Marketing: Why not focus on 70% of B2B Buying Processes, which are completed before Sales get involved?

A series of interesting facts and figures, which should make every marketer rethink their content offerings. A little bit black and white and banging on Marketers (while not covering the other side of the house, the Sales force, which very often only sees Marketing as the T-Shirt and Coffee Cup department).

The truth is in the middle: Marketing needs to concentrate on more high quality content less blabla. And we need to go beyond traditional measurement systems. Not the Web and landing pages of a vendor are changing the game. The presence and awareness beyond these platforms makes the difference: Presence at Independence platforms, good influencer marketing, eloquent and competent spokes persons in industry associations and in social media … But this is something hard to measure for the Excel-arators in the Marketing departments. Time to think differently.

And marketers: Be bold. It is not only Sales making the deal. We are responsible for the 70 % of the Business–to-Business (B2B) buying process, before customers even speak to Sales. The downside: We do not get honored for it and typical Marketing measurement systems don’t take this into consideration. They want Click-Through-Rates and useless registration forms to be filled out.

Marketing leaders: The decision is made somewhere else.

Eighty to 90 percent of marketing collateral plays no useful role in the selling process, … Markowitz also states that:

• 70% of the Business–to-Business (B2B) buying process is completed before a buyer is willing to speak to Sales
• ..
• 18 to 24 percent of leads are contributed by Marketing

… Eighty-eight percent of B2B executives go online to research purchase decisions, according to a 2014 Chief Marketing Officer Council survey, but only 9 percent trust the content they find on vendor’s websites. Executives’ number one complaint about marketing content, according to The Economist Group, is that it’s just not useful. Too much waffle, too little detail. …
Organizations in general publish far too much of ego, vanity content that’s high on hyperbole and low on information. I know of numerous situations where when we deleted up to 90 percent of the content on a website, sales went up.

And yet there seems to be no end to the marketing content that is flooding the Web. …

Source: Is Content Marketing Just the Same Old Marketing?