Demand creation budgets shrank in 2017, but SiriusDecisions made an interesting discovery: The highest performers beat the competition by spending that limited budget very differently. While average performers bought ads, high-performers leveraged white papers, trade shows, and interactive assets in new and interesting ways. Based on the findings of this report we have some EMEA Marketing Recommendations to help you continue to spend your limited budgets wisely while still beating the competition.

EMEA Marketing Recommendations#1 – MAP’s

Many EMEA marketers are planning to integrate with a MAP (Marketing Automation Platform) in the next 24 months. MAPs are quickly becoming the cornerstone of the modern B2B marketing technology stack because they are more efficient, more powerful, and more cost-effective than using a diverse set of point tools.

Used well, marketing automation can tell the story of how your customers interact with your brand, your content, and the people in your company, throughout the entire customer journey.

Why add marketing automation to your stack?

A MAP can help you organize and manage those complex and time-consuming tasks that need to be coordinated with each other, including:

Social media marketing and other early-funnel tactics to attract leadsContent marketing that helps leads progress along the funnel and convert to salesEmail campaigns to generate engagement, nurture prospects, and onboard new customersAsset creation, such as email and landing page templatesForms and landing pages to capture lead dataAutomated lead management, including qualification and hand-off to salesList and data management, including segmentation for target marketingWebsite analytics that reveals what people are interested in, and how they engage with your siteCampaign analytics that shows which campaigns really work and which channels deliverCoordination with sales, including sharing customer relationship management (CRM) data in marketing campaigns

Efficient alignment of your inbound and outbound marketing strategies, multiple platforms and channels, and programs and processes, is a monumental, manual, tedious, nearly impossible job without using a MAP.

Implementing marketing automation can effectively bridge the gap between the various technologies, and empower marketing and sales to work closely together.

#2 – Lead Scoring

Many EMEA marketers are passing leads over to sales as soon as they get, vs implementing lead scoring but they are not alone.

79% of B2B marketers have not established a lead scoring model.

If you don’t know where to start with lead scoring, you’re not alone. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t learn: companies that excel at lead nurturing have 9% more sales reps making quotas.

Lead scoring is a method for identifying sales-ready leads by assigning values (points) based on predetermined criteria, e.g., industry and job title, website visits, video views, webinar attendance, and form completions. The sum of the points is the lead’s score.

Companies that excel at scoring and nurturing leads generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost. – Forrester

Lead scoring offers a lot of value to your business, including:

Efficiency: Decrease the volume of sales-ready leads, so you aren’t focusing on the wrong leadsMarketing measurement: Assess campaign effectiveness, and potential worth of opportunitiesOperational excellence: Align organizational resources for more efficient conversion

Here’s an example of what lead scores could look like for some individuals based on their behavior and engagement with common marketing and sales activities:

BehaviorVisitor 1Visitor 2Visited Landing Page (+3 Points)33Watched Explainer Video (+8 Points)8Viewed Case Studies (+5 Points Each)1020Viewed Pricing Page (+5 Points)55Opened Drip Email (+3 Points Each)36Attended Webinar (+10 Points)1010Total Score3152

In this example, Visitor 1 would fall under the interested category and would be funneled into a nurturing campaign of drip emails and marketing outreach, while Visitor 2 is qualified as a lead, and would be moved over to the sales team.

Dive deeper into how top European demand creators are spending their shrinking budgets with the SiriusDecisions Report on European Demand Creation Budgets and Tactics. In the report you’ll learn things like:

Which assets high-performers spent more onWhich delivery mechanisms worked best for high-performersWhy interactive content (like video!) was 2017’s big winner

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