Chapter 2
What's damaging your lead generation efforts?
The rising competition between businesses and the changing media landscape means traditional marketing methods that companies have long relied on are not nearly as effective.
In a data-driven market, traditional content assets fail to fulfill the needs of both buyers and businesses.
With that in mind, it’s safe to state that understanding the needs of your buyer must have the highest priority in order to maximize your ROI on lead generation.
You depend on data to continually optimize your lead generation efforts.
The inability to qualify leads based on their engagement after downloading your content leaves you blind and spending money in the wrong places.
Imagine separating hot leads from cold ones based on engagement inside your gated white papers and eBooks, and automatically sending the highly engaged ones directly to your sales team.
In order to analyze what’s damaging your lead generation efforts, you should also understand the needs from the company and marketer’s perspective.
In the matrix below we have highlighted the current trends in the ever-changing B2B landscape.
Buyers
Higher expectations, personalization
Lack of trust, skeptical by default, show vs. tell
Purchase based on experiences, rather than product/price
Mobile-first, micro-moments, on-the-go, multi-channel, content
on-demand
Digestable, visual, media-rich
Content overwhelm, low attention spans and less time
Access to info, prefer self-diagnosis
and third party research prior
to sales
Business
Digital transformation and CX
Shift from business-centric
to customer-centric
More members of the buying committee
Longer sales cycles due to accountability and budgets
Misalignment b/w marketing
and sales
Marketing bottlenecks: strategists, creatives and developers
Big Data, little insight: analysis paralysis and lack of actionable
data
Marketers
Growing scope, channels and functional responsibility
Demand for impact, transparency and accountability
Tightened budgets and scarce resources — forced to do more with less
Tactical overload: Shiny Object Syndrome hacks and ‘Best Practices’
Record levels for engaging, high-performing Content
Operational challenges with scaling results, quantity and quality
Measurement, ROI and attribution in a multi-touch, multi-channel world