The 2023 Benchmark report was released months ago, and we recently caught up with some key folks from the Metadata team to dive into their observations. Jason Widup, owner of PeakB2B, Bryttney Blanken, owner of Bryttney Blanken Consulting, Jessica Kezia, performance marketing manager at Metadata, and Alon Even, B2B expert, all weighed in on the report.
If you’re craving more insights, be sure to watch our video for further details.
The biggest observation we all noticed
In a down economy, you’d assume, marketing is going to spend less, but surprisingly they spent more. But the most surprising was the spending habits between the prior period and post-April 2022. And pre-April, they spent $45 million across LinkedIn and Facebook, post April 2022, they spent 63 million.
Pre-April, they spent $45 million across LinkedIn and Facebook, and post-April 2022, they spent 63 million— an 18 million difference. Factors like paid social media are becoming less efficient. It reminds us of the importance of looking at data and patterns within our business.
Retargeting can help boost lead gen
It showed that 80% of the spending was on lead gen. That’s down a little bit from last year where it was at 90%, and so as a percent of the total spend, it looks like maybe marketers are getting a little bit smarter and it showed we can’t do pure, straight lead gen,
If you’re doing lead gen to a cold audience, it usually stops working. At least for us and for a lot of the customers that we were talking with and warm them up in some way. That way we were focusing a lot more on the demand and spending on retargeting audiences. It was clear in the data how much better those performed.
Know what you can and can’t measure
When it comes to long-term strategy, you have to know what you can measure and what you can measure indirectly.
When it comes to demand creation, a few early performance indicators can show you that you are heading in the right direction.
It can take one project to see the actual results. But besides the traffic, you can also see that the traffic is visiting your high intended pages, such as demo requests or pricing the page, and so on. Later on, you can also identify other leading and lagging indicators.
You gotta change it up in a down economy
A lot of B2B marketers are using paid social and tying that with lead gen-only efforts and it’s becoming highly inefficient.
We know that in down economies we still have to advertise to our buyers, everyone gets that at this point, right? But it’s not about how we do that has got a change.
Some of the biggest patterns we noticed were top-of-funnel metrics like CPCs and CPS, they’re decreasing and even CTRs are increasing but the CPOs are also increasing so it’s showing that buyers are consuming our messaging. Which is awesome, but they’re not converting. Often due to lower buying power and longer sales cycles.
Going from upgating our content to increasing consumption rates a bit better to reach our buyers. Only going after downloads and leads because at the end of the day, if they aren’t converting, what are you doing?
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