As a B2B marketer you know that challenges related to lead generation cost you time and resources, and perhaps more concerning, lost or missed revenue opportunities. You are not alone. Enterprise B2B marketers are working in increasingly complex consumer environments, and the shift to omnichannel, data-driven, and hybrid work models doesn’t make identifying, engaging, and converting prospects any easier. The buying collective intensifies this challenge since there are an average of six to eight decision makers in a typical enterprise account, each with their own agenda.
In response, lead generation efforts and the broader demand generation strategy has to be increasingly driven by high-quality intent data for better engagement, and ultimately better MQLs that sales can convert more effectively.
The first step to addressing lead generation challenges is to identify and understand them. In this blog, we dive into five challenges with lead generation that enterprise B2B marketers face, and share some ideas on how to address them for optimal revenue outcomes.
5 Lead Generation Challenges Faced by Enterprise B2B Marketers
- Driving more and better quality MQLs: In our 2021 State of B2B Marketing Data study, the top operational challenge picked by B2B marketers was ‘effectively identifying and targeting prospects’. This same challenge comes up repeatedly in other industry surveys, in the context of lead quality and lead volumes, identifying and targeting the best prospects, etc.
This is neither new nor a surprise, but with marketers starting to invest in building strong first-party data foundations, and third-party data getting more challenging, balancing lead volume and quality has to be addressed urgently.
So, how can B2B marketers generate better – and more – quality leads, so they can hand over the best possible MQLs to sales for the last mile of the buyer’s journey? This answer too, is revealed by B2B marketers themselves. In our survey, 97% of marketers using behavioral intent data say it improves marketing and sales effectiveness, and 75% of sales, business development, marketing, and data science professionals believe data is “critical” or “foundational” for marketing success. In other words, good intent data is often the bridge between lead quality and quantity.
Working with the right intent data vendor (or set of vendors) can help meet strict ideal customer profile (ICP) qualifications that help define quality leads. Select vendors are able to provide high-quality intent data without compromising on volumes, because they have invested in building a network of diverse, credible owned and operated channels. Prospects trust these sources of content and conversations to build awareness, gather information, and arrive at their final consideration set. To address the challenge of better – and more – MQLs, make sure your intent data vendor can access and deliver intent signals from the deepest, widest, and most accurate sources of data.
- Integrating workflows and activating data effectively: an equally pressing challenge B2B marketers called out in the SWZD survey is “mitigating process complexity”. With the overwhelming amount of data being generated by complex buying collectives across their buying cycle, B2B marketers are hard pressed to collate data from multiple sources and integrate the multiple sources and platforms for better engagement and conversion. Working digitally themselves, today’s distributed B2B marketing teams are navigating the complexities of collaboration and better streamlining internal processes.
In such a scenario, they need demand generation specialists who can help them not just with lead generation, but with developing an entire sustainable demand generation ecosystem that is easy to activate and use, while being effective, measurable, scalable, and flexible. Building a future-proof revenue generating ecosystem where workflows are seamless requires an ongoing process that involves true partnership between the marketer and intent data vendor-partner. A recent Forrester report described SWZD as a best fit for technology marketers who need deep insights into their buyers and are willing to work with their vendor as they build out that solution.
- Content marketing: with much of the buying journey moving online, the demand for digital content experiences that can break through the clutter, provide relevant and timely knowledge, and help progress the buyer through research to implementation is higher than ever. Creating high-quality digital content, distributing it across a wide network of credible and relevant channels and platforms, and ensuring it reaches the right audience at the right time is a never-ending challenge for enterprise B2B marketers. “Creating enough content to match demand” emerged as another top challenge for most B2B marketers in our recent SWZD B2B revenue generation practices survey.
Engaging key members of the buying collective with content is not just about creating and distributing the right content, but also giving audiences a chance to have conversations around that content when in a buying mindset. Very few vendors can offer such a breadth and depth of channels for buyers to engage, and fewer still B2B marketers can create such a network themselves. SWZD offers best-in-class authentic intent powered by its access to the widest and deepest set of owned and operated channels – even behind the firewall. This helps optimize reach and relevance on trusted industry-specific networks.
- Tracking return on investment (ROI) from lead generation investments: proving the value of marketing by tracking and measuring ROI is more important than ever today, as budgets grow to support digital reach, engagement, and nurture campaigns before sales reaches out. The aim is to hand over the highest quality MQLs to help sales improve their MQL-to-conversion ratio, which is the ultimate key performance indicator (KPI) to measure ROI on marketing spend. Other considerations are cost of conversion, time taken to convert, average lead value, and growing the most efficient lead sources.
For the business, it all boils down to lead quality and an efficient cost per lead. In that sense, the ROI challenge reveals a deeper process challenge. When the right data, process, and workflows are established, measuring the ROI should fall into place as a natural outcome. Working with the right partner who has that capability can help easily access consolidated account level data to track performance, view pipeline impact, and measure true ROI of integrated marketing campaigns on a single, unified platform.
- Security and privacy compliance: while most marketers have been striving to make data-driven consumer experiences central to their strategy, the last few years have seen the tightening of customer data security, privacy, and compliance protocols across most regions. With most tech giants and walled gardens including Google, Facebook, and Apple also putting in place multiple restrictions on the collection and use of third-party data for advertising and marketing purposes, the confusion around what’s safe and compliant in data-driven marketing has reached a fever pitch. On one hand, marketers are expected to deliver more relevant, user-friendly, and cohesive brand experiences than ever before despite these constraints and regulations. On the other hand, the risks of falling short of compliance and privacy expectations in the quest for personalization are equally great.
The challenge for B2B marketers is to quickly adopt marketing and revenue generation strategies to comply with new, evolving regulations and deliver more competitive brand experiences (i.e., relevant, timely, personalized, efficient) without compromising data quality or privacy. This ecosystem needs to be brand safe, privacy compliant and commerce friendly.
At SWZD, we’ve long since built a trusted and strong intent data ecosystem, drawing insights from an optimal combination of first and third-party data. The good news is that there is still a lot that marketers can do to adopt marketing approaches that deliver relevance, reach, and scale without adding risk; starting with these five steps to compete and comply in a privacy-first world.