60% of marketers say they are challenged by a lack of integration across channels.
Enterprise Content Marketing Research: Where Does Success Lie in 2014?, Content Marketing Institute, April 2014.
B2B buying has changed dramatically. 70% of the buyer’s journey happens online while buyers are anonymous. Digital marketing is clearly the best way to reach these buyers. Yet many marketers still struggle to connect marketing spend to revenue. Without that connection, finance has no way to know marketing’s impact.
All of this has B2B marketers in a tight spot. Vanity metrics are out. The business needs to see proof of marketing’s financial impact on pipeline and revenue. It needs a plan to win greater market share at a lower cost. Marketers, you cannot do this alone! You need a partner in finance to fund your plans.
How do you create the partnership? B2B in the Black is a great place to start. A committed team of successful CMOs and CFOs shares tricks and techniques they use to create reporting models, budgets and true partnerships.
Your mission is to know the ROI for every dollar spent. To track sales back to the first-touch cookie level. It’s not going to happen overnight but, when it does, it’s a game-changer. Every dollar invested can be tracked to revenue, allowing you to actively manage and improve pipeline performance.
Working together with finance, you can transform marketing from a cost center to a profit center by:
- Proving marketing’s impact on revenue
- Creating marketing budgets that drive lowest-cost revenue
- Delivering C-suite-worthy marketing metrics
- Uncovering robust, data-driven routes to revenue growth
When it comes to reporting, the proof is in the eye of the beholder. So you must create different dashboards and report slices for various stakeholders so they can focus on the impact of their specific business unit or team. Reserve the all-in details for internal marketing sessions and leverage roll-ups for the executive team. When everyone has a clear direction, the gods of ABM are happy.
