Why Benchmarks Matter – Relevant Data
Who doesn’t love to compare and contrast things, especially our own performance? Marketers care about performance perhaps a little more than other professionals because we need to know the success of our programs, amount of revenue driven, conversion metrics, lead scores so we can work hard to optimize everything. However, you can’t compare performance or revenue numbers, yours or those of an organization, if you don’t have metrics or a baseline to compare against.
This is especially difficult for most enterprise marketers as many surveys tend to skew to the midsize to small organizations. And, if you are a global organization with 250 million in revenue, a large dispersed sales force, selling multiple products, you might have different challenges and goals than a 20 million dollar B2B organization. The comparisons between enterprise organizations and smaller organizations may not be relevant, it all depends on the data.
So, to address this and start the benchmarking for organizations that fall into the enterprise category, ANNUITAS launched the first B2B Enterprise Demand Generation Study in 2014 and found that enterprise marketers are not unlike other B2B marketers. They attempt to measure the performance of their marketing, optimize technology platforms, deliver relevant content to their buyers and struggle to address the marketing skills gap like most organizations. However, they struggle on a bigger scale than most.
Today we made available the 2015 B2B Enterprise Demand Generation Study to enable a true benchmark with relevant data on the performance, goals and challenges of enterprise marketers. According to the data from the survey of over 200 enterprise marketers,there has been some progress in the past year, but not much:
- More than 24 percent of enterprise marketers still don’t define the purchase process of the buyer
- Less than 50 percent put lead scoring value on their content based on where it falls in the purchase process
- More than 65 percent of marketers don’t create content that speaks to every member of the buying committee
- Less than 50 percent put lead scoring value on their content based on where it falls in the purchase process
Take a look at this year’s study and register for The Big Reveal webinar on November 5, 2015 at 1 pm ET to hear an analysis of the study and insights into what has changed from 2014 to 2015. Now that enterprise marketers can benchmark ourselves, we need to hold ourselves accountable to making progress. Otherwise, why bother to measure or gather metrics if you aren’t going to take action?
Author: Erika Goldwater CIPP/US @erikawg Vice President, Marketing for ANNUITAS
