convey brand, message, intent. Youtube is prediciting that almost 70% of the world’s internet’s traffic will be video by 2018. On delivery mechanisms, we see direct mail and contact list rentals return. Direct mail is making a comeback in small volume, targeted ABM strategies. Contact lists are targeted list provided by or augmented by 3rd party providers using publically available information that can be mined from websites, financial reports, new articles, etc.
15. Looking at the changes in the delivery mechanisms over the last two years, we see an intersting change in the first spot. We’ve moved away from a broadcast banner ad to a more targeted audience play, signaling that marketers are getting smarter and narrowing where they spend their money in order to make a bigger impact. We also see events have lost some popularity. While events of all types will always be a part of a marketers tool kit, marketers are trying to take advantage of targeted association events rather than running the wide-net prospect roadshows they were doing a couple of years ago.
16. Moving on to Delivery Mechanisms, we see here that spend and effectiveness are more evenly matched. The outlier is in the fifth place spot where we find spend on live tradeshow events which are very costly but the cheaper content syndication is seen as more effective. As is the case for many organizations, live tradeshows are non-negotiable for many sales leaders and they insist on attending to be seen. In that case, many markters chose to use the events to leverage as many other tactics on top as possible to make the pre/during/post event more worthwhile.
17. As we look one level deeper, we see that Association Marketing is seen as the most effective way to find new prospects at the top of the funnel. And email is seen as the most effective way to nurture and progress those prospects through the buyers journey. Targeted contact acquisition, while not as good as association marketing is still high on the list to help both support both broadbase marketing and targeted ABM account strategies. Direct mail, specifically in an ABM context, is seen as an effective tool at the earlier stages of the waterfall Persona specific content sydication programs is seen as an effective way to attract informed prospects.
18. Comparing 2013 to 2015, we see some failrly major changes to the top 5 effectiveness ratings. Email is still high but Association marketing is the biggest mover up across all stages completely replacing live seminars / roadshows. Contact acquisition has replace display advertising and live tradeshows as the most effective way to drive traffic at the beginning of the funnel Direct mail has moved up a couple of places and Content syndication has replaced user groups as a better way of driving prospects at the top of the funnel.