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You are here: Home / Digital Relevance / Investing in B2B Marketers’ Digital Relevance Development

Ardath Albee 5 Comments

Investing in B2B Marketers’ Digital Relevance Development

ThinkstockPhotos-469589013What marketers are saying about their effectiveness and beliefs about what the future will hold are a huge indication of the work to be done. Companies must make it a strategic priority to ensure the relevance and value marketers are prepared to bring to help the brands they work for achieve high performance today…and tomorrow.

As a brief overview, consider:

Marketers are admitting they’re less effective with content marketing year over year. Just look at the trend in the last five years of B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks and Trends reports produced annually from the Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs:

  • 2011 – 41% of B2B marketers classify themselves as effective at content marketing
  • 2012 – 40% shows a slight decline
  • 2013 – 36% more decline
  • 2014 – 42% a nice improvement, but apparently an anomaly…
  • 2015 – 38% back down to below 2011 effectiveness ratings
  • 2016 – 30% we’re getting worse! Updated 10/5/15

B2B marketers know their role is changing and that they need to reinvent themselves and their organizations:

  • 64% of marketers expect their role to change in the next 12 months – Adobe
  • 40% of them want to reinvent their role as a marketer, but only 14% know how – Adobe

ITSMA’s research finds that 85% of B2B marketers say that understanding buyers will be their #1 responsibility in two years. Why are we waiting?

ITSMA’s research also found that only 44% of B2B marketers are increasing relevance through personalization by using buyer personas.

The evidence that our marketing programs do not impress our buyers has also been clearly noted:

  • 75% of B2B buyers say vendors give them too much material to sort through; 62% say that much of that material is useless – Forrester
  • 71% of executive buyers say that content provided by vendors is still a sales pitch, rather than information they find helpful and relevant – Economist Intelligence Unit

I could go on, but you get the point. Buyers are buying differently and taking control over the process. As marketers, it’s on us to keep pace and become so damn relevant that they can’t help to engage and choose us to help them deliver on bringing their business ideas to life.

The Need for B2B Marketing Digital Relevance Development

As marketers, we’re busy. No one cleared our plates when buyers changed and content marketing kicked in. While companies spend approximately $5.2 billion on sales training—up to $30k annually per rep in some industries—most digital marketers don’t have formal training; 82% learn on the job.

When so much of a company’s success now requires engaging buyers over longer buying processes for complex sales, often before they’re interested in speaking with a salesperson, how is leaving marketers to learn by trial and error a wise decision?

CMOs need to realize the strategic importance of providing digital relevance training to marketers who now influence a majority, if not all, of the buying process through content marketing strategy and sales enablement programs.

More than $40 billion is spent globally each year producing and using custom content in marketing programs. But how much of that money is bringing quantifiable return on investment? How long will companies continue to spend on marketing programs that don’t help to achieve business objectives?

Agile Learning for Digital Relevance Development

Passive learning from online courses that tell marketers what to do, but not necessarily help them understand how and why to do it is not the answer. Who wants to spend dollars and time watching a course only to go back to work without any idea of how to produce a work product that will help them develop new skills and put them to work?

B2B marketers need to learn how to create a well-built persona. Then they need to understand how to put it to work within a content marketing strategy. And how to execute in a way that’s digitally relevant for the buyers they aim to engage and enable.

 

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Filed Under: Digital Relevance Tagged With: b2b personas, buyer enablement, content marketing effectiveness

Comments

  1. Bob Leonard says

    June 9, 2015 at 11:02 AM

    Done, Ardath! As somebody who spends an hour a day on Udemy, and another reading books (I have Digital Relevance on my desktop now), and another with blog posts and online articles just trying to keep up; I’d love to see a digital skills development course from a name (brand) that I trust.

    Reply
    • Ardath Albee says

      June 9, 2015 at 11:10 AM

      Thanks, Bob!

      Reply
  2. Dee says

    October 12, 2015 at 6:58 PM

    Keep me posted digital skills development

    Reply
    • Ardath Albee says

      October 13, 2015 at 8:05 AM

      Will do!

      Reply
  3. digitalbrief Online Courses says

    January 19, 2017 at 2:33 AM

    Hello!

    I definitely think that this should be well thought out and done in a smart way, it is important to get out there and market your business. This is a great information and examples, thanks for sharing!

    Reply

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