By Heading into a meeting with your boss knowing you fell short on your marketing KPIs again — few experiences evoke more stress, sleeplessness, or career uncertainty. But it's a scene that plays out repeatedly across many companies.
Many B2B technology marketers are scratching their heads, wondering why their marketing strategy didn't generate more qualified leads, organic traffic, higher average order values, or more impressive marketing ROI.
You had a B2B marketing plan, but it didn't play out as expected. Here's what to do next!
1. See Opportunity, Not Failure
A poorly performing B2B marketing KPI is not a personal or professional failure. And it certainly doesn't represent how hard your team tried to deliver the results you want to be walking into the boardroom with right now.
It's a window into what's working or not. The only failure here would be failing to recognize you need to either improve your strategy or its execution.
2. Revisit Business Goals & Alignment
Many companies have goals they put on paper and share openly. Then, there are the real goals.
Let's say a company says it wants to grow into an industry leader, but secretly, the goal is to build a business that a bigger company will buy out, allowing the founder to walk away with multi-millions.
Every marketing KPI should point toward the goal because a key performance indicator, by definition, indicates you're on the right track to reach that goal.
If you're not meeting marketing KPIs, those KPIs may not be aligned with the business' goals or be indicators at all. To fix it, revisit business goals and evaluate how meeting each marketing KPI gets you closer to that goal.
3. Look at a Typical Employee's Workday
Does working in your marketing department entail a lot of busywork, inefficient processes, workarounds, crisis management, and inconsistent performance feedback? Are employees having to do extra work to demonstrate that they're working rather than spending their time being productive? Does poor performance on KPIs show up in their evaluations?
These represent marketing inefficiencies and misalignments that destroy both employee productivity and morale.
In these cases, leaders often establish goals and KPIs for their B2B technology company. But they're not putting the tools, training, and processes in place to enable employee effectiveness. They're not aligning KPIs with goals or marketing's roles with sales.
The only fix here is to take a hard look at what's happening on the ground floor. You need to align the marketing and sales purpose and eliminate the efficiencies that make it harder for them to do their jobs. One way to do this is by introducing marketing automation that tracks and communicates performance and tasks automatically.
4. Put Your Content Strategy Under a Microscope
First of all, in B2B technology, you must have a solid content strategy. You're not selling something that people buy on a whim. They need content to understand and evaluate their options.
Your content strategy should guide them through the customer's journey from stranger to 5-star review customer. And it's critical that you have MarTech in place to consistently track each marketing KPI and understand how customers navigate this journey.
When you understand this journey, you can create the right kind of content and consistently deliver qualified leads to sales.
5. Promote External Engagement from Internal Customers
Content gains traction through engagement. And just a little engagement can get that snowball rolling. Set an expectation that your internal customers (employees) will genuinely engage with content.
This should feel like a fun job perk versus a job duty, so work to create an engaged culture. But remember, as far as labor laws are concerned, this is work, so you can't require people to engage outside work hours.
Many will, though, because they're invested in team success and spend spare time on social media anyway.
This engagement shows your external customers that you have an active and engaged workforce that believes in the product. It puts a face on your company.
Check out the social media of B2B technology companies like SEMRush and AhRefs. Their employees do this a lot. Twitter, Quora, Instagram, even TikTok — they're everywhere because this works.
If it's working for your competitors, borrow it and make it your own to meet each B2B marketing KPI without fail.
Consistently Meeting Your B2B Marketing KPIs
Never have to wonder if you'll meet a given marketing KPI this quarter again. You can set up strategies and systems that reliably deliver results.
This requires the right MarTech for monitoring KPI performance and the agility to adapt, as B2B marketing KPI results indicate you need to change your approach.
