1. The idea of intentionally designing content to address a clearly-identified stage in the buying decision process
resonated strongly with many of the participants - but it was acknowledged that much of their existing content
had been prepared without this clarity of purpose.
Many accepted the need to significantly refine their content strategy, and to place a strong emphasis on thought
leadership and issue-led material. When it came to preferred media, video was seen as being particularly effective.
“Despite all the publicity and promotion associated with lead scoring and nurturing, it’s clear that these disciplines
are still in their infancy for many B2B organisations. My two abiding impressions from these workshops were the
need to develop real clarity about your purpose and your processes before investing in technology, and the critical
importance of marketing working hand-in-hand with sales to agree, define and, where necessary, redefine lead
scoring frameworks.”
“Agencies should be an extension of your team. They should impart knowledge, not just run campaigns.”
“Give the content legs. Create Once, Publish Everywhere (COPE).”
The key idea shared is to offer value. A question that marketers should ask is, “What do we want our customer to
think, feel and do?”
Key takeaways
Build a business case for SEO – whilst the return on investment from paid search marketing is more apparent,
in the long term it is more effective to use both techniques to achieve marketing success. Look to collect
information and data that will support investment in SEO.
Get SEO and PPC working in synergy – returns are often greater when paid search and SEO marketing are run
together. Look at getting both channels to work with synergy with each other.
Look to improve measurement and tracking – in order to justify continual investment and dedication of
resources to integrated search, improve your measurement and tracking and look to keep records on how
your efforts have paid dividends.
Lack of effective techniques used within email
Only a small minority of companies attending had any plans to optimise their emails for mobile. They all 'knew'
they should do it but didn't have any immediate plans.
Minimal testing was being done by B2B marketers, and of those that did, most only tested subject lines. The use of
call-to-actions and landing pages were also not being tested or optimised with the majority of brands.
However some companies were using advanced email marketing techniques such as using triggers, using dynamic
content to personalise the email, and implementing content strategies. Those that used such strategies had a
higher success rate from email marketing than those that did not use any of these techniques.
The challenges of data and getting started in marketing automation
While there were some B2B companies who are making use of marketing automation and seeing results from their
efforts and expenditure, the vast majority are only really just getting started. Not knowing where to start was a
consistent message. Through discussion it was agreed that mapping the lifecycle and understanding the data was a
good first step.
Data consolidation and ‘single customer view’ were areas where a lot of companies were struggling. In addition
being able to get data specialist resource within the company assigned to do this work and have this prioritised
over other data and insight requests was a challenge for several companies.
Everyone was interested in what factors were most beneficial for lead scoring. No one was conducting behavioural
lead scoring from web behaviour, those that were lead scoring tended to focus on transactional behaviour e.g.
which products were last purchased and their value. There was some discussion about utilising social media
activity to enhance a lead scoring programme but no one was doing this.
Know how your customers purchase – draw out your customer lifecycle as you know it, put it on the wall, add
to it when you get a new piece of insight or campaign that works.

2. Empower your data specialists to derive insights about the lifecycle, purchasing behaviour and customer
profiles – add these insights to your customer lifecycle and start to define how you can optimise existing
processes with marketing automation and how you could influence the lifecycle with new automated
marketing campaigns.
Test regularly and constantly – everything you do should be a test, with a defined outcome and learning for
the lifecycle/data. Empower marketing to challenge the norm and present campaign ideas that may positively
influence the lifecycle or test your data segments. If it doesn't work no problem, as long as you've learnt
something. Record it, note it down on the lifecycle diagram.
Identify the resource intensive processes – for example manual data handling or custom email creative design.
See if you can improve the efficiency of these with marketing automation practices.
Appoint an automation champion – becoming an effective marketing automation orientated business takes
time and lots of testing. The champion should drive it forward and have enough senior authority to prioritise
across the business, but every marketer, sales person, data specialist, and campaign manager should be
bought into the benefits and given the scope to effect change in existing business processes.