Raffaele Apostoliti outlines six principles that should underpin any client or agency’s approach to performance marketing in B2B
When talking about performance marketing, people normally think of online advertising. Pay-per-click (or pay-per-action) is the performance model agencies and media typically offer to their advertisers, but this model mainly works at a tactical level. Now, with the increasing importance of data analytics in B2B, a more strategic approach to performance marketing is required from both the client and the agency.
Although pay-per-action has existed since the beginning of e-commerce (via ‘affiliation programmes’), it only became mainstream when Google launched its AdWords platform and related pay-per-click model. The benefits for B2C is fairly straightforward. You redirect traffic to a site where there’s an economic transaction that gives you the value of your PPC campaign investment. It’s a different scenario in B2B – brands are unlikely to achieve an immediate online sale, and it’s even harder to measure the return on the investment of each individual tactic.
As any B2B marketer knows, getting registrations on a landing page has become an increasingly challenging task. Moreover, a person who registers to download an asset can hardly be defined as a proper lead. They need to be nurtured across each step of the funnel and a PPC campaign works mainly at the top of it. Today, 88% of B2B companies are struggling with lead generation and when leads are finally identified, only 5-10% are converted due to ineffective nurturing.
For too long, businesses have paid a set price for a campaign no matter the results. Now clients want to be spending less money, and achieving more, but finding new customers is a lot easier said than done.
Utilising performance-based marketing is a sure-fire way of boosting your client’s sales win rate while also ensuring you spend your time and resources on the highest quality of leads. Cutting out the waste.
“Performance-based marketing is a sure-fire way of boosting your client’s sales win rate while also ensuring you spend your time and resources on the highest quality of leads”
6 stage B2B marketing performance marketing model
The new performance marketing model for B2B should focus on six aspects.
- Sales and marketing departments need to work together to define specific goals and ways to measure them.
- Sales and marketing need to make sure the performance-based model embraces all marketing tactics. It’s not just about clicks and registrations.
- Media and agencies need to be properly informed and aligned with the same goal(s) defined by sales and marketing, and are using the same metrics to track success.
- Media and agencies’ remuneration is closely linked to the target, set by the key stakeholders.
- Every marketing campaign is designed with an attribution model that tracks and measures its success and the relevance of each tactic.
- Any performance deviation from the campaign objective(s) is reported in real time to make adjustments immediately and optimise the results.
Media and agencies, by playing an essential role in the last four steps, need to become true partners for their clients in order to put performance marketing in action and lift their B2B marketing to the next level.
The B2B Marketing UK Agencies Benchmarking Report 2019
This year’s league table features a record-breaking 95 agencies, and is chock-full of analysis, commentary and interview with the agencies themselves and on the state of the market.
