Best-in-class B2B marketers are doubling down on marketing automation and performance metrics, according to the 2016 B2B Marketing Outlook Survey conducted by the leading digital marketing agency Green Hat and developed in conjunction with ADMA (Association for Data-Driven Marketing & Advertising).

Overall, budgets are on the rise. Of the 448 participants, 40% said their dollars are moving up. In comparison, 9% said their numbers were heading south.

However, the perennial problem of lead follow-up remains, with only 36% stating that their marketing-sourced leads were being effectively followed up their sales organisations.

I joined ADMA CEO Jodie Sangster, Telstra Wholesale’s Marketing GM Glenn Flower and Green Hat’s CEO Andrew Hausegger for an engaging discussion on the survey’s results:

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This means, for example, that if $1 million is invested in content creation, then $660,000 is wasted as the assets either cannot be found or are irrelevant as they do not meet customer needs and/or are unusable because they are either inaccurate or obsolete. Smart B2B marketers are recognizing that this structural problem must be addressed. SiriusDecisions challenges marketers to truly understand the external and internal costs of content creation. The outcome can confidently be predicted to be what Sirius describes as a BSN (Big Scary Number). Sirus says:

• The majority of B2B content creation is done internally across functions, representing a huge blind spot in the marketing budget
• Most B2B organizations have a hunch they’re wasting money on content creation, but have no ability to capture the total spend − never mind analyze waste
• It’s impossible to even begin to think about return on investment without having a good handle on what the investment truly is

In the face of these realities we must commit to making systematic the production, distribution and analysis of marketing content, whilst increasing productivity, delivering measurable results and reducing organizational friction. This means changing the way we commission, produce, manage, deploy and maintain content. An integrated, efficient content operation enabling effective, transparent and accountable marketing is essential.

It makes good business sense to invest into a dedicated B2B content engine application featuring content galleries and a centralised marketing calendar, which enables marketers to map content to customer personas and buying stages and develop workflow templates to accelerate content production. Content galleries and calendars when embedded in an integrated sales-and-marketing front-end environment (CRM + marketing automation and web content management) enhance relevancy, drive utilization and influence revenue.

Marketers have long needed a genuine strategic platform designed to target each content asset for a specific buyer persona at a specific stage in the buyer’s journey. It makes a profound difference, in an accountability and transparency context, if a content object is visible to all collaborators via a content dashboard and becomes part of our workflow in a calendar format, identifying due dates for content assets and campaigns.

The ability to distribute content to all channels with a click of a button is both a time saver and an amplifier. For example, sales people, with sales collateral galleries embedded in CRM, are able to easily post to their Linkedin connections our approved content. A sophisticated content engine aggregates performance metrics and displays them in one place, including links earned and conversions. Website, marketing automation and CRM integration, means you can score content performance based on its sales funnel impact. Critically, a content marketing platform must answer the pivotal content questions:

• It is relevant?
• Is being utilised by sales and marketing?
• Is it effective? Is it resonating with customers and influencing revenue generation & retention?

These foundation revenue metrics are our ultimate engagement indicators. Genuine creativity will always be an essential ingredient in the marketing mix, but we need to measure and understand if it is driving revenue or not. If not, what do we change? What do we do more of? The performance data will give us the confidence to experiment and fail more often and get better faster.

A recent research study by InsideSales.com shows that the average response times to website leads sits at 40 hours and 56 minutes

And though some companies are doing better than before, it is at the expense of their  slower competitors.

Too few companies appear to act on the reality that there is a direct correlation between lead response times and lead close rates.

Unfortunately, whilst the need for speed is widely acknowledged, few are geared to react in the almost instant –on timeframe.

What’s the value in a web presence if you are not equipped to engage with those who do visit your site and request contact?

This year’s Insidesales.com report involved 5257 companies.

Their sites were visited by “secret shoppers” who located a web form and asked for follow up in some form.

The clock then started ticking as Inside Sales counted down how long it would take for responses to flow and how were they managed:

• 1811 (34%) companies were eliminated from further analysis because they did not have a website which contained a functioning Web form.
• 3446 companies received a Web form submission.
• 1368 companies (40%) did not respond to the lead we submitted.
• The average response time by phone was 40 hours and 56 minutes.
• The median response time by phone was 4 hours and 8 minutes.

The average response times have not improved since the first year this research was conducted in 2008 and time of 44 hours, 31 minutes and 8 second was recorded.

1368 companies of the 3446 in the study did not make a single phone call to follow up on people coming to their website and asking for contact.

214 companies made 6 or more phone calls to follow up on web-based inquiries.

The report also found that 65 percent of companies make their initial response through email.

The remaining 35 percent use phone calls to respond — 23 percent called and left a voicemail, and 12 percent called and did not leave a voicemail.