What is marketing doing, anyway?

Ask five people at a B2B organization what their marketing team is working on and you will probably get five different answers. And if you ask someone in the organization what marketing metrics are most valuable to them in their personal role, you’ll get an even wider range of answers. Delivering B2B marketing and showcasing the value it provides is, simply put, complicated!

 

B2B marketers have a wide range of responsibilities: They must be master storytellers, brand stewards, and industry experts. They must be drivers of new revenue growth, and also turn existing customers into happy advocates. They are expected to be creative thinkers, but also quantitatively savvy to forecast next quarter’s leads and revenue. They must be attuned to customers’ needs and preferences, but also sense what’s coming around the corner. They must keep a pulse on every new digital tactic that emerges, but also maintain a well-oiled marketing operations machine that keeps content flowing and ensures all the moving parts run smoothly and successfully. 

 

Do you feel exhausted yet? 

 

Yes, the CMO and her team are on the hook to do all of this…but also A LOT more. Increasingly, CMOs are under pressure to EDUCATE the internal team on all initiatives and tactics in use, to prove the impact of every dollar spent, and to provide a regular cadence of reporting that is both high-level enough to satisfy senior leadership and also detailed enough to satisfy a range of internal stakeholders. The problem is, prioritizing what to share and in what format is not even half the battle – the hard part is actually unearthing, organizing, and making sense of the data so it can be shared inclusively, consistently, and for a wide range of constituents.

 

“The best CMOs are data-driven, but the sheer amount of data that a CMO actually has to navigate often gets in the way of being able to use it effectively. By addressing this data challenge, Octane11 is giving marketing leaders the ability to implement more impactful strategies, and also to create stronger communication and transparency across the organization.” – Rachel Meranus, 4x B2B CMO 

 

On top of all that, if you’re doing your job right, testing and learning and keeping your marketing fresh, you will of course continue to introduce new initiatives, tackle additional channels, produce more content, and adopt new technologies…all of which will create even more complexity in reporting. Meanwhile, as variety and complexity grows, so will the pressure to prove each tactic’s performance, your team’s performance and your contribution to the bottom line. 

 

But don’t despair. There is some good news: Platforms like Octane11 can simplify all of this complexity and make it vastly easier to report on activity across all channels for all of your constituents. Octane11’s platform integrates, transforms, and enriches your marketing data without requiring expensive data engineers or complex SQL queries, so you can share exactly WHAT MARKETING IS DOING to all of your partners across the organization – whether that’s the Sales team, Product, Finance, the CEO or the Board.

If you want to learn more about how Octane11 is helping innovative B2B marketers to track and share their results with internal teams at a fraction of the time and cost, let us know, we’d love to share more details and a live demo! (book a demo here)