Forrester Research: B2B Marketing Trends and Predictions for 2012

Forrester Research: B2B Marketing Trends and Predictions for 2012

Download this report to learn the latest trends in marketing technology, how tools are impacting reporting and measurement and what marketers will do to meet content demands.

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Forrester Research: Metrics That Matter for B2B Marketers

To succeed, marketers need to focus on the metrics that matter most to executives. Download this report to find out what metrics are important to the c-suite and how to measure your impact across the organization.

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Aberdeen Group: B2B Social Media Marketing

This benchmark report from the Aberdeen Group examines the pressures and challenges social media presents for B2B marketing and the path taken by top performing companies to achieve success.

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New: Data Rich: The Payoff of Marketing Measurement on Revenue Performance

While the pressure to justify spend may have jumpstarted the measurement movement in marketing, it is clear that there is a big appetite for insights beyond basic ROI metrics. As tools and processes continue to improve, the visibility of marketing’s role in revenue generation is climbing.

According to the DemandGen Report survey, more than 4 in 10 CEOs (42%) are now actively tracking marketing’s impact on revenue, and 21% of CFOs now have direct visibility into the revenue performance of marketing. A majority (63%) of respondents said CMOs are now providing reports that show marketing’s impact on revenue.channels, including email, direct mail, advertising, the Web, call centers, trade shows, partners and the sales force.

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A Clearer View of the New Buyer Via the Cloud

These days there is an explosion of marketing applications available "in the cloud". But each application is its own data silo. However, the continued evolution of cloud computing has enabled leading providers to build open platforms that provide integration and connect the dots between this growing list of applications.

Because today’s buyers are relying more on their own web research and feedback from peers, marketing and sales professionals need as much intelligence as possible on their digital behavior. While all analytics are valuable, the ability to integrate different solutions and create a holistic view of their behavior makes it much more powerful.

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Dare to Compare: Marketing Automation Trends and Benchmarks

The purpose of this study is to help marketers understand how their performance compares against other marketers that have adopted marketing automation capabilities as well as provide insight into major trends and best practices across B2B and B2C companies.

The results are in and it’s clear what’s needed to get ahead – leading B2B and B2C companies of all sizes across industries are tapping into the power of marketing automation to drive tremendous benefits and fuel their growth.

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Marketing Sherpa: Email Marketing Trends

MarketingSherpa digs into the most significant challenges to email marketing effectiveness in 2011. What strategies are the best B2B marketers using to break through the clutter and engage buyers?

While relevancy will be the most significant challenge to email marketing effectiveness in 2011, there is a range of second tier issues - from quantifying email marketing ROI to growing email lists - that are equally challenging to marketers in all channels and have been addressed in this study.

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Pushing Past Send: Get More from Email Marketing

Compare your current email marketing technology against four core areas where marketing automation extends the power of email – audience targeting, automating marketing tactics, enabling sales and measuring results.

It’s estimated that 90% of today’s email is considered spam. Cutting through all of that clutter requires thinking past the send button to leverage a mix of tactics that will drive significant and measurable results from all of your marketing, not just email.

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Aberdeen Group: Crossing the Chasm with Lead Management

This report, based on lead management and demand generation best practices from 213 organizations, highlights current adoption trends and the pressures driving automated lead management investments.

Highlights from companies covered in the report include:

• 90% improved company-wide annual revenue
• 88% improved click-through rate on e-mail
• 87% improved annual growth in customer acquisition

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Aberdeen Group: Lead Scoring

Learn from the best! This valuable report identifies best practices in lead scoring and prioritization by analyzing the processes, capabilities, and performance of 180 top performing organizations. The Aberdeen Group offers hard numbers demonstrating increased revenue, higher conversion rates and lower cost per conversion at companies using lead scoring and prioritization.

All companies are pressured to maximize sales and marketing effectiveness to increase conversion, increase lead to sales revenue, and increase top-line revenue. This study explores the strategic value of lead scoring and prioritization techniques and isolates the processes, capabilities and technology enablers that allow Best-in-Class organizations to achieve superior performance in revenue, lead conversion rates, and cost per lead.

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Investing in the Customer Lifecycle

Financial services companies today must compete in a rapidly changing business environment. Customers are increasingly reluctant to commit their financial resources to a single brand, and they are also more likely to take their business to a competing provider when an existing relationship fails to meet their expectations.

Customer attrition is a familiar, long-standing challenge for financial institutions, and there is clearly room for improvement here; according to an Accenture survey, up to 30% of a typical bank’s customer base is vulnerable to offerings from competitors.

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Reading Your Buyer's Digital Body Language (TM)

The traditional B2B transaction has been almost entirely a sales function rooted in face-to-face interactions. Now salespeople are increasingly dependent on their marketing teams to provide insights into which prospects are showing the strongest digital buying signals.

Over the past two to three years, the buying cycle for complex B2B products and services has fundamentally changed. As the buying process moves online, salespeople are getting less face time with clients. They are increasingly dependent on their marketing teams to provide them with insights into which of their prospects are showing the strongest buying signals.

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Revenue Performance Management Whitepaper

CEOs know the score: Grow fast enough, and all is forgiven. Miss the number and you’re toast. This white paper examines how Revenue Performance Management can be used to manage a company’s interactions with buyers through the entire purchase process to enable dramatically more predictable, rapid and profitable revenue growth.

Despite technology innovations of the past decade, revenue remains a black box. Most executives simply don’t know which sales and marketing strategies actually work on a repeatable basis. To illustrate, put yourself in your CEO’s shoes. Ask your sales and marketing heads what the best strategy is for growing the business by 25% next year. Do you get a consistent answer?

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Fueling the Revenue Engine

Generating predictable revenue requires plans and processes that look beyond lead generation to deal acceleration and targeted marketing throughout the marketing and sales funnels.

Most marketing departments are now intimately involved in revenue creation. Not only are they driving leads at the top of the sales funnel they are also providing content and market intelligence to keep prospects warm as they advance through the middle and later phases of the funnel.

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The Business Case for Integrated Demand Generation

As competition intensifies and growth expectations increase, B2B marketers are under pressure to deliver measurable results and clearly demonstrate the value they provide. To succeed in this new era of accountability, marketers must consistently reach the right people through the right channels with the right message.

To drive marketing performance to new levels, B2B marketers have begun to embrace the concept of integrated demand generation and acquire the skills necessary to maximize their investments in underlying platform technologies. Unlike point solutions that enhance marketing in an individual channel, integrated demand generation platforms integrate and synchronize the whole spectrum of offline and online marketing channels, including email, direct mail, advertising, the Web, call centers, trade shows, partners and the sales force.

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CSO Insights: Optimizing Lead Generation

CSOs and CMOs are realizing that they need to find ways to help sales reps achieve higher targets by increasing their efficiency. Now many executives want to understand which investments assure the highest results?

As CSOs and CMOs realize they to make their salespeople more effective, they strive to optimize lead generation. CSO Insights, a sales research firm, recently completed a Sales Performance Optimization study of 1,275 firms worldwide. The study found that companies excelling at demand generation program management – the art of clearly identifying a lead, delivering the targeted message to the prospect and tracking all activity to better understand the process – had higher conversion rates with more salespeople meeting their quotas.

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Codynamic Lead Scoring

There is an opportunity to realize significant gains in the selling process by optimizing what happens at the top end of the sales funnel - particularly the way leads are handled before they get passed onto sales. How can marketing seize this opportunity? One way is to improve and automate what many companies already do manually: lead scoring.

Companies must quantify the value of leads, or prospect assets, based on their expected value. Lead scoring systems make the top end of the sales funnel more efficient by enabling marketing to organize, prioritize and nurture leads before they are given to sales. Lead scores can track prospects’ behavior, including web and promotion response activity, creating dynamic scores that can increase or decrease over time.

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Automating Demand Generation

How leading companies are using management techniques, traditionally applied to manufacturing, to optimize and accelerate the demand generation process.

Today’s B2B companies face serious challenges: increasingly saturated marketing channels, difficult-to-reach prospects and competition for buyers’ attention. To greatly influence sales conversions, companies need to start at the top of the sales funnel - where prospects are identified, interest is captured, demand is generated and leads are nurtured. Marketers need to be able to clearly see the opportunities and impediments in their demand generation processes, so they’re better able to break the bottlenecks, eliminate waste and strategically allocate resources to produce results. Many of today’s leading companies are implementing management techniques traditionally used in manufacturing for this demand generation process.

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