The results of Chief Marketer’s B2B marketing survey are in—and here’s what we’ve learned: There is a greater need for B2B marketers to measure ROI in marketing attribution. And projecting that ROI is a top barrier to gaining approval for marketing investments. The majority of respondents also confirmed that content marketing produces the greatest ROI, with articles and blog posts proving the most effective.

This year’s survey provides marketing data points surrounding which channels produce leads with the highest ROI; how budgets are faring this year; where marketers are making martech investments; how the industry is addressing consent and preference management—and much more. Enjoy our 2023 B2B Marketing Outlook Survey, co-produced with OneTrust.

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Presenting this year’s Dream Team, a crop of marketing executives handpicked annually by sister pub EM for their ability to navigate the increasingly complex world of B2B event marketing. Read how industry heavyweights from the likes of Cisco, Salesforce and Yahoo are approaching hybrid experiences, enacting critical sustainability policies and embracing fresh formats that move the needle for their brands.

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Content consumption in the B2B space has accelerated rapidly over the past two years. Consider this statistic: According to NetLine Corporation’s 2022 State of B2B Content Consumption and Demand Report published this week, consumption increased more than nine percent from 2020 to 2021, with total demand for B2B content rising 33 percent since 2019.

But whether marketers are successful at reaching B2B decision-makers through content marketing tactics depends on a multitude of factors, including the specific format preferred by buyers, the level of purchasing intent, the buyer’s specific job function, and much more. Following are highlights from the report, which analyzed data from approximately 13,000 pieces of content from 300 industries, processed by its syndication lead generation network.

Job Function

As expected, information technology professionals were the most active job function when it came to consuming B2B content, representing 28 percent of the total audience. Breaking it down further, 12.6 percent worked in IT systems management, 6.6 percent were network/server administrators and 6.4 percent were involved in software/system architecture.

The “executive” job function experienced a lift in 2021, increasing by nearly 20 percent to represent 13 percent of the total audience consuming content. Additionally, CEOs represented 10.7 percent of the total audience, and the consumption of B2B content by C-level executives overall rose 15.8 percent year-over-year. The industry categories that recurred the most after IT and executives were education, engineering, human resources and finance.

Interestingly, though it wasn’t ranked as a top-10 job function, biotech industry professionals—presumably in light of COVID-19 vaccines becoming available in 2021—requested about 26 percent more content than they did in 2020, according to the report.

Job Level

Drilling down further into target audience statistics, 40 percent of all content consumption came from C-level users (14.8 percent), managers (13.3 percent) and directors (12.5 percent). In terms of year-over-year increases, directors consumed 27.8 percent more content and C-level users consumed an additional 15 percent. The most active job level—for the sixth consecutive year—was “individual contributor,” representing 25.5 percent of the audience.

Format

When examining format, the most popular content type was eBooks, accounting for more than 43 percent of all buyer registrations, followed by guides (8 percent), cheat sheets (8 percent), tips and tricks guides (7 percent) and white papers (7 percent). Interestingly, the consumption of cheat sheets grew by 56 percent year-over-year. When looking at the webinar format, total buyer registrations increased 63 percent year-over-year, while virtual event registrations increased by 139 percent.

Buyer Intent

The amount of time it takes for buyers to invest in services is another data point warranting consideration by B2B content marketers. The report notes that approximately 31 percent of respondents expect to make purchases in the next 12 months. Within that subset, 55 percent will take 6-12 months, 26 percent will take 3-6 months and 19 percent will take less than three months.

Additional highlights from the report:

*Though the volume of B2B content is increasing, the time spent consuming those assets of content is expanding as well. In 2021, it took users 12 percent more time to open a piece of content they’d requested than the year prior—on average, 33.3 hours versus 29.7 hours in 2020.

*Looking at when content is most frequently reviewed throughout the week, the report notes that Wednesdays are the most popular day, followed closely by Mondays and Tuesdays. Approximately 90 percent of consumption happens during the work week.

*Keyword trends for 2021, ranked in order of interest, included pandemic, virtual, next generation sequencing (NGS), artificial intelligence (AI) and construction financial.

*Content is being consumed overwhelmingly via desktop, the report revealed, representing nearly 93 percent of engagements. That’s up from 74 percent in 2020.

Editor’s Note: Chief Marketer’s parent company Access Intelligence uses NetLine Corporation’s lead generation services.

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As in-person experiences continue their revival, marketers charged with engaging customers through events are developing a new skill set: the ability to pivot a virtual event into a real-world physical experience. Event Marketer culled insights from B2B executives who are tackling the “reverse pivot,” a strategy that requires developing two separate events; mastering the right timing; nurturing qualified leads; preparing a bigger budget; and much more. Read how B2B marketers from Honeywell, Illumina, Hyland and MuleSoft are working on transforming virtual events into IRL experiences, according to a piece in Event Marketer.

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As consumers take in the big game this Super Bowl Sunday, they’ll be introduced to several first-time advertisers, some of which have paid up to $7 million for that coveted 30 seconds of airtime—and not just from companies in the consumer space. Advertising platform Criteo, workforce app development platform Monday.com and online retailer Rakuten—all B2B companies—are investing in the brand-building exercise this year as well. Here is the motivation behind Criteo’s presence at the Super Bowl, according to a piece in AdExchanger, as well as what a B2B company can gain from such a move.

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B2B marketers can learn a thing or two from the B2C world’s experience with customer data platforms before adding one to their tech stack, according to a piece in AdExchanger. Following are the essential requirements for a CDP that are unique to B2B organizations—from being people-based to allowing for data flexibility to enabling multichannel orchestration.

People-Based Systems

Particularly when it comes to B2B companies, CDPs should be able to facilitate meaningful conversations with all people of interest to the organization, including customers, prospects and anyone who might become a customer in the future.

Flexible Data Capabilities

A successful B2B CDP will support custom relationships and hierarchies from your data. They should also allow for both anonymous and known profiles and multiple use cases, such as marketing, sales and service.

Data Unification and Orchestration

The CDP should be capable of cleansing first-party data, supporting third-party data and integrating engagement data from multiple touchpoints.

For more CDP requirements for B2B marketers, read on in AdExchanger.

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Most are familiar with the consumer side of Panasonic’s business, but not necessarily its thriving B2B enterprise in the manufacturing, retail, entertainment and mobility sectors. Like so many others, the company was not immune to the challenges of keeping its business customers engaged during the pandemic.

But the marketing insights it gained are invaluable. Most critically, the brand has shifted from seeking to drive the conversation to letting customers take the wheel. “We had to step back and say, what are the conversations that are happening in the industry that we play in, and how do we fit into those conversations, versus us saying that this is the conversation we want to drive,” says Panasonic’s VP of Marketing, Brian Rowley.

We spoke with Rowley about lessons learned from these tumultuous times and how adopting a more customer-centric approach, engaging in thought leadership and launching a podcast series helped the brand remain relevant to B2B customers and play to its unique strengths.

Chief Marketer: How did Panasonic experience the past year and half, and how did your B2B business adapt?  

Brian Rowley: It’s no surprise that the past year has been more challenging than ever for some companies, and Panasonic was not one that didn’t witness and experience some of those challenges. We’re more focused on meeting the customers where they are. More so than ever, we’ve seen the importance around this customer-centric approach to marketing.

When the pandemic broke, we were at the heels of one of the largest shows we have for our professional video business, which is NAB, the National Association of Broadcasters. We quickly had to pivot there and move our presence from that in-person [event] to virtual. So, how do we do that? We looked at it and said, here are pain points. Here are the things that each of these businesses are experiencing, and how do we add value to that? We shifted a lot from the conversation we want to talk about to what our customers are looking for and what they wanted to hear from us—not our agenda, but their agenda.

CM: What were some of the key learnings?

BR: When customers wanted to have a conversation—and quite honestly, in some cases where they wanted to terminate a relationship with us—that fell more in their hands than we’ve ever seen before. That’s one of the bigger shifts. For us, this was about being where our customers wanted us and having content available to them wherever they were and whenever they wanted to consume it. In the past, we were very focused around, what is our message that we want to talk to the market about? We had to step back and say, what are the conversations that are happening in the industry that we play in, and how do we fit into those conversations, versus us saying that this is the conversation we want to drive.

From a Panasonic perspective, we’ve always been very engaged in soliciting feedback from our customers around product development. I could talk to you about numerous products that we’ve had and pinpoint where a button is on a piece of hardware as a result of feedback from a customer. But this wasn’t just about feedback. This was about understanding what was important and doing the listening in the markets that we were in, and making sure that we designed these experiences based on that listening.

For example, we initially had intentions of opening a customer experience center in our offices in Buffalo Grove, IL, that was meant to have four primary areas of the business: our immersive experience center, food retail services, manufacturing, and we also wanted to cover the public safety sector with the solutions that we offer to the market. We very quickly realized that we wouldn’t be able to open that center. So, we ended up doing it from a virtual capacity, but we made it self-guided so that it didn’t require us to be a part of the conversation. We made it so that each section was self-explanatory… to allow customers to do that when they want it. We made sure that the topics of our webinars were important to people in the business. For example, the concept in the quick-serve restaurant market of maintaining social distancing and keeping people coming through their businesses. What does contactless look like? Those types of things.

CM: From a marketing perspective, what are some examples of what worked and what didn’t?

BR: We knew we had to be relevant. We also knew that we had to shift, potentially on a dime, with what we were talking about or how we were approaching it. Panasonic is a hundred-year-old company. So we had to be fearless. We had to be willing to try new things. We did about 200-plus trade shows a year. We ended up doing about 40 virtual events last year. From a marketing side,  we had about a 40 percent attendance rate for those that registered. We’ve heard that a good turnout was 25 to 28 percent. The other thing that we saw was the quality of people. It was a lot more effective than some of the shows in the past that were face-to-face, where people who would walk through the booth didn’t have a lot of interest in speaking. These relationships are ones that you can actually nurture and pull into a real customer.

We went through and revisited materials that we had in every place that we talked to a customer to make sure that it made sense. Sometimes [companies] take a very broad stroke across a conversation or when marketing to specific industries. We’ve found that you really have to focus and not try to be everything to everybody. Know where your strengths are, stay in that space and deliver quality around that and the content that you’re providing.

We also saw the importance of thought leadership. We established a thought leadership program with nine of our key executives that helped educate people on some of the positives we saw and give an opportunity to share some of those stories. And the last thing was we introduced a podcast series called The Big Rethink. We bring in external experts who have conversations with us—myself and two other individuals on the team—and post the conversation. It gives people a chance to hear how others have been successful and are literally changing the way that work is being done.

We’ve launched over 50 episodes, with just shy of 11,000 downloads. We need to expand where we show up and allow people that opportunity, understanding that we’re supporting all different demographics, whether it’s a white paper or a video case study, whether it’s on our website or on social, whether it’s through podcasting.

CM: What skills do B2B marketers need today to be successful in today’s business landscape?

BR: There’s a stronger need for awareness than we’ve ever seen before. The days of being able to just go in and stay focused on the work that you’re responsible for are behind us. As a marketer, it’s about telling a story. But it’s also understanding the sub-stories that are developing underneath the bigger story. The other thing is, more than ever you need to push that comfort zone further. Doing traditional things that we’ve been doing for the past five, 10 years isn’t going to be enough. Podcasting wasn’t a part of the realm of what we do, but we got out there and we tried it and we’ve been successful. Getting yourself more in that space around video, and tackling some of the more challenging areas in regards to thought leadership is another one. Being fearless as a company, but also as a marketer and having that awareness, are two of the most important shifts.

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The author of a recent white paper for Nielsen, “Take Command of Your Brand: Long-Term Growth Requires a Balanced Marketing Strategy,” Hirani notes that a one-point increase in upper-funnel metrics such as brand awareness and consideration translates on average to a one percent lift in sales. “You can’t buy what you don’t know exists, and you won’t buy what you have no interest in,” he says. “If you haven’t done the work to build awareness and prime the consumer, it’s going to be awfully difficult to convert them.”

There have long been three primary sources of brand awareness, Hirani says: distribution, regular brand usage and marketing. Distribution is having your products on store shelves or your name on storefronts; brand usage entails seemingly minor elements such as an auto brand’s logo on a steering wheel and a retailer’s name on a credit card that continually reinforce brand awareness on a subconscious level. During the pandemic, as people ventured out less, those first two sources lost much of their impact. But marketing can fill in the gaps. “Use marketing to make up for the loss in the other two channels,” he advises, because that’s the source that marketers can control.

Among the key indicators that a brand’s upper funnel needs renewed investment: “You’ll start to see that your long-term sales prospects are not growing. You’ll also start to see reduced effectiveness in your lower-funnel efforts—that’s a big red flag because it’s saying that you failed to create a significantly broad-enough base,” Hirani says.

That reduced effectiveness of previously successful conversion tactics can help you overcome one of the biggest stumbling blocks to bolstering investment in brand-awareness marketing: internal resistance. Sales departments, executives and investors can be so focused on immediate sales that they hesitate to divert resources from conversion to brand building. “You have to really emphasize the perils of not investing in the upper funnel,” Hirani says. Showing the long-term effects on revenue of this short-sightedness can—and should—persuade them to adjust the balance of their brand awareness/sales conversion investments.

When rebalancing your marketing investments, keep an eye on your competitors’ efforts. While focusing 60 percent of marketing efforts on the upper funnel, as mentioned above, is a solid guideline, “what’s most important is making sure you’re not getting too far afield from the competition,” Hirani says. If your key competitors are amping up their brand awareness efforts with splashy ads, partnerships, tie-ins and the like, you might want to consider adding more resources into brand building as well, so as not to become overshadowed.

Another thing to keep in mind: “When you think about how you optimize your marketing mix, it looks different when you’re optimizing for sales versus the upper funnel,” Hirani warns. Avoid assuming that what worked for the lower funnel will also perform well for the upper funnel. “Sometimes there’s a correlation, but overall there’s tremendous variability in how effective channels are for upper funnel versus lower funnel. Balance is needed not just from a messaging perspective but also from a channel perspective.”

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“Marketing will be the creator of the organization’s future,” says Forrester Vice President and Principal Analyst Lori Wizdo, the author of the report. “That is a leadership role that, with few exceptions, B2B marketers don’t recognize.”

The increasing demands and expectations of B2B customers—and regarding company culture, employees—along with the myriad opportunities enabled by ever-advancing technology are making the role of marketing less reactive and more proactive. The report outlines six mandates for B2B marketers going forward:

* Champion past, present and future customers. This includes expanding the focus beyond customer acquisition to include providing value to customers post-purchase—which in turn will increase the lifetime value of those customers to the business.

* Steward all stakeholder relationships. In a sense, this means creating an “ecosystem” of all partners within the organization.

* Engineer the customer experience. This ties in with focusing on buyers post-purchase, thinking beyond episodic transactions to a continuous relationship and personalizing the customer experience.

* Actualize the brand. Execute this internally as well as externally. Having a mission is no longer enough; marketers need to ensure that the mission has an impact on customers and employees alike—that the company walks the talk.

* Architect customer value. Key to this is shifting the focus from value propositions to outcomes, or from “what we do” to “what you want to do.”

* Orchestrate future success. This includes helping to formulate long-term strategies and challenging the status quo while also being agile and open to experimentation. “The COVID-19 pandemic just gave us an object lesson in the need for agility,” Wizdo notes. “To lead in changing times, CMOs must be comfortable embracing the unknown.”

One could argue that these six mandates apply to B2C organizations as much as to B2B. Wizdo contends, however, that the challenges for B2B marketers than for their B2C counterparts are quite different.

“Take the concept of understanding customer value realization. In the consumer world, customer value is pretty much a one-to-one correspondence with product features: The tennis racket is lighter; the shoes have better arch support; the mutual fund has better performance and lower fees. In the business world, product value prop doesn’t equal value realization nearly as often,” she explains.

“Value is realized when change is enabled, and that takes process and behavioral change that is incremental to the product’s inherent value. Extend that to the concept of customer experience. It’s that understanding of the vagaries of value realization that provide an incremental perspective of the customer experience. I find that customer experience in consumer marketing is very much about the transaction, not about the life-changing experience.”

One could also argue that many of the tactics advocated in the report, such as using data to personalize the customer experience without being intrusive and maintaining customer relationships beyond the purchase, are long-recognized best practices or goals. But summarizing key tactics, Wizdo says, “misses the point that I so hope this research plants in B2B marketers. It’s not so much that our job is changing, but our environment is changing, and that changes our purpose, the role we fill in our organization’s success.”

And that environment is changing far more rapidly than most could have predicted prior to March 2020. Wizdo cites a survey in which 34 percent of respondents said their companies had been in growth mode prior to the pandemic but were now in survival mode; nearly as many respondents said that during the same year their organizations had gone from surviving to growing.

“If there’s one thing I’d like marketing execs to take away from this research, it’s a sense of urgency about the need for transformation,” Wizdo says. “I think there’s a tendency to say ‘Yeah, we’ve got this’ when we don’t. There’s a line I’ve always loved from the old vaudeville comedian Will Rogers, and I think it applies to the future of marketing: ‘It doesn’t matter if you’re on the right track; you’ll still get run over if you’re not moving fast enough.’”

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If your B2B organization hasn’t hired “hybrid” sales reps yet, it probably will be doing so soon—or risk falling behind the competition. That’s one of the key takeaways from McKinsey & Company’s report “Omnichannel in B2B Sales: The New Normal in a Year That Has Been Anything But.”

“Hybrid sellers are typically defined as reps that were previously ‘in-person by default’ but now sell with a fairly even mix of remote—mostly via video—and in-person, supplemented by phone or email as needed,” explains Rock Khanna, senior partner at McKinsey. Of the nearly 3,500 respondents to McKinsey’s February 2021 B2B Pulse survey, 28 percent said their organizations had hybrid reps in place, and 77 percent of those introduced this “specifically to address the surge in video/virtual selling due to COVID-19,” Khanna says. “The expectation is that this will be the number-one sales role very soon.”

That hybrid model extends to marketing as well. “Our previous research shows that the average B2B customer interacts with an organization through seven channels, and 20 percent use 10 or more,” says Liz Harrison, partner at McKinsey. “This means there is an even higher bar to craft, develop and activate effective marketing campaigns. This underscores the importance of properly harnessing your data assets in order to understand your audience across channels and drive more positive business outcomes.”

McKinsey found that just under one third of buyers prefer in-person meetings with sales reps—even now that the country is opening up again. That figure is consistent across all stages of the buying process: identifying and researching new suppliers, considering and evaluating new suppliers, ordering and reordering. Slightly more buyers favor what McKinsey calls “remote human interactions,” including video and phone calls, emails and texts. And digital self-serve was nearly as popular. In fact, when it came to reordering, it was the most popular option, with 36 percent of buyers preferring it, compared with 34 percent favoring remote human interactions and only 30 percent opting for in-person meetings.

B2B organizations are striving to give current and potential customers what they want. While 57 percent of such companies reported selling in person as of February 2021, only 15 percent expected traditional in-person meetings to be the rule going forward. “Essentially, what we’re looking at is the difference between in-person being an option versus it being the default,” Harrison says. “Even though the majority of companies are still selling in person, and will continue to do so as part of their omnichannel go-to-market, compared to their pre-COVID-19 model, they won’t choose for every interaction—be it with customers or internal—to be in-person.”

That’s one more reason that companies need to have a data-based 360-degree view of the customer. “A foundational customer data set must exist inside an organization, with the goal of having a unified view of the customer across channels,” Harrison says. “Investments in data and technology will ultimately augment personalized marketing in an omnichannel environment.”

Fortunately for B2B companies, the omnichannel approach works. Of those surveyed in February, 58 percent said the hybrid sales approach was somewhat or much more effective when reaching and serving existing customers than “in-person by default” selling. In comparison, only 17 percent judged it somewhat or less effective. Effectiveness ratings when it came to new customers were similar: 60 percent of the B2B organizations surveyed said omnichannel selling was somewhat or much more effective, with 16 percent citing it as somewhat or less effective.

Another way to look at this is by channel. Forty-one percent of the B2B survey respondents ranked ecommerce as effective, making it the most highly rated sales channel. In-person meetings came in second place, with 37 percent rating them effective, followed by videoconferences (31 percent considered them effective).

Transitioning a B2B sales organization from the traditional in-person model to a hybrid model has its challenges, of course. Two-thirds of the B2B respondents said their sales teams have experienced channel conflicts—for instance, sales reps losing commissions because customers are purchasing via the website.

“Organizations should consider a way to figure out a role for sales reps to play in advocating ecommerce and incentivize them for that role,” Harrison says. “One example could be to pay reps a percentage commission on ecommerce sales for customers in their territory, compared to a slightly higher commission they may earn for traditional sales. Also, organizations should work closely with reps to ensure they play a role in follow-up services—delivery, onboarding, service check-ins—as it is incredibly rare that 100 percent of B2B customer needs can be handled via digital alone. Finally, organizations should provide guidance to reps on where they can and should add value—for example, advising where reps should be involved in certain types of customer interactions and which types should go to self-serve.”

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