Business-to-business marketing is evolving, and so are marketing teams’ goals.
Digital analytics and engagement strategies matured in the 2000s and 2010s. As a result, many B2B marketers became enamored with vanity metrics.
Those included click-through rate, impressions, raw views, follows, and other top-funnel stats.
Fortunately, the days of using vanity metrics to set B2B marketing goals appear to be over.
This week, we asked more than a dozen professionals about their teams’ B2B marketing goals for 2020. By and large, our respondents are focused on the bottom of the funnel – and measurable growth. Talk of old-school vanity metrics barely registered.
Here are some of the highlights.
Driving Leads with Digital Ads
Our company is taking a leap of faith into digital advertising this year. Our goal is launch some Google Ads campaigns for our services, and optimize our Google My Business Page. The ultimate goal is to bring in more qualified leads for our sales team to sell.
Jeff Neal, Capital Coating
Increasing Conversion Rate & Diversifying Traffic
Our content marketing team has two major goals for 2020.
First, we want to increase the conversion rate of blog readers to demo requesters. Our blog traffic has grown month on month throughout 2019, but the conversion rate has stayed the same. To fully take advantage of our TOFU content and high-ranking blog posts, we must focus on improving conversion from 2% to 7%.
Second, we want to decrease reliance on organic traffic. Sixty-five percent of our traffic comes from Google. We need to increase traffic from other sources to reduce our dependence on organic traffic – even though the figures are awesome. Everybody is one algorithm change away from an organic traffic shift. The focus must be maintaining a great standard of content across other channels – and not getting sucked into writing for Google.
Dominic Kent, Mio
Increasing B2B Visibility with Long-Tail Content
One of our 2020 B2B marketing goals is to increase the number of leads we get from our website via blog posts and paid search marketing.
In addition to this, we’re also aiming for more enterprise-level leads as opposed to smaller businesses. Another goal is to become better known within our industry. We’re pretty well known at the moment thanks to our existing marketing efforts, but sometimes when we speak to new potential new clients, they’ve heard of all our competitors but us!
To achieve these goals, I’m going to be working closely with our content marketing team to ensure we produce high-quality and relevant content that tackles a range of niche PPC and Google Ads topics. At the moment, there are plenty of PPC-related articles and blog posts out there, so my aim is to cut through the noise by focusing on less-covered topics. Not only does this mean less competition, but it also allows us to produce original content that will help increase our brand image.
Sam Carr, PPC Protect
Driving Traffic with YoY Comparisons
Our No. 1 marketing goal for 2020 is to increase overall website traffic by 25% with a goal of increasing leads by roughly the same amount. This will hopefully be achieved by improving our existing content, and also adding new relevant content we’re missing.
To track progress we’re going to compare YoY numbers at the end of each quarter to see what’s working and what isn’t. This should allow our content teams time to implement things, but not so much time that we can’t course correct if things aren’t going our way.
Ian Wright, British Business Energy
Targeted Content for More Qualified Leads
Our 2020 B2B marketing goals are to generate more qualified leads and narrow down our buyer persona. We are looking to improve our SEO and web presence by creating excellent content and videos on our blog.
How do we plan on measuring progress? It is somewhat difficult to measure leads, as 70% of our business is generated through referrals. We are looking at website visits, rankings in Google, and leads not based on referrals.
Brooks Flanagan, SCS Cloud
Raising B2B Brand Awareness & Perception
Our core B2B goal for 2020 is to take a soft and highly brand-led approach, rather than targeting direct sales. This has the aim of raising brand awareness and brand perception. This is naturally one of the most challenging of metrics to measure. For this reason, it is widely overlooked by many companies serving the B2B marketplace – even though the benefits of such an approach cannot be ignored.
Tracking keyword searches for our company name, monitoring web traffic and third-party mentions, and actively seeking feedback via channels such as LinkedIn and professional trade bodies are all a part of this. Of course, we will also be keeping a keen eye on our competitors and what they’re up to!
Polly Kay, English Blinds
Turning Leads into Dollars
In 2020, we’re looking to solidify our outbound sales processes. Lead generation is easy, but without the right process to track, nurture, and close the leads, it’s just throwing away money (and opportunity)!
Harry Maugans, Clickagy
Taking the Longview on Organic Traffic
The biggest marketing goal we have for 2020 is to increase our organic traffic. At the end of 2019, we analyzed our current performance and did some keyword research. We realized that we could do much better in this department. We already have a product-market fit and organic traffic could be a major source of leads for us in 2020.
“We already have a product-market fit and organic traffic could be a major source of leads for us in 2020.”
We’ll start off doing some public relations, continuing off to content marketing and SEO and backing it all up with link building. We just hired some amazing people as contractors to help us out in the process. The one thing we learned from companies like ours is that we need to spend at least 5-6 months on content to see the results, so we plan to persevere.
In July 2020, we’ll see what we were able to do, but our plan is to grow our traffic by 10% every month.
Cassy Aite, Hoppier
Doubling Conversion Rate & Juicing Domain Authority
Our biggest B2B marketing goal for 2020 is to get our conversion rate higher than 5%.
At the moment, we’re converting at the industry average of 2%, which is pretty bad considering that we have a solid offer. For us, 2020 means taking another look at our entire offer, our design, copy, user interface and experience and the website as a whole. Hopefully, we can make this number happen as our conversion rate is the most important metric for our entire marketing team.
Carsten Schaefer, Crowdy
Accounting for Rapid Growth
We grew so much last year that our senior management finally decided it was time to expand our warehouse capacity. Rampant growth was both our greatest triumph as well as our biggest challenge.
Why? Because we started getting more leads faster than we could handle them. This year, one of our B2B marketing goals is to decrease the pool of leads that our sales team has to qualify, but to increase the quality of the pool so that our conversion rate goes up.
“Rampant growth was both our greatest triumph as well as our biggest challenge.”
For reference, 88% of the leads that filled out our contact form ended up being the wrong fit for us. It’s a good problem to have – being picky enough that you can turn away almost nine out of every 10 suitors. But it’s a bad problem because that’s a lot of wasted time.
We’re tackling this issue in 2020 by producing more targeted landing pages that focus on some of the key issues that matter to our clients – location and turnaround time, to name two of the biggest ones – as well as crafting content on our blog that’s meant to inform and educate decision makers who are already deep in the funnel and picking between us and one of our competitors.
Jake Rheude, Red Stag Fulfillment
Focusing on Customer Retention
Acquiring new customers is getting more difficult and more expensive every passing year. Therefore, our goal for 2020 is increasing customer
retention.
“Customer retention is easier and less expensive than customer acquisition.”
We’ll continue working on building deep, lasting relationships with new and existing customers. We’ll focus heavily on bringing value to the customer relationship by offering them a personalized experience to decrease customer churn and build brand loyalty.
Customer retention is easier and less expensive than customer acquisition. Besides, it provides increased sales opportunities because we can cross-sell our services, inviting customers to purchase related or complementary products to the ones they already use, based on our previous knowledge of the existing customers.
Eckhard Ortwein, Lean Case
Growing the Email List
Our main B2B marketing goal in 2020 is to grow our email subscriber list to over 10,000. In 2019, we’ve seen email as our primary channel for growth, converting better than organic traffic, social media or paid ads.
There are several ways we want to make this happen. First, we’ll double down on website opt-ins and we’ll include lead capture forms on our homepage and landing pages. Moreover, we’re creating several lead magnets for the near future, such as eBooks, white papers and calculators.
For the second half of 2020, we are planning a ProductHunt launch, which
will hopefully bring us a good number of qualified leads. Finally, we want
to end 2020 strong with a great holiday marketing campaign – the one we did for the end of 2019 worked beautifully. All in all, we hope to increase our annual recurring revenue by 20% just by using email in the upcoming year.
Malte Scholz, Airfocus
