Generating demand and ensuring the consistent flow of high-quality, actionable leads is paramount to the success of today’s business-to-business marketer. Sales enablement and pipeline performance remain key mandates as organizations look to better harness their content marketing practices to be high-performance growth engines.
According to 46 percent of the 600-plus marketing decision makers taking part in the CMO Council’s “State of Marketing” study, their greatest accomplishment in 2013 and 2014 was the realignment of marketing to better support sales and improve selling cycles. Nearly one in three marketers admits that maintaining a high-quality sales pipeline is one of their top senior management mandates for the coming year, and half say that lead generation and qualification is the area of business need that will receive the most resources.
But despite the improvements in processes, goals and intentions to optimize lead generation and yield, only one in four marketers believes they have made strides in implementing demand-generation systems to better target, acquire, qualify and convert business. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 50–60 percent of B2B content that has been created is actually never used. HubSpot cites that 79 percent of marketing leads never convert into sales. And according to Marketo and The B2B Lead, lost sales productivity and wasted marketing budget at the hands of ignored, poor-quality or poorly managed leads cost companies at least $1 trillion each year.
To address the growing need to optimize lead flow and track winning content marketing strategies to optimized demand-generation tactics, the CMO Council has partnered with global content syndication expert NetLine to better understand the issues and challenges marketers face when working to deliver timely, relevant and robust content that reaches the right audiences. To drill into this area of study, we are inviting senior marketing leaders to share their insights and best practices to enrich the thinking around content performance, syndication and demand-generation strategies.
