According to a report by Forrester Research, in 2005 B2B marketers spent more than $77 billion on DM, telemarketing, Internet marketing, commercial email and other direct media. The question that all these marketers are asking themselves is: what level of return did they get on their investment? With tightening budgets, pressure to deliver measurable results increases each year, but many businesses in the B2B sector continue to struggle as they look for metrics they can apply to their marketing activities. Traditional media is certainly still in the marketing mix, but digital channels are now proving almost irresistible as they can provide fast and direct measurable metrics.
Choosing the right channel for a marketing campaign is now more crucial than ever. With increasing digital channels competing with traditional media, it’s not surprising that many businesses in the B2B arena are finding it difficult to identify the right channel for them let alone ensure they have adequate metrics in place to track their campaigns.
In practice, I think B2B marketers spend more time on choosing among traditional and emerging interactive channels than they do on getting the metrics right, says Laura Ramos, VP on Forrester’s Marketing Strategy & Technology Research Team. They seem to intuitively understand that you can’t determine whether a tactic/channel is productive without baseline and then campaign-centric measurements. However, our research shows that B2B marketers are wasting time and effort on a boatload of tactics that aren’t very effective, according to their own admission.
A report by data co-operative Abacus looking at multi-channel marketing shows a clear movement to online channels. Matthew Pepper, client services director at Abacus, comments, While both consumers and business buyers increased the proportion of online spend in 2005, the web represents nearly one-third more of B2B activity than B2C. This much greater adoption of the web highlights that business purchases exhibit a different dynamic than consumer purchases. There needs to be, therefore, a consistency of measurement across all channels so they can be accurately compared.
For example, companies must be able to identify which attracts the most leads and which generates the most initial orders, and what attracts the highest order values and delivers the greatest proportion of repeat purchasers. This can all feed into promotional planning and budgeting.
The traditional marketing channels of print, events and tradeshows are still excellent channels to use, but businesses are increasingly using a combination of channels. Ray Welsh, head of sales and marketing at Mailtrack, explains, Digital channels can be easily measured, but it is worth noting that you can get reasonably accurate information from traditional channels. The success of measuring also depends on what information needs to be measured. Sales can be measured well across both digital and traditional channels. But if you want to measure when, or the number of times, a message was opened or read, it is very difficult to do with offline marketing. The nature of digital channels allows this to be easily measured.
Measurability is now of serious concern to all B2B enterprises as the push to provide a good return on their marketing investment becomes of paramount importance. Nick Frazer, head of B2B marketing at Experian, points out that it is still very important to approach your marketing with the message at its centre and not the metrics. From our perspective we would say that you must start with the message first and then the segmentation before thinking about the metric. If you segment properly and you know your audience, you can choose the appropriate channel even before you start to talk about metrics.
Richard Payne-Gill, new business leader at D&B, goes even further and suggests that good marketing starts not with the message or metric being used, but as a core belief of the business, Improving the measurability of marketing happens in two places. Firstly, the boardroom; where marketers secure investment in tools and processes to support measurement and evaluation.
Secondly, it is about robust tracking of transactional data to ensure visibility on campaign outcomes to the senior management team; data referencing can play a critical role here. By sourcing data that assigns each prospect a unique ID such as D&B’s DUNS Number it’s much easier to track responses back to your prospect list. Build this into a campaign from the start and all responses to your campaign can be tied back to the initial data.
Each marketing channel will have its own set of mechanics that will include tracking. The art of good marketing is choosing the right channel for your message.
Email. This channel above all others is seeing massive growth in the B2B market. Forrester stated in its recent report on how Hewlett-Packard use email marketing, Faced with the challenge of deepening customer relationships, B2B marketers are turning up the volume on email marketing. Most B2B marketers 89 per cent are currently using, piloting, or expecting to pilot email programs this year. Yet, most business email programs focus primarily on customer acquisition and don’t leverage segmentation or dynamic content to create more retention-focused messages. Forrester analysed Hewlett-Packard’s ‘Technology At Work’ email program and found that it cuts costs and drives revenues by delivering news, promotions, and product updates that its customers value.
Websites. Your business’ website is now one of its most important assets. As a marketing channel it can be leveraged to provide a wide-range of returns that can be tracked. The early days of e-marketing via websites was marred by a lack of accountable tracking. Today, the B2B market in particular is utilising its websites as it can see instantly if a campaign is working. Frazer of Experian, comments, E-marketing is so cheap that ROI is less important; but because the businesses they are targeting are being inundated with marketing messages, they are actually destroying their brand. Even if they get poor results, financially it looks OK, but it’s diluting their brand. The drivers in this channel will be different even though it’s cheaper. The targeting will need to be designed for long-term results.
Events. For many businesses in the B2B environment, trade shows and other staged events are still their main marketing channel. Figures indicate that globally, business spends more then $20 billion (£13.4 billion) annually on trade-show marketing. Ruth Stevens who runs consulting practice E-Marketing Strategy, comments, Business events have an undeserved reputation for being hard to measure. In fact, business events are no less measurable than any other part of the marketing mix. All it takes is discipline and prior planning.
If your business uses events or trade shows as its primary marketing channel, the equation is simple: look closely at your costs and the number of sales leads that are generated. Stevens adds, The main benefit of tracking cost-per-lead is the ability to analyse costs on a consistent basis over time, and to compare the value of competing marketing investments. For example, ranking the annual trade-show calendar by cost-per-lead results can serve as a benchmark for making future event-selection decisions.
Print. One of the most widely used marketing channels in the B2B market is print, as specialised trade publications and events that often support them offer any business in their sector an almost captive audience. If your business does operate in a specialised industry, print can still be a highly effective means of reaching your customers. Tracking is certainly not as instantaneous as via digital channels, but over time, you can build a very detailed picture of how your print marketing is delivering a return.
Val-Pierre Genton, head of media at online event services, BrightTalk offers this advice, Print ads are amongst the most difficult to track, so including deep links on print advertisements will allow you to transfer interest online and gauge the response your print campaign has generated. Creating specific email addresses and phone numbers around an ad will also allow you to follow the enquiry trail more accurately. If the publication is distributed by controlled circulation, make sure it is audited.
Direct Mail. Just like B2C marketing, businesses selling to other companies must pay particular attention to how they segment their mailing lists. Direct mail enables you to target a number of potential customers with great accuracy. It is also attractive as it can be tracked and measured with precision. However, as Frazer of Experian, points out, tracking is increasingly being partnered with risk analysis. What is happening with DM is that businesses are looking to their marketing services to test their lists and identify which leads could be high risk if they were pursued. There is little point in selling to businesses that are not credit-worthy because that could attract more bad debt and ties up the sales force with pointless calls. Today, one out of every four calls is a bad risk, so if you can remove these contacts your DM return will improve.
Rich media streaming. The new kid on the marketing block is media streaming. This is a new form of marketing that has been developed and includes podcasting, webinars and any other forms of content that can be sent or ‘streamed’ to a customer or client.
This digital channel has seen massive growth over the last couple of years alone. Businesses are embracing this new way of reaching their clients. Just as with other digital channels, tracking is detailed as the content can be targeted on a focused group of recipients. Genton of BrightTalk, says, Rich and streaming media makes for good sticky content, which should be knowledge-driven so you create value around the registration process that will ultimately allow you to capture all the audience details you want and track their behaviour throughout the communication. Look out for individual viewing times and the total of viewed hours as well as the average viewing time.
The future looks bright for B2B marketers as their ability to measure and track their campaigns will become more efficient. According to Ramos of Forrester, More marketing tools and automation will make it essential for marketers to capture, analyse and use rich customer data that goes beyond simply capturing contact information, geography, firm size, and lead source to design and execute marketing campaigns that demonstrate measurable ROI. B2B marketers will focus more on data to capture behaviour, motivation, preference, contact history, relationships and prior purchases/support interactions. They will shift from after-the-fact analytics to predictive. And they will start to get the technology backbone in place.
What is clear is that the digital marketing channels that continue to develop and expand will become more important in your business’s marketing mix. Tracking and measuring these digital channels will become faster and more efficient as the current tools are refined and developed. No matter which channel your business uses, remember that your marketing message how you deliver this and to which potential customers go hand-in-hand with the metrics you use to track and measure your campaigns.
