Goodbye guesswork
Organisations should be rejoicing that the guesswork long-since associated with marketing has gone. Everything we do in marketing and business development should now be planned, activated, measured, analysed and results reported against specific commercial goals.
Metrics & analysis are playing an ever-increasing role in professional services and B2B marketing strategy. More and more boards and management teams are demanding that every aspect of marketing be quantified by direct impact on revenue goals.
Most marketers would agree that bringing metrics to the fore provides long-absent evidence of the impact of marketing on business generation. Metrics help to persuade numerically minded peers and management to understand the realities vs perceptions of how their business wins new work.
There is more impetus to change tack or tweak campaigns when the results are clearly presented. As a result, B2B and professional services marketing can be more nimble and responsive.
On the other hand, many marketers and creative CEOs lament that the last creative bastion of business is being reduced to a set of numbers so that the finance guys can put it on a spreadsheet. Where is the room in that for brand resonance, for intangible relationship ties or for the positive emotive impact that creative marketing can inspire in clients and customers?
Let’s look at what management should now expect from their marketing & business development leaders – a perfect combination of analytical skills with creative ability – and how marketing leaders can deliver to those changing expectations.
Changing expectations
We all lean heavily on the analytics we can access from digital channels, but these are not enough - they are usually surrounded by many unmeasured activities in the business development cycle to finally lead to a new client or new piece of work.
Hubspot’s recent article Inside the boardroom – a CMO’s guide to impressing investors summarises some qualitative research they did with VC investor board members in terms of what they need their CMOs to focus on. The overwhelming consensus was the requirement for metrics around lead generation and lead to client conversion.
Stacey Bishop from Scale (quoted in Hubspot article referenced above) nicely sums up the expectations boards of management have for marketing today, saying:
“CMOs today have to wear many hats. They have to be both creative enough and analytical enough to handle the challenges they face today. They need to analyze multiple data sets to know where to spend money and they need to still create a company brand and identity.”
The research was primarily based on Saas (Software as a service) businesses, but I think there is a lot from that sector we can bring across to other B2B and professional service businesses.
What metrics are important for B2B and professional services?
Metrics should tell the story of how a client becomes a client. And why a client stays a client.
Borrowing from our Saas peers - look more broadly at the TOTAL impact of your marketing and business development efforts on potential clients (qualified leads). Rather than analysing the outcomes of channels in isolation (e.g. digital communications, tendering, seminars), think about the entire process of bringing in new business (the dreaded sales funnel). Our marketing metrics need to encompass all channels to see what activities are working best at different points in this process.
Clearly the first step is to decide what a “qualified lead” is for your businesses. Your potential leads depend on your overall marketing strategy and audience targets.
Through information from databases/CRM, digital analytics, financial reports, expense tracking the focus of your team should be to:
• Measure and compare potential client lead generation across all channels
• Follow potential clients as they experience your brand in different ways and move through each phase of the business development process
• Measure client acquisition costs vs client expansion costs and compare to lifetime client value to determine best use of budget and resources
• Analyse lead to client conversion ratios of different activities to better understand quantity vs quality
Are you rubbing your eyes yet? Maybe so, but think of how wonderful these metrics will look on a graph at the end of the year!
Ultimately, the role of B2B and professional service marketing is changing to one that needs to move metrics away from the digital marketing manager and into everyone’s everyday roles to allow more integrated strategic marketing reporting.
How does creativity fit into this?
The world needs more creativity
Creativity isn’t always necessarily the first thing that comes to mind when we think of B2B brands, particularly professional services. But I would argue that these Firms can show very strong creativity to develop nuanced yet distinctive branding & marketing campaigns for such a range of business clients.
There are some great examples at the bolder creative end of the spectrum:
Bingham McCutcheon’s marketing campaigns [Spotted Dog “Feeling exposed?” / Litigation is like “playing chicken” /Hang-gliding elephant / Bear with a Baby] which spoke to business across sectors and size and ran across the US in airports, online, RFPs, in magazines and as part of their audiovisual presentations.
And at the more nuanced end of the spectrum – Deloitte marketing - inspiring understated confidence and market presence with a strong brand identity and internationally replicable grass-roots marketing programmes.
I read a recent Future Brand blog post The world needs more creatives, which talks about how the value people place on analytics will change as they become more prolific. Creativity will become more valued.
"The 80’s/90’s era of the MBA ushered in a propensity to honour and value left brain thinking (rational/analytical) over right brain thinking (emotive/creative). Well, how things are changing. Today, in the twenty-teens THE WORLD NEEDS MORE CREATIVITY!"
Of course, it is not an either/or situation.
Creativity, particularly now in terms of content development IS more important than ever because the bar is constantly being raised. I have blogged before (B2B content marketing – an old game, with a new name) about the prime position professional services are now in with regard to content marketing, with decades of content production behind them.
But that creative content needs to be tracked through the business development cycle and captured in metrics in order to measure and report on its value.
I truly believe the increasing use of metrics will inspire creativity because if you know something really works, it sets you free from fear of critiscism and gives management comfort that they are doing what should be done in order to market and grow their business effectively.
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Triona Saunders is a marketing consultant and founder @ Buckley & Partners Consulting, a marketing and business development partner for professional services and other B2B organisations.