Why Your B2B Marketing Isn’t Performing

By Chris Goetz, Senior Engagement Director at Heinz Marketing

This may sound familiar to you: “We’ve taken all the right steps to build out our B2B marketing platform, but it just isn’t performing like we thought it would. We need stronger results from our marketing investment.”

We hear this from clients all the time – it’s why they hire us! But often times the reason for a plateau in B2B results is that many organizations have jumped into demand generation, account-based marketing, and more modern-based B2B marketing methodologies without a sound strategy for integrating the core components of demand generation.

Oftentimes, marketing orgs make solid choices in marketing technology. They do their due diligence on target accounts and persona research. Maybe they even coordinate between marketing and sales! But the magic is not in the execution of these components in silos, but rather the integration of all of these core components into a finely tuned machine. In this case, the whole really is greater than the sum of its parts.

The solution lies in a holistic approach to demand generation where everything works synergistically. Alone, all of your technology tools and best practices will make some incremental improvements in marketing results. But it is when everything works together, that you truly realize the potential of your demand generation efforts.

For example, you may generate some great pieces of content, but fail to map those assets to various steps in the buyer’s journey to effectively move prospects through the funnel. This is common among marketers who have the ability to create quality content but miss the step of applying that content across the buyer’s journey. Each persona has different pain points and triggers that move them to action and that content needs to work in harmony with the other aspects of your campaigns.

The technology tools we have available today are indeed powerful. Yet, many organizations still use these tools to execute old-school, one-off email blasts. In contrast, implementing a well-thought out strategy to nurture prospects through the funnel could drastically improve your marketing results.

So, take the time to step back and re-evaluate your B2B strategy and truly integrate each aspect of the marketing mix and you’ll start to see the results you were expecting. By integrating marketing, sales, technology, content and target audience together in a cohesive strategy, you’ll soon be on your way to achieving the results you were aiming for when you first embarked on your B2B marketing venture.