We both know that there's a big problem with B2B marketing because it's either not effective or it doesn't generate enough revenue leaving most business owners wondering why they even bother. I'm about to reveal why marketing is broken, who and what's to blame and how you can put it. Right. And this has got nothing to do with a lockdown.
Hi, I'm Nigel Maine. I'm the founder of salesXchange. And to begin with, here are some shocking statistics,
- up to 40% of businesses that receive investment fail
- up to 75% of businesses who received investment don't make any money for their investors
- and a whopping 95% of businesses who forecast their performance, never achieve it.
- Ten out of the top 20 reasons for startups failing are marketing related
And here's the kicker from fortune five hundreds to businesses throughout the UK, chief marketing officers only keep their jobs for an average of 18 months. And I kid you not. This has been known in the press and online and with recruitment companies since 2016. So I hope I've got your attention. This will only take a few minutes, but I'm about to lay down the foundation, why marketing has failed for so many businesses and what can be done to put it right. So what's behind this failure rate. Well, in my opinion, it's primary reason is laziness. It's flabby marketers who created a massive industry selling B2B snake oil in the form of marketing automation software. Let me explain; back in the fifties, 1950s, new business was achieved through telesales and cold calling. And it stayed that way until, uh, mid say the mid two thousands.
When we got email automation. And with that, we got spam and later around 2008, 2009 marketing automation platforms like Eloqua, Marketo and Pardot came onto the scene and all the CMOs bought into hook line and sinker, and convinced the CEOs to invest in it too. Think about this though Eloqua was bought by Oracle. Exact Target was bought by Salesforce and later renamed, Pardot and Marketo was recently bought by Adobe. So it is pretty clear. These companies were making some serious cash to be bought by these software companies now on the face of it, what could be wrong, but here's the problem. Marketing automation and attraction marketing assumes that exceptional content has been created and a demand is generated and it's called good copywriting. The trouble is no one wants to write engaging and educational B2B content because the sales person wants to be the dominant party. And the supplying company wants to keep its intelligence or intellectual property close to its chest, allowing the sales person to be the provider of that intelligence or IP.
So additionally automation software forces a transaction by demanding an email address in the first place. So this tiny piece of information becomes a KPI. As a marketing qualified lead, it gets passed to sales and almost immediately the supplying company, the sales department within, within the supplying company, hounds down the prospect and telephones them like a typical cold call. So bear this in mind, every B2B organization researches new products before connecting with a supplying company. In fact, I think it's 75 to 80% of the buying process is completed before a sales person is invited into a meeting.
So cold calling someone because the supplier got an email is going to upset pretty much anyone. And if cold calling is a primary activity and someone actually comes across another person, a prospect that's in the market, which is a 200 to one shot, then you'll be an also ran because they're already researching.
And if you've even got a deal in there, you'd end up having to massively discount it. So the above describes the persistent tension between marketing and sales. If sales failed, they'd complain that the leads were useless. Yet, marketing would swear blind that sales couldn't do their job. Now on the subject of content, firstly, the supplier has to segment their target market. And then actually you write for the personas they want to sell to, trust me, this rarely happens. Then there are three categories of content that are absolutely essential and that's, it's laid out as primary, secondary and product content. And this part is really, I mean, it's really important. Primary articles are long form thought leadership, blogs or articles between 2000 and 5,000 words, that act as your main attraction pieces found and recognized by the search engines. These articles sit on page one of Google and drive traffic to your site with a call to action, to your product pages, your product pages in the same way, primary articles are to be viewed as thought leadership pieces, your product pages need to be as comprehensive as possible to the point of teaching your browser, how to use installed and troubleshoot. Anything to do with your product, providing links to your contact us page, telephone numbers, FAQ's and chat. And finally the call to action is to encourage them to contact you for demonstration or talk to presales.
I hope that makes sense, and then finally the secondary is your primary and secondary. Your secondary articles can be anything you like because you're not worried about using them for SEO or anything like that. They're just, I suppose, life pieces, you can include either staff parties, CSR events, charity stuff. And of course the Christmas jumper competitions, but so the same logic needs to be applied with primary and second with primary and product content. When you're producing podcasts or videos, they also have to include when you do them transcripts, otherwise Google doesn't know what you're saying. Now, what I've just mentioned is the foundational structure for content for your business.
And it's actually what SEO is all about. And if you haven't got this in place, then you are not playing by the rules that Google has specified. I mean, we do this on all our long form articles and they appear on page one of Google within minutes of going live against >multiple different keywords. Now one seriously important point to give you something else to think about. And that is your content stays on your website for years, potentially unless you retire it. That means possibly the employees who have already left are still having a negative impact on your business because of the aggregated effect of poor content. So the answer there is to is to rewrite, edit, or retire the content and, and that's what your site map is supposed to do again, that's what Google is expecting you to do. There's no point wasting money on advertising banners or pay-per-click if the rest of your marketing infrastructure is not fit for purpose. The fact that you've got someone interested is great, but then you've got to show them what else you've got.
But if you can't send them somewhere from a landing page and present multiple options on a thank you page, you're probably wasting your time now. I know what I've said there's a lot to take on board, but it's really, really important to get this on the inside as the success and profitability of your business. Absolutely 100% depends on it. And that brings me to the B2B marketing reset playbook for 2020. Now this playbook we've provided, we've created, provides everything
you n eed to ensure that your marketing plan is actually fit for purpose. Think of it as looking through the lenses of the playbook, you'll be able to gauge and assess how your marketing should develop now. And for the future. Now the playbook will also help your talent acquisition team accurately analyze the CV's of senior marketing personnel to ensure they're able to deliver on your plan.
Now, additionally, you'll benefit in two ways. You're either reduce the numbers of new business staff you need and maintain your income, or you'll increase profitability without increasing staff. Now that this is quite straightforward. There's 35 diagrams and a corresponding explanation on each page, every page or stage links to the next. And the whole strategy is designed to make sense from start to finish.
We've even included a revised organizational chart, scalable for an enterprise to show how you can exploit the most effective way of driving your business and profits forwards and upwards. I'm not going to explain every single page on this video, but what I'm going to do is simply invite you to download the playbook with the link that's above or below and decide for yourself so my call to action to you is to say that if you have any queries, please get in touch either by phone or email, the details are on our website. And of course we're able to offer, help support or consultancy. So that's it for me. I hope you like the playbook and it helps.
And I'll see you in the next video. Bye for now.