The study, by the firm which describes itself as a customer experience consultancy, tracks the cumulative total stock returns for two model portfolios _ comprised of the Top 10 (“Leaders”) and the Bottom 10 (“Laggards”) publically traded companies in Forrester Research’s annual Customer Experience Rankings.

According to the report’s latest edition, leaders outperform the broader market. They generated a total return that was 35 points higher than the S&P 500 Index. Laggards were far behind. Their total return was 45 points lower than the market.

Watermark states that “a great customer experience, and the internal ecosystem supporting it, can deliver tremendous strategic and economic value to a business, in a way that’s difficult for competitors to replicate”.

So why do the laggards “continue to subject their customers to complicated sales processes, cluttered websites, dizzying 800-line menus, long wait times, incompetent service, unintelligible correspondence, and products that are just plain difficult to use”?

Watermark says leaders embrace these basic tenets:

• They aim for more than customer satisfaction
• They nail the basics and then deliver pleasant surprises
• They understand that great experiences are intentional and emotional
• They shape customer impressions through cognitive science
• They recognize the link between the customer and employee experience

Download the report.

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.

According to Zettelmeyer, managing well with analytics does not require a math genius or master of computer science; instead, it requires “a working knowledge” of data science. This means being able to separate good data from bad, and knowing where precisely analytics can add value.

Zettelmeyer states that analytics is not a separate business practice, it has to be integrated into the business itself.

“It all starts with understanding the data-generation process,” Zettelmeyer says. “You cannot judge the quality of the analytics if you don’t have a very clear idea of where the data came from.”

Zettelmeyer says decision making in the business world is being revolutionized in the same way that healthcare is with the widespread adoption of “evidence-based medicine.” Managers with a working knowledge of data science will have a distinct advantage.

“There has to be a culture where you can’t get away with ‘thinking’ as opposed to ‘knowing.’”