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December 2009, Issue 70 |
Featured Article
Top Five Trends that Will Affect BtoB Marketers in 2010 and Beyond By Naylor Gray, Director of Global Marketing, Frost & Sullivan 
As 2009 draws to a close, many marketers will review and identify the strategies and tactics that did and didn't work as they make decisions about their budgets and 2010 strategy. The following are the leading trends that we at Frost & Sullivan observed firsthand during 2009 through our client interactions and our research findings.
At the outset of 2009, our annual Growth Team Membership™ survey of marketing executives found the top issues for marketers to be the recessionary economy, justifying budgets through ROI on the marketing spend, and seeking new ways to grow revenue. A similar survey of sales executives from the same time period revealed related issues—sales executives struggled with a lack of qualified prospects, declining customer spend rates and the need to address a rapidly changing business environment with their clients. Marketers Respond to the Recession The dismal outlooks by sales and marketing executives served only to increase the pressure on marketers to implement changes quickly. Midway through the year, we released our annual CEO survey on growth. With the worst of the recession already behind us, the top issues emerging from the CEO survey showed that CEOs were no longer struggling with cost reductions but were instead focused on revenue growth, innovation and customer satisfaction. CEOs also found their own workplaces to be myopic about innovation, unable to function at best practice levels and resistant to change. Examining all of these varying perspectives from the CEO at the top all the way down to the realities of the sales and marketing executives in the trenches, we start to see the emerging battle lines for 2010 budget dollars, strategies and tactics. There is no doubt that for many, 2009 will be a year to forget, but it will also undoubtedly appear as the proverbial tipping point from which new attitudes, perspectives and realities emerge that go on to shape the careers of marketers. As a consequence of all this upheaval and change, here are the top five BtoB marketing trends that we expect will shape 2010 and beyond: 1. Back to the Basics: Marketing 101 In 2009, marketers have taken on so many different tasks that many have potentially compromised the basics of their marketing programs. With recovery expected to take hold in 2010, marketing teams need to review their basic blocking and tackling to ensure that the fundamentals of their programs are on strong footing. Additionally, as the marketing automation craze continues to grow, the basics of marketing will take on greater importance. Generating audiences, creating new messages, segmenting the database in different ways, and understanding all the facets of the sales process will be required skills for effective marketing programs. In many cases, successful marketing automation deployment begins with the basics of the marketing program; like so many ambitious new undertakings, it is always best to start with a strong, simple foundation. Finally, as we begin to glimpse the other side of the recession, it is absolutely clear that there must be awareness and acknowledgement of this global economic phenomenon and its impact on customers and buying, which means new messaging and segmentation on the high end and a lot of database scrubbing on the low end.
2. Sales and Marketing Integration: It's All About Process Marketing and Sales must integrate their processes and objectives; when they don't, it is usually the marketing team who gets the blame. There is a delicate balance between Sales and Marketing that is about to get even more precarious. The balance relies on Sales communicating to Marketing precisely what a "lead" looks like and, on the other hand, Marketing establishing the proper way to score this and hand it off. Complicating this relationship will be the ability or inability of both teams to explicitly track the sales process through data points in a CRM system. A poorly understood or poorly articulated sales process will result in the inability to map the marketing program into the sales process. Weakness within any aspect of the sales process will result in a cascading failure between the sales and marketing integration. A lack of integration will cause the following symptoms: price erosion or excessive price discounting by the sales team, lack of lead follow-up by the sales team, inability to track a lead through to the sales close, low response rates to marketing e-mails and offers, and ultimately, a lack of top line revenue growth. Most importantly, a disintegrated sales and marketing process will make the effective implementation of a marketing automation solution nearly impossible. Marketing automation relies on a robust sales process that is clearly discernable by the marketing team charged with generating and qualifying the leads. 3. Marketing Automation Many BtoB companies have not yet automated, but leading marketers will automate in 2010 if they have not done so already. Marketing automation will integrate lead-generation efforts, sales process, contact CRM tracking and Web site analytics into a hyper-powerful tool. There are many companies that provide marketing automation solutions, so marketers looking to automate should be certain that they identify one that best fits with their organization's culture and needs. The degree to which marketers will automate will be dictated by their existing practices and budget, but before they do, they should perfect their sales and marketing processes so that they are fully integrated. There are powerful returns for those organizations who master this marketing automation rollout, with some organizations reporting double-digit increases in sales revenues simply as a result of the successful automation implementation. Additionally, automation will be a blessing for the marketing department that struggles to do more with less. It will also free up resources to focus on the important tasks of building new client relationships, demonstrating value for their products or services, and finally achieving those ROI targets. In addition to selecting the right marketing automation technology, there are three other essential elements to lead generation in a marketing automation environment: integrated marketing strategy, content to generate demand, and database development of contacts, processes and measurement. Each of these four elements must operate in harmony with each other to produce optimal results. 4. Content Is King (Again) Pop quiz: What has a longer half-life: a candy bar or that white paper you just purchased? If you chose the candy bar then you're probably correct. Knowing what types of content to select for lead-generation programs and when to deploy them will be a critical success factor moving forward. Additionally, when selecting the right content, marketers must be able to model out the relevant lifespan of this content to ensure that they have interesting and timely offerings that attract the right kind of attention. There are many different content sources, but what marketers really need is to stand out from the noise with a truly distinct content offering. Many marketers will perform a content audit mapped against buying groups and sales process and discover that they do not have enough of the right kind of content. Content can take many forms, and includes social media, user-generated reviews and recommendations, e-mail copy, Web pages, customized landing pages, white papers, event sponsorship, thought leadership, case studies, ROI/TCO calculators, benchmarking tools, podcasts, Webinars, videos, press releases, brochures and other marketing collateral, interviews, articles, testimonials and proposals. 5. Convergence of Marketing/Public Relations PR is the new Marketing. Or maybe Marketing is the new PR. Whatever your perspective, tactics and strategies need to be tightly integrated between Marketing and PR. With the rise of social media and a movement away from conventional advertising, what the PR team does affects Marketing more than ever. Many PR teams are getting into the lead-generation business with the savvy use of press releases and tracked media mentions. What defines this convergence is the movement of major media publications online, which is traditionally the domain of Marketing. Many wiring services now tout online press release search engine optimization strategies as well as social media optimization strategies. Further fueling the trend, surveys indicate a shared responsibility between Marketing and PR for social media strategies. And as the Web continues to fundamentally alter buying behavior, much of the decision-making occurs upstream from the vendor via Internet searches. PR can ensure that the company's value is communicated on a multitude of social media sites and formats. Other items driving this convergence:
Naylor Gray is Director of Global Marketing, Frost & Sullivan. Marketing Watchdog Journal is a monthly newsletter from Bulldog Solutions, a lead optimization and lead management company dedicated to helping our clients generate more, better leads and turn them into revenue. We welcome your feedback on this newsletter's content and design, and encourage you to share your ideas for topics you would like us to cover in future issues. Please send your comments or questions about Bulldog Solutions to Amy Bills, director of Field Marketing. |
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