4 Areas of Challenge in B2B Marketing

Browsing my LinkedIn Groups today, I came across a discussion started by Holger Schulze on the B2B Technology Marketing Community that got me thinking. Holger asked:

Can you use ONE WORD to describe the biggest challenge facing B2B Marketing today?

Holger always asks these fantastic, insightful questions. At the time I checked, the question had received 85 one-word responses. Considering them in combination, I was intrigued so of course I entered them all into a spreadsheet and started doing a bit of armchair analysis. Here's what I came up with.

The responses (from my perspective) fall into four distinct areas of challenge for B2B marketers:

• Management
• Execution
• Mindset
• Market

Even more interesting, when counting up the number of responses after I'd divied them up, management, execution and mindset each received 22. Market received 15.

The distribution makes me wonder if marketers are still overly focused on internal stuff rather than markets? However you look at it, the answers point to some clear indications of a few things that need to be ironed out.

Here's my interpretation of each of the four areas of challenge:

[*Note some words submitted by more than one person.]

Management:

The overall standouts in what I've labeled management fall into several clusters:

• Accountability, Measurement, Revenue, Sales
• Budget, Profitability, Credit
• Goals, Effectiveness, Success
• Professionalism, People, Time, Collaboration
• Automation, Integration, Overcomplicated
• Branding, Communication

Proving ROI and the alignment of marketing spend with results have risen as imperatives for marketers and are obviously proving challenging. This can also be tied to technology challenges as well as the overall integration of marketing programs across the enterprise. Talent, time and teamwork are proving difficult to solve for marketing departments with limited resources and an ever-widening scope of responsibilities.

Execution:

The words attributed to execution are evidence of difficulty in matching marketing programs to the challenges of management as well as to market receptiveness.

• Attention, Awareness, Proposition, Relevance
• Engagement, Follow-up, Relationship
• Clarity, Consistency, Disconnect
• Leads, Target
• Content

Relevance received the highest number of responses across the board. That only one person responded with content suprised me a bit, although a number of these could be reflective of the quality of content that's being produced. Importantly, what becomes obvious is that all stages across the entirety of the funnel appear to be challenging—from beginning to end.

Mindset:

This area shows evidence that marketing is changing so quickly and comprehensively that we need to do some work to help marketers adapt in order to equip them to resolve the other areas of challenge.

• Competence, Confidence, Creativity, Focus, Flexibility
• Dullness, Differenetiation, Saturation
• Insightfulness, Listening, Ill-defined
• Fear, Obsolescence, Uncertainty

Marketers cannot be at their most effective when they lack confidence in what they are doing or realize that their skillsets don't prepare them to address today's markets. If you look at the third bullet, it's obvious that there's still work to be done to get to know our markets so damn well that the programs we create for them [not for us] will help us to overcome many of the challenges identified by Holger's question.

Market:

It's important to remember that these challenges were voiced by marketers and apply to their perceptions of what they think their target audiences think. Or even how they perceive the marketplace.

• Clutter, Hype, Noise
• Choices, Commoditization, Fragmentation
• Skepticism, Trust, Value, Loyalty

The ease of publishing has definitely made it a world of too much information. Audiences have changed and fragmented and the ability to gain more insight into vendors without ever speaking to them allows perceptions to form that may or may not be realistic. But, it's what it is and we've got to rise above it to do our jobs effectively and answer the challenges of the other three areas.

When you evaluate management, execution, mindset and marketing, you can see how one feeds into another. The best part of this analysis is that you can also start seeing paths to resolution.

The one-word challenges play off one another so that if you solve one cluster, it's highly likely that another will diminish. This said, I also find it interesting that personas or buyer knowledge didn't make the list. If that's resolved and applied, a lot of these words might vanish from the list.

It's also important to note that 4 marketers said their answer was a definitive NO. That there was not one word to define the biggest challenge to B2B marketing today. I agree with them.

What do you think?

Would you have arranged the one-word responses differently?

If I can add my own word (beyond NO) - I think it would be Interaction - but you probably could have guessed that!

Comments

[Holger Schulze]

Great analysis Ardath! I was surprised how insightful one-word responses to a question on the LinkedIn B2B Technology Marketing Community can be.

[Ardath Albee]

Thanks, Holger! I was fascinated by the insights as I moved the words around and thought about what they meant as a whole.

[Mark McClure]

Holger's challenge would make a great small group break-out session. Perfect for mind mapping.

Ardath, I was struck by your linking of "buying personas" with "...audiences have changed and fragmented...".

I also recalled Toffler's "FutureShock" from all those years ago... the authors talked about fragmentation of interests and channels. And that was not only pre-Internet but pre-PC networks!

Thanks for crafting this post... a great example of how to take data of interest and write about it for a target audience!

[Susan Fantle]

What a great analysis Ardath. Actually, I personally contributed the word "uncertainty." At the time, I wasn't thinking of it as a "mindset" issue so much as a "market" issue. That is, uncertainty about the future cost of doing business (taxes, healthcare cost requirements, etc.) and uncertainty about whether the market would regain the economic confidence needed to move forward with desired purchases. I thought it was interesting that the answers were all over the board, yet you've brought them together in a very insightful way. Thanks.

[Gejohnson777]

It seems the most important word has been overlooked: customer

[Ardath Albee]

Hi Mark -

Thanks so much for your comment. I hadn't thought about Toffler, but that's an interesting parallel.

Hi Susan -

Thanks so much for sharing your word and point of view about it. I think a number of these words can likely apply to different areas depending on the interpretation. I'm glad you liked mine!

Hi Gejohnson777 - You're right. I introduced the idea with buyer personas, but - now that you've pointed it out - the word customer is definitely missing. What do you think that says?

[Mark Panes]

One area of challange for B2B marketing is of course SEO and SEM. It's hard to get ranked when you are just starting out. It takes a lot of skill, time, and technique in order to get results.

[Advertising Directory]

Thanks Ardath Albee for another brilliant post. This is very important to understand your customers online research and buying habit. It is not a myth that lead generation is a critical part of B2B marketing initiatives. But the reality is, most B2B Marketers are not effectively utilizing search and social marketing to drive leads through the sales pipeline.

[Michael Kelly]

As of today, there are almost 600 answers to the One Word question. Anyone want to help update the count and the analysis?
I'll help.
mkelly@techtel.com

[מנהלת חשבונות]

That only one person has responded to the contents surprised me a little thing although some of these may reflect the quality of content.