Buyers have changed, and marketers need to adapt
A few days ago, I sat down with a CMO of a $75M agency that does marketing for some of the fastest-growing startups in the world.
Here's what he told me:
Every one of their stakeholders is struggling with indecision on what types of campaigns to run and investments to make. Leads — MQLs — SQOs — Win rates — and Revenue. The nose is a little down on every indicator. Despite similar budgets. It's getting really hard out there.
Market pressures have been kicking a lot of people's asses this past quarter.
But you were a badass marketer crushing goals before, and you'll be back at it soon enough.
If you're on a marketing team that is feeling this pressure because you've only been allowed to run plays that over-index on the 5% of the market that's "ready to buy" vs. the 95% that is "open to learning."
Now is the time to remind leadership that if pipeline values & velocity aren't where we want them to be, then we need to do what buyers prefer, vs. the strategies that have an ROI they are comfortable with.
— People prefer buying through high-trust relationships.
— They want consumable thought leadership from creators that work for you.
— They want your people to help them learn in professional communities.
— They don't want to be interrupted with cute or creative outbound unless it's just nostalgic when they get a good one in the sea of crap efforts.
Buyer behaviors have changed, and it's time executives get behind doing what their future customers want, vs. doing what they have done before, even in spite of it working less.
If you find yourself between a rock and a hard place negotiating for where to invest, remind executives that the ROI on marketing that they are comfortable with but doesn't work anymore is always worse than the ROI of unfamiliar marketing that is hard to track, takes longer than you like — but is what buyers prefer.
Keep your head up, marketing team. It's tough out there, but you're built for it.
Thanks for the reminder, Blake Williams!
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