While they would be nice to have, the Future of B2B Marketing involves more than science fiction inspired predictions about cranial implants and neural marketing dashboards. Business Marketers are simultaneously investing in a more human approach to business content while also further tapping in to the power of data. Which innovations make sense for your B2B company?
From predictive analytics to more scientifically understanding buyer content consumption preferences, there’s a world of opportunity when it comes to optimizing B2B marketing performance.
In this post I’ve curated a collection of reports and one very clever infographic on topics that should be front and center for B2B marketers in Q4 and on into 2015. Click on each report image to download (some require registration).
Insight Venture Partners – Periodic Table of B2B Digital Marketing Metrics and Glossary – A very handy guide of digital marketing tactics with corresponding industry averages for performance. It also includes a glossary for the uninitiated to B2B digital marketing metrics.
Chief!Marketer: B2B Marketing Tool Kit – With insights from a collection of B2B marketing experts, this report from Chief!Marketer offers advice on direct mail, analytics, lead gen, automation, social media, content marketing and team building.
AdvertisingAge: B-to-B Marketing Fact Pack – A collection of stats and insights as well as some of the biggest B2B marketers in the world including AT&T, Microsoft, IBM, GE, American Express and many more. Industry stats cover CRM, automation, social media, content marketing, mobile marketing and lead generation.
CMI & MarketingProfs: 2015 B2B Content Marketing Benchmark, Budgets and Trends North America – Well over 100 statistics from this 5th edition of the report cover overall trends, tactics and where B2B marketers are investing in content marketing. A great tool for planning 2015 content marketing programs.
Technology Marketing Community on LinkedIn: B2B Content Marketing Spotlight Report – Holger Schulze, who runs the tech marketing community on LinkedIn partnered with a number of sponsors to identify new content marketing trends, challenges and best practices. This is a great complement to the report from CMI and MarketingProfs.
Marketo: The Definitive Guide to Lead Generation Workbook – Informative and entertaining, this workbook gives B2B marketers a fun way to collect the information necessary to plan and implement a more effective lead generation effort.
Circle research: B2B Market Segmentation – This report from UK based Circle research outlines approaches to B2B customer segmentation and how to implement a segmentation model.
LinkedIn: The 2014 Professional Content Consumption Report – Understanding how business buyers consume content is an essential part of optimizing the B2B buyer journey. Based on the information discovery and consumption behaviors of professionals on LinkedIn this report offers some very interesting insights into optimizing content for attract and engage content marketing efforts.
Demand Gen Report: 2014 B2B Buyer Behavior Survey – This report helps answer key questions about about social media and content affect buyers during the sales cycle. How has the buying process evolved? What kind of content wins more deals? What role does social media play in the research process?
Digital Marketing Depot: Market Intelligence Report – B2B Marketing Automation Platforms 2014 – A Marketer’s Guide – This report provides a breakdown of the marketing automation software market, trends and platforms. Platform features are compared (Adobe Campaign, Act-On, eTrigue, HubSpot, Marketo, Oracle Eloqua, Pardot, Sales Engine, Salesfusion, Silverpop and Teradata. The report also offers advice on selecting a marketing automation solution.
Demand Metric & Influitive: Customer Marketing – Improving Customer Satisfaction & Revenue Impact – Investing all your B2B marketing dollars into new customer acquisition is a lost opportunity when it comes to growing revenues from current customers and inspiring advocacy. This benchmark report from Demand Metric and Influitive outlines everything from the current status of customer marketing to tactcs, metrics, skills and what’s next.
IDC: The Math of Modern Marketing – How Predictive Analytics Makes Marketing More Effective – This white paper discusses how a combination of structured and unstructured data creates a more complete view of the customer that can further the conversation, reveal patterns of customer intent, and provide predictive guidance on future customer behavior.
BONUS
Another resource I’d like to add to this collection is a recent post that summarizes a survey of 200 qualified B2B Marketing professionals by the folks at Software Advice. It’s not a report in PDF format, but is a blog post chock full of insights, graphs and comparisons to other similar B2B marketing reports.
Software Advice – B2B Demand Generation Benchmark IndustryView 2014
Top Photo: Shutterstock
