I’ve worked with enough B2B manufacturers over the last 10+ years to say with confidence that most don’t really know how they should define “success” in marketing.
I’m also confident that this uncertainty stems from the fact that most of these organizations — whether they’re OEMs, contract manufacturers or distributors — are largely sales-centric organizations that haven’t historically invested much (if anything at all!) in marketing.
In fact, to many in this camp, the word “marketing” is synonymous with trade show support, print ads, brochures and making the website look nice. So the idea that marketing could produce any kind of meaningful business result isn’t even on their minds.
Taking it a step further, those who do attempt to measure marketing success are usually dialed in on the wrong things — mistaking KPIs like Google rankings, traffic and “leads” for business outcomes.
So let me make this simple for you:
Marketing success = marketing-sourced pipeline.
If marketing is not contributing to meaningful business outcomes, why are we doing it at all?
In this video, I take you through the following:
- Why your North Star success metric should be marketing-sourced pipeline
- How to use marketing KPIs like the ones mentioned above in the context of the bigger business outcomes you’re trying to achieve (instead of using them as the end-all-be-all)
- Why trying to measure everything often forces companies to make bad long-term decisions
- What you should be doing during the first year to set yourself up for a marketing program that will source pipeline over the long term
