5 eMarketing Status Quo Beliefs to Challenge

I want to thank my long-time friend and business associate Ardath Albee for guesting today. 

Ardath is an expert in the field of B2B eMarketing Strategies.  Her new book, 'eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale' rocks!  In this post, Ardath shares the status quo beliefs she sees that hold companies back with regard to their eMarketing initiatives. Her insights are right on, as always. Enjoy!

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B2B Marketers are operating within a fickle buying environment. Buyers have more access to information, peers and worldwide perspectives than ever before. They’ve taken control over how they want to buy, pushing salespeople to build relationships during the early stages of the purchasing process. All this change necessitates that marketers challenge their traditional marketing standards – as Rebel would say, “the way we’ve always done it.”

Challenging our status quo beliefs is critical for marketers who want to step up their ability to attract, engage and inform prospects in ways that help them choose to become buyers.

Take a look at 5 status quo beliefs marketers should challenge:  

1. A Download Form Submission is a Sales Opportunity

For some time, marketing has considered that anyone who opts in for their newsletter, downloads a white paper or attends a webinar is a fully-formed lead. Marketers have actually caused the friction people experience when confronted with a form because we’ve been trained to expect a totally irrelevant sales call after we click submit. There’s a reason why research shows that 75% of the people who visit your landing pages will leave without filling out the form. 

2. Eyeballs are Still the Most Valid Form of Measurement

Opens and clicks were two measurements that marketers used to judge the success of campaigns. That’s because those are what we had. Today, we have the technology to help us measure much more of the behavior in response to our online marketing programs. With the executive mandate for marketing accountability, marketers with thriving eMarketing programs will be measuring via time, number of interactions, dialogue and activity that triggers conversions to sales. Not to mention customer acquisition. Marketing’s role has expanded along with all the ways available to measure success with metrics that have traction.

3. Content Marketing is Just a Campaign

Perhaps the most pressing status quo to be challenged is the idea of start and stop campaigns versus continuous content flows that tell a consistent story to engage prospects over time. Given the way most corporate budgets are structured around quarters, this belief almost requires a cultural shift in thinking—not to mention measurements. In lieu of that, marketers need to determine the best way to “sell” a campaign structure to their companies while executing content marketing across the longer term. Executing a 3-month campaign when the buying cycle is 9 months or longer won’t get the job done. In fact, continuing to operate this way will just open the door for your competitors who address prospects’ needs across the entirety of their buying process.

4. We Know What Sales Needs

Unless marketers have actually engaged sales in defining a lead and developed a closed-loop feedback system to incorporate insights from sales about the leads they’re working, then I doubt this is true. Considering the B2B Marketing Skills survey recently released by Genius.com that found nearly 1 in 10 marketers never meet with their sales counterparts, I’d say most marketers should go find out if what they think sales needs is true. I’ve sat in countless meetings where marketing assured me that they knew just what sales needed, only to discover a number of nuanced insights that revealed big gaps in marketing knowledge once sales entered the conversation.

5. We Can Control How Our Customers Buy

No, you can’t. Give this one up now. Go out and be helpful. Provide so much value they WANT to engage with your company. Nuff said.

This only scratches the surface of status quo beliefs that should be challenged to free marketers up to produce the best eMarketing strategies possible. I’m sure you can think of other beliefs that should be on this list – let us know. If any of you have been challenging some of these beliefs within your companies, Rebel and I would both love to hear what you’ve learned. The point is that the digital environment changes so quickly that this list will continue to grow. With each challenge you cross off this list, you’ll be better aligned to deliver what your prospects need to build a relationship with your company.

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About Ardath Albee

Ardath Albee, CEO of her firm, Marketing Interactions, Inc. is a B2B Marketing Strategist. She applies over 20 years of business management and marketing experience to help companies with complex sales use eMarketing strategies to generate more and better sales opportunities.