Customer engagement top priority for B2B marketers – but there’s a disconnect

The majority of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) consider customer engagement as their top priority according to a recent study done by Forbes Insights and GPJ

The ‘New Rules of Engagement: CMOs Rethink Their Marketing Mix’ is based on a survey of 314 marketing executives at companies with more than $500 million in annual revenue. Fifty-six percent of the participants were primarily B2B marketers and the remaining 44% were B2C. Nearly 97% of the respondents viewed customer engagement as very (67%) or somewhat (30%) important.

While B2B content marketing has many purposes, its primary goal is to engage with prospects and customers in order to build trust so that they will want to contact you in order to do business with your company.

Robert G. Vallee Jr., Chairman and CEO of GPJ said, “This report suggests that engagement is now a key dynamic that should be considered when designing big-idea campaigns; without engagement, the message is quickly lost, its power diminished.”

That was the good news part of the study. The bad news -  more than a quarter (27%) have no specific strategy for customer engagement, and more than a third (34%) feel their companies do only a fair or poor job engaging their audiences. “They [CMOs] believe they can do a better job at engagement, but often don’t know how,” said Stuart Feil, editorial director of Forbes Insights.

The apparent disconnect is even more telling as seen by these key findings from the study:

• The two traditional interruptive marketing tactics, advertising (25%) and direct (20%) are still receiving the biggest share of the budgets, indicating that marketing budgets are misaligned with the CMO’s priorities.
• Marketers are getting in their own way when it comes to drafting their engagement strategies. Top engagement roadblocks were lack of a well-defined approach to engagement (30%), and poorly articulated benefits for loyal customers (30%).
• Just 59% of companies now measure customer engagement; 36% do not. The primary metrics measured are retention (58%), sales (44%), and revenue per customer (35%).
• While customer engagement is the top priority (95%), inspiring your employees is an important part of the engagement formula (61%).

Because of the longer cycles and the complexities of B2B and industrial sales, marketers find it very difficult to associate leads to specific marketing content. As a result, most BtoB marketers tend to credit sales-ready leads to the last marketing touchpoint. This tendency often neglects the other marketing channels that played a role in early stages of the purchase funnel.