The future of B2B marketing needs stats as well as intuition...

There’s a fair amount of intuition in marketing – even in B2B we draw on our own experiences to inform our insights into buyers, products and messages.

But those instincts don’t hold water if they’re not backed up with numbers.

There’s too often a worrying lack of actual benchmark data being used in our industry – so it often gets all rather subjective. I think we’d all love to be able to stop the comments/opinions in meetings that drive us all nuts: “I don’t think senior audiences watch videos”, “Friday is the wrong day to send an email” and “That blog is just too long”.

Here at Earnest, we’re rather obsessed with stats.

It started a few years ago, with Earnest’s Vital Stats for B2B Marketers. We did Vital Stats 1 when we launched the agency, then a sequel, and then we rounded off the trilogy.

We then went one step further and we gathered all the stats we could find about B2B marketing – from search and paid social to webinars and content –and published our Essential Benchmarks for B2B Marketers. It went down well, everyone’s hungry for industry averages to measure campaigns against – and stats to help us better our approach.

Recently, we decided it was time to update this guide. We wanted to see how the industry – and its challenges – had changed over the last few years.

We started off by throwing every stat we could find in a big spreadsheet. After we hit 100 stats, it felt unfair to keep this wonderful bank from our fellow marketers – so we made it available to all. It’s always growing, so keep checking!

We then started publishing blogs on each channel, using the great stats we’d found to answer common questions about different formats and help marketers hone their approach. So far we’ve done content marketing in general, video, podcast and digital display – and there’s plenty more to come. Our latest in the last few days is focused on search marketing.

To bring some of our favourite stats to life, we’ve even started creating some lovely animations.

And then, inspired by a workshop with a client, we created the B2B Benchmarks Quiz. If you think you know your stuff when it comes to B2B marketing, it’s the perfect place to prove it.

What’s next?

So we’re just starting on this benchmark mission. More channels, more tactics, more marketing challenges. They all need researching, stats, data, benchmarks.

If any of you have ideas you want to collaborate on, need help on your benchmarking approach, or just came across a cracking stat you want to share– get in touch.

Header Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash