Top 3 priorities for B2B marketers: Marketing Sherpa

According to new research from MarketingSherpa, published recently by eMarketer.com, marketers are concerned primarily with 3 stages of the marketing funnel. While 60% of B2B marketers revealed that lead generation is their top priority, converting leads into customers trailed closely behind with 57%.

This is good and bad news.

What this tells us is that increasingly marketers understand that their primary role is to contribute directly to the business in the form of one key metric: revenue. It's really, really good news because it shows that marketers are increasingly acknowledging that they form a key part of the complete go to market funnel, that sales and marketing are inextricably linked and that together they nurture a buyer along their buying journey, from unaware and untroubled to loyal customer.

It's bad news because so many marketers really struggle to achieve this goal. They struggle to see that their marketing tactics must form part of a clear go to market methodology that:

• Clearly defines your go to market strategy in terms of the buyer's problem that you solve.
   
• Understands your "funnel maths" ie how many visitors, leads, prospects and customers do you need to hit your revenue goals.
  What's the velocity at which you need to run your funnel?
   
• Gets you found by your target audience in the right volume.
   
• Builds content that consciously nurtures prospects as they move along their buyer's journey. Different stages need different content.
   
• Clinically analyses and scores your buyer's journey so you know how many sales ready leads you have given to sales and how many convert to customers. To understand what tactics are working best.

Increasingly smart marketers realise they must align with sales, even be measured on revenue generated from their leads (pretty scary huh?!).

Only a methodology aligned around the buyer and the buyer's journey allows this to occur in any semblance of order or rigour.

What are your top 3 priorities? Do they match this list? Are Australian B2B Marketers focused on different priorities? We would love to hear your thoughts.