B2B MARKETER: “What are our big goals for next year?”

BOSS: “Increase Market Share and Expand Growth in East Coast markets.”

B2B MARKETER: “How do we currently measure those things?”

BOSS: ???

If you’re a marketer in the business-to-business (B2B) world, this should sound very familiar.

My theory is there are many business owners out there that kneel at the alter of “Market Share” and “Growth”. Maybe they read these words in Forbes, Fortune, or the Wall Street Journal and go: “gee, those words do sound important.”

But at the end of the day, business decisions still get made with good old “gut feeling”. It’s how we’ve always done things around here...

Have you ever actually tried to track the Return On Investment of your print advertising? Do you go based on what the trade publication gives you in the form of media kits?

In my experience, all those “brand preference” graphs and “recall” surveys for your ads don’t count for much. How can you take an “ad recall” score from one ad in July 2018, compare it to a different ad you ran in July 2019…and gain any kind of meaningful insight?

Maybe you’re saying “Oh come on, Aaron. That’s the print side. Nobody can track that that old stuff. At least on the digital side, we’ve got things like Clicks, Likes, Opens and Shares. Plus there’s lots of cool line graphs. Can’t we use those stats to guide our marketing?”

Well, as Dan Kennedy used to say: “Sure we can use those metrics. So long as its okay for me to pay you in likes and shares.”

So anything you can glean from digital marketing tools out-of-the box is, at best, a signal. And its really easy to confuse a signal with its noise when you have no context.

I’ve struggled with this lack of actionable marketing insight for years. If you are in B2B marketing (especially on the manufacturer-side like I am), it can seem like there’s this giant “Ice Wall” between you and the end-user buying your product through distribution.

“How can I tell which marketing campaign is actually working and worth my company’s investment?”

I don’t know the answers…yet.

But to quote Pike Bishop from The Wild Bunch “What I don’t know about I sure as hell am gonna to learn!”

So if you work in the Marketing department of a B2B firm…if you’re the type that’s not okay with doing things as they’ve “always been done”…if you’ve ever wanted to present a real business case to your boss in REAL $$$ figures he or she will understand…and if you’re determined to crack the “B2B ROI code” like I am, then stay tuned to ebizmarketer.com.

Let’s learn this thing together.

P.S. What B2B market or industry do you work in? What are some of your biggest challenges? Leave a comment and maybe we can write about it in a future post.