The world of B2B marketing is ever evolving, and today’s marketing team needs to be able to adopt new strategies and leverage a mix of technologies that educate, engage and increase conversions. Marketing is part art, part science, and there are a number of different things that make up a top-notch marketing team that always keeps the pipeline full. With that said, we’ve paired it down to 5 essential traits.
- They know where to find content ideas – without question, one of the biggest challenges we hear from marketers is that they don’t have enough content. Most of the time, that’s because they don’t know where to look. In our last blog – Great Webinar Content Is Staring Back At You – we discussed where marketers/webinar producers can look to find compelling webinar content. That same concept holds true for content in general. Great marketing teams look everywhere for content ideas and they know where to find it because they know who their target audience is. Content inspiration can come from press releases, trade publications, your own customers, social media, other departments in your company (what is sales hearing from your customers and prospects? Why do they buy from us?), and your own existing content such as literature, webinars, blogs, videos, etc.(repurposing content into new pieces of content). Successful marketing teams let everybody bring content ideas to the table
- They run campaigns frequently – marketing isn’t a one and done activity, it’s perpetual. Ineffective marketing teams run a single campaign and if that doesn’t work, they take the approach of “marketing campaigns don’t resonate with our audience and don’t work for us.” Successful professionals want to understand how they can make it more effective and run marketing campaigns x 10. They understand that the more they stay in front of their audience with quality content, the more their audience will opt-in. We talk to marketers about this all the time when it comes to webinars. Too many B2B marketers want to test-drive 1 or 2 webinars to see if it works for them, but they’re not giving themselves a chance for long-term success by taking that approach. We tell them they need to invest in the strategy and take a longer-term approach to get the ROI they’re looking for. I guarantee you that a marketing team who runs an engaging webinar every month (and promotes it the right way) will find more success out of that strategy than the team that runs one webinar per quarter. Like everything else in marketing, frequency is key
- They take an integrated approach – great marketing teams know that there’s more than one way to skin the cat. It’s essential that you hit your audience a number of different ways to maximize response. They’re leveraging cold calling (yes, it still works and always will), email marketing, content marketing (webinars and video fall into this category), social, SEO and PPC, events, trade publications, etc. And behind the scenes they’ve got a strategic marketing technology stack that enables them to execute this integrated approach more efficiently and effectively
- They provide the right content at the right time – creating content is one thing, but delivering that content to the right person at the right time is the next step. Successful marketing teams are fully entrenched in who their target audience is – they know who the key stakeholders are, they know the challenges they’re faced with, they know what influences their decisions, the know where they are in the buying cycle. And with all of that insight, they know what piece of content to deliver to them that aligns with where they are in the buying cycle. This know-how enables successful marketing teams to accelerate deals through the pipeline more effectively
- They are laser-focused on quality and revenue generation – we’ve talked about this a lot…I believe the days of B2B marketers pounding their chest about the amount of MQL’s (marketing qualified leads) they generate are long gone. Highly successful marketing teams are focused on quality, not quantity. They want their leads to turn into SQL’s (sales qualified leads) and convert into revenue. These teams understand that their campaigns are tied to revenue and they put their strategies together with that in mind. They know that the more revenue their programs generate, the more budget they’ll have to play with to drive even greater returns. In the last few years specifically, this focus on quality has made marketers a lot more targeted and selective in the partners they work with to help fulfill their initiatives