The trends driving online sales in fast-changing and disruptive times.
In early 2020, a meme-like cartoon has been circulating which depicts the wake-up call that COVID-19 is to businesses who have delayed digital transformation.
With physical sales channels like Trade Shows and road based sales teams limited, B2B Ecommerce has moved from a roadmap item to a business imperative.
But ecommerce doesn’t exist in a bubble or a silo. Like B2C online selling, it is a multidisciplinary activity that involves many teams, including marketing .
It’s no accident that trends in B2B marketing are closely linked to B2B Ecommerce and digital transformation generally. From data, including intent data to marketing technology investment decisions, digital will require a higher prioritisation due to some of the following trends.
Revenue Impact Marketing
Is a term that only a marketing person could come up with. Basically, this is an admission that lead-generation and traffic is not enough and that there should be accountability for marketing spend measured by Return on Investment (ROI).
So what is Revenue Impact Marketing? Put simply – its marketing that leads to sales! Those who think this is a novel idea say things like:
“Marketing teams that are switching to RIM should expect to work closely with sales, with the overarching goal of creating scalable and repeatable revenue outcomes.
It’s a new concept for some agencies who, despite the reporting advantages offered by digital marketing and ecommerce, shy away from discussions about conversion or revenue performance. Just as poor social media influencers are not keen to be paid based on results, similarly, some B2B marketers would prefer to talk about more vague concepts like ‘brand building’ and lead generation.
Events of early 2020 that caused a global slowdown (shutdown) of large parts of the economy have forced companies to evaluate their spending and demand that marketing spend is delivering revenue.
In many ways, marketing people were reluctant to implement ecommerce, because it allows for direct attribution from promotion to sale. To this day, many marketing people would rather focus on Instagram likes or YouTube video views than whether or not that content led directly to revenue.
In B2B terms, lead generation is a bit like ‘traffic’ for a consumer business. Marketers like to focus on the big numbers at the top of the funnel rather than metrics like cost per sale.
In the good times, as long as the revenue is coming in, the wastage or underperforming marketing activities can be justified. But in bad times, the conversion rate by marketing channel starts to become important.
While Revenue Impact Marketing shouldn’t really be a thing, it’s refreshing to see marketing people take responsibility for their work and realise that data will expose bad or lazy strategies and tactics.
Next up… Intent Data