Study: ROI Tracking, Advanced Lead Scoring Drive Best-In-Class Marketing
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- Published in Demand Generation
According to a recent study, the most successful marketing organizations get a significantly higher budget than their less effective competitors – and they're investing that money in a variety of cutting-edge activities.
The study, Best Practices of the Best Marketers, involved an online survey that includes responses from 121 marketers representing 117 unique organizations. It grouped respondents into three categories – leaders, medians and laggards – based on their organizations' effectiveness in six key categories.
Bigger Budgets, Better Results
According to the study, leading marketing organization budgets were 56% higher than median firms and 180% higher than laggards. Among other things, suggest the study's authors, changes in buyer behavior are driving a shift towards higher marketing versus sales budget allocations.
"This change in buyer behavior requires new processes to engage buyers before they choose the engage sales people," they write. "This change in resourcing allocation will also require a change in budget allocation."
Diversity A Key To Successful Campaigns
Many of those leading marketers, according to the study, are investing that money in a much wider variety of programs. While laggard marketers use an average of two types of marketing programs for the majority of their lead acquisitions, write the authors, "those marketers that employed five or more types of programs achieved higher performance for nearly every program type."
This difference, they conclude, shows "that doing more programs does not dilute focus or degrade performance and in fact achieves just the opposite effect."
ROI Tracking, Lead Scoring Set Apart Best-In-Class Firms
Best-in-class marketers also engage in a number of other relatively advanced activities, according to the report. Leaders, for example, "tie every lead, customer and revenue dollar back to the marketing program that created them" 50% of the time, versus 19% for laggard firms. Leading marketers also employed lead scoring models 50% more than median performers and 112% more then laggards.
The survey also found that best-in-class firms were likely to use more lead scoring criteria than their competitors and were more likely to include lead behavioral data in their scoring models.
In addition, the survey found that "leaders aligned nurture campaign content with buyer persona and buy cycle stage" more than twice as often as laggard organizations, and that as a result of this the best-in-class firms also averaged a 20% lower average nurture cycle period and 48% higher nurture campaign lead as media performers.
"Lead scoring is the most difficult task in our lead management program," commented one respondent to the study. "It's time consuming and it's never finished but it's clearly worth the effort."
The research report was independently produced by Vantive Media and published by crmsearch.com.