New Year’s Resolutions for B2B Marketers

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Millions of people make New Year’s resolutions to improve their personal habits. Resolutions to exercise more, eat healthier food and save money in the year ahead are all popular choices. But what about New Year’s resolutions to improve your professional life?

Here are some B2B marketing resolutions that can help make 2022 your best year yet at work.

• Align marketing activities with your company’s sales goals. Sometimes B2B marketers assume that good creativity plus solid lead gen efforts equal success. And sometimes it even works out that way. But the truth is, you can accomplish so much more when marketing and sales are on the same page, and at too many organizations, the teams still work at cross purposes.

So, in 2022, resolve to explicitly align your marketing activities with your organization’s revenue goals, and work more closely with the sales team to drive success. Full Circle client, Integrate, also recommends collaborating directly with the finance team to coordinate marketing expenses for ROI tracking. This approach enabled Integrate’s marketing ops team to achieve unprecedented clarity and success.

• Review your tech stack to ensure effectiveness. There were nearly 10,000 martech solutions on the market in 2021 and paired with the fact that only 33% of marketers feel like their tech effectively meets their business needs, you begin to see the issue. Like gardens, tech stacks need pruning from time to time to keep them healthy. That’s why a periodic review of your technology assets makes sense, and the beginning of the year is a good time to take stock of the tools and licenses your marketing team has and evaluate them in terms of effectiveness.

Some of our clients tell us they have dozens of martech tools, but they also say less can be more. Resolve to assess your tech stack this year and determine which assets are delivering value and which are adding unneeded complexity. Look for tools that enable you to easily compare digital and non-digital campaign performance on a single platform so you’ll be ready when in-person events make a comeback, which will hopefully be soon.

• Hold regular measurement meetings with the sales team/revenue council. It’s critical to align objectives, and it’s equally important to measure performance so you can adjust on the fly to maximize revenue. This will require accurate marketing attribution capabilities and the ability to monitor funnel metrics.

Full Circle client Tessian was able to automate reporting and gain full visibility, building better marketing attribution models and identifying process issues to improve efficiency — not just at the top of the funnel but throughout the lead lifecycle. This allows the team to provide board reports and easily share data across the organization via a single source of truth: the CRM.

• Don’t get stuck — remain agile in 2022. The past few years made it abundantly clear that the ability to turn on a dime and react to changing customer needs and marketplace trends is critical for success. The B2B marketers who were able to quickly shift to digital when the pandemic blew up their events-based lead gen strategies had a competitive edge.

Customer needs and marketplaces will change in 2022, so resolve to be ready. One great way to avoid getting stuck in a rut is by maintaining an 80/20 ratio in your campaign mix, with 80% comprising proven performers and 20% experimental. Success depends on accurate measurement so that you can rapidly shift away from campaigns that aren’t working to redirect spending to campaigns that do generate revenue.

The right campaign performance measurement tools will be essential for success in the months ahead. Marketing attribution capabilities let you invest more efficiently, and funnel metrics help you improve process efficiency. Both will support your efforts to align with company goals, collaborate more closely with colleagues and increase agility in 2022.

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