Should Sustainability Be Part of Your Brand Story?

The political debate surrounding climate change has been raging for the past two decades and is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. However, several recent developments indicate that the leaders of many large business enterprises have accepted the reality of climate change and recognized they need to step up their focus on environmental sustainability.

August 2019 - The Business Roundtable, an organization whose members are the CEOs of major U.S. companies, issues a new Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation. The new statement says that corporations must serve the interests of a broad set of stakeholders, including "communities." The CEOs signing the statement committed to supporting communities by "embracing sustainable practices across our businesses."

January 2020 - Microsoft announces that it will become carbon negative by 2030, and it pledged that by 2050, it will remove from the environment as much carbon as the company has emitted since it was founded on 1975.

January 2020 - BlackRock, the world's largest money manager with over $7 trillion of assets under management, announces that will will make sustainability a major component of its investment strategy. In a letter to clients, BlackRock's global executive committee wrote, "We believe that sustainability should be our new standard for investing."

The general public is also becoming more concerned about the environment and climate change. In January, Pew Research Center polled a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults. In this research, 64% of the respondents said that the environment should be a top priority for the President and Congress. That was up from 47% in a 2016 Pew Research poll. Fifty-two percent of the respondents said that climate change should be a top priority, up from 38% in the 2016 poll.

Several recent studies have also found that B2B buyers - particularly younger buyers - are placing greater importance on the environmental and social practices of their prospective suppliers and business partners. For example, in a 2019 Marketo survey of 910 B2B buyers in the U.K., Germany, and France, 67% of the respondents said they seek to work with companies that are striving to reduce their impact on the environment.

In response to heightened buyer interest in environmental issues, some B2B marketers have made sustainability a part of their messaging strategy. Including sustainability in brand messaging can be effective, but it's also a tactic that must be used carefully in order to avoid being perceived as engaging in greenwashing.

Marketing that focuses on sustainability is one form of purpose marketing. Purpose marketing is strongly supported by some marketing pundits and strongly criticized by others. But one thing is clear. When a company engages in purpose marketing, it also invites close scrutiny. Therefore, it's critical for marketers to be sure their company is "walking the walk" before they begin "talking the talk."

There are two specific steps that marketers should take when adding sustainability to their messaging strategy.

Know Where You Stand - Before making sustainability part of their brand messaging, marketers should thoroughly understand what actions their company has taken to improve the sustainability of its operations. This analysis should also cover the company's supply chain because the company's reputation for sustainability will be significantly affected by the environmental practices of its suppliers.

Don't Exaggerate - When it comes to marketing messages around sustainability, it's best to use a conservative approach and be prepared to demonstrate the accuracy of any statements or claims that marketing messages contain. And if messages include commitments for future actions, marketers need to ensure that senior company leaders are fully onboard with those commitments

In today's business environment, it's increasingly important for B2B companies to have programs in place to improve the sustainability of their operations and to make customers and prospects aware of those programs. But marketers must be careful not to "overpromise and under deliver."

Image courtesy of Ron Mader via Flickr CC.

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How to Make Personalization Work in a Privacy-Conscious World

In my last post, I wrote that it's time for marketers to rethink their approach to personalization. The value of personalized marketing has been widely recognized for nearly two decades, and most marketing pundits are recommending that marketers expand their use of personalization. They contend that marketers should make personalization more specific and use it more frequently, in more channels, and for more types of communications and experiences.

The problem with this "more personalization" approach is that it fails to account for widespread and growing privacy concerns among both consumers and business buyers. Personalized marketing will not reach its full potential unless marketers use an approach that addresses these privacy concerns. Simply increasing the use of personalization will be ineffective at best, and may do more harm than good.

Personalization has been the subject of numerous research studies over the past few years, and these studies provide a good picture of what is required for personalized marketing to produce maximum results. There are three major components of an effective personalization strategy.

Make Personalization Useful

The first requirement for effective personalized marketing is that it must deliver meaningful and pragmatic value to the recipient. A 2018 study by Gartner/CEB documents the business value of personalization that is perceived by customers and prospects to be helpful. I've previously discussed this research, so I won't repeat that material here. For a more detailed description of the Gartner/CEB study see this post.

Make Personalization "Relationship-Appropriate"

The second component of an effective personalization strategy is to use a level of personalization that is appropriate for each customer or prospect. By appropriate, I mean that the level of personalization should match the real-world status of the relationship. A message or offer sent to a long-time customer can and should be more personalized than a first outreach to a new prospect.

To be effective, personalized marketing must be based on genuine insights about your customers and prospects. When you take personalization beyond such insights, it becomes inauthentic and will tend to be perceived as presumptuous. Corporate Visions recently conducted a field trial involving this principle, and you can read more about that research in this post.

Get Meaningful Permission for Personalization

Much of the concern about data privacy and personalization revolves around the issues of transparency and control. Many consumers and business buyers aren't confident they know what personal data companies are collecting about them or how that data is used. And many feel they don't have any meaningful control over those data practices.

Several recent research studies have shown how important transparency and control are for customers and prospects. For example, in a 2019 survey of 3,000 people in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., The Harris Poll asked participants about the importance of several data privacy practices. The following table shows the percentage of survey respondents who rated four transparency and control practices as very important or absolutely essential:

These research findings point the way to the third important component of an effective personalization strategy. In a world where privacy concerns are heightened, permission is critical to successful personalized marketing. If all the research about personalization tells us anything, it tells us that most consumers and business buyers will welcome and value personalized content when it is helpful, authentic, and based on permission that is willingly and consciously given.

So, how can marketers gain this kind of permission? There are three key steps.

Use Personalization "Programs" - In most cases, personalization efforts should be organized into discrete programs, each of which is designed to provide a specific type of value to a specific type of customer or prospect. This approach leads marketers to focus on the purpose of personalized marketing from the recipient's perspective.

Invite Participation - Invite your customers and/or prospects to "subscribe" to personalized content on a program-by-program basis, and reassure them that subscribing to one program won't open the floodgates to other marketing communications.

Be Transparent - It's important to be "radically" transparent in your invitation about the details of the personalization program. The main objective of the invitation is to persuade customers or prospects to participate in the program. So it should include:

• Why the program will be useful and valuable for the recipient
• What personal information will be used, and how the information will be used
• How the personalized content will be delivered (format)
• How frequently the personalized content will be delivered
• The duration of the program
• A clear statement that the recipient has the option to "unsubscribe" at any time

It's About How - Not Whether - to Personalize 

The issue for marketers is not whether to personalize marketing content and customer experiences. The evidence is clear that customers and prospects want and appreciate the increased relevance that personalization can provide. The real issue is how to deliver personalization in a way that respects privacy. By making personalization helpful, authentic, and permission-based, marketers will reap the maximum benefits of personalized marketing.

Top image courtesy of Josh Hallett via Flickr CC.

Related Articles

Why It's Time to Rethink Personalization

With Personalization, Less Can Be More

Two Ways to Make Personalization Welcomed

The Growing Personalization Conundrum for Marketers

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Why It's Time to Rethink Personalization

The value of personalization in marketing has been largely unquestioned for nearly two decades. Today, most marketers view personalization as essential for success, and many companies have made personalization a top priority. But the marketing environment is changing, and that means it's time for marketers to rethink their personalization strategy.

In a report published last November, the research firm Gartner predicted that by 2021, one-third of marketers will reduce spending on personalization, and by 2025, 80% of marketers who have invested in personalization will abandon their efforts due to lack of ROI, the perils of data management, or both. These predictions were both surprising and controversial because they run counter to most of the current conventional wisdom about personalization.

While I doubt that eight out of ten marketers will completely abandon personalization over the next five years, it is clear that marketers are already facing a personalization conundrum. On one hand, numerous studies conducted over the past several years have reported that consumers and business buyers want - and are willing to provide personal information in order to receive - personalized offers, messages, and experiences.

But a growing number of studies also show that consumers and business buyers don't always welcome personalized marketing and will react strongly when they perceive that personalization goes too far. In one recent study, for example, 38% of survey respondents said they would stop doing business with a company that sent them "creepy" personalized messages.

Most marketing pundits and many marketing leaders argue that the key to increasing the effectiveness of personalized marketing is more personalization. They contend that marketers should collect and use more data about customers and prospects, make personalization more specific, and use it more frequently, in more channels, and for more types of interactions. The popularity of this view explains why hyper-personalization and personalization at scale have recently attained buzzword status.

The "more personalization" argument is based on the idea that increased personalization will produce more relevant messages and experiences, and that the increased relevance will make those messages and experiences more compelling. The fundamental flaw of this approach is that it fails to account for a significant shift in public attitudes toward personalization that's occurred over the past few years.

The Shadow of Cambridge Analytica

Since the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal became public knowledge a few years ago, we have been bombarded with media coverage about how companies collect and use our personal information. Facebook's data privacy policies and practices have been widely, strongly, and repeatedly criticized, but other large tech firms such as Alphabet/Google have also been the subject of multiple media stories and Congressional hearings.

All of this has made the public more acutely aware of how much personal data companies are collecting and how they are using that data to target and personalize advertisements and other marketing communications.

Note:  The data practices of large technology companies have also been addressed by several highly-respected scholars. If you'd like to see an example of these discussions, get a copy of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. Dr. Zuboff is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor emerita at the Harvard Business School. Her book is thorough and sobering - if somewhat strident - but at over 700 pages, it is not a quick or easy read.

The heightened public awareness is impacting personalization in two ways. First, as members of the public have become more knowledgeable about how companies are using personalization in marketing, they have become desensitized to its effects. They no longer see personalized messages or content as extraordinary. So, many of the more widely-used personalization tactics and methods make less of an impact today than they did in the past. As the old saying goes, "Familiarity breeds contempt."

More importantly, as the public has learned more about how companies are collecting and using personal information, they have also become more disturbed about those practices. Today, when someone receives a personalized message, he or she is likely to think first about what enabled the personalization. What does this company know about me? How did the company obtain that information?

The conundrum facing marketers is clear. Most consumers and business buyers say they want and value personalized offers, messages, and experiences. At the same time, however, both consumers and business buyers are becoming more concerned about privacy, and they are increasingly distrustful about how companies are obtaining and using their personal information.

Under these circumstances, the "more personalization" strategy may do more harm that good. So, what's the alternative? I'll discuss that in my next post.

Image courtesy of Phil Wolff via Flickr CC.

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The State of Trust in Business

The global communication firm Edelman released the 2020 edition of its "Trust Barometer" survey during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last month. The new survey found that despite low levels of unemployment in most of the markets covered, many people aren't optimistic about their prospects for the future. About two-thirds of the survey respondents said they do not have confidence that their current leaders can successfully address their country's challenges.

Edelman has been conducting an annual survey on the state of trust around the world for the past 20 years. The Trust Barometer survey focuses on trust in four societal institutions - government, business, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and the media. The latest survey polled over 34,000 people in 28 countries.

The 2020 Trust Barometer survey found that the overall level of trust has changed little over the past year. Edelman's global Trust Index (the average percent trust in NGOs, business, government, and media) was 54 in the 2020 survey, compared to 53 in the 2019 survey. On average, trust in all four societal institutions increased slightly, but both government and media are still distrusted in most of the countries included in the survey.

Trust has become a major issue for business and marketing leaders over the past few years because of growing concerns about the collection, protection, and use of personal information by business organizations. The Trust Barometer survey doesn't directly address privacy-related trust issues, but it does provide insights about the general level of trust in business. These insights are important for marketers because they describe the "trust environment" in which marketing activities are conducted.

The findings of the 2020 Trust Barometer indicate that public perceptions of business are somewhat ambivalent. Overall, survey respondents trust business organizations as much as they trust NGOs, and significantly more than they trust government and media. Based on the Trust Index scores, business organizations are "trusted" in 12 of the countries included in the survey and "distrusted" in 7 countries. In the 9 remaining countries (including the U.S.), business earned a "neutral" Trust Index score.

In the United States, trust in business has remained relatively stable over the past 5 years, as the following chart shows:

The ambivalent views of business can be seen in several specific findings from the 2020 Trust Barometer. On the positive side, business was the only societal institution that survey respondents rated as competent ("good at what it does"). The net competence score for business was 14, compared to -4 for NGOs, -17 for media, and -40 for government. Respondents gave business fairly high marks for generating value for owners, being an engine of innovation, and driving economic prosperity.

On the negative side, 56% of the global respondents agreed with this statement:  "Capitalism as it exists today does more harm than good in the world." (Note:  "Only" 47% of U.S. respondents agreed with the statement.) In addition, 54% of the global respondents said that business "serves the interests of only the few," while only 29% said that business "serves the interests of everyone equally and fairly."

So how should business and marketing leaders interpret these findings, and what can they do to bolster trust in their company? When interpreting the results of the Trust Barometer survey, it's important to remember that Edelman focuses on business generically - as one of four societal institutions. The survey did not ask respondents about their trust in individual companies. It's not surprising that the respondents had ambivalent feelings about "business" as an institution.

The good news is that business and marketing leaders can identify what they need to do to increase trust in their company. In a December 2019 survey of 2,200 U.S. adults, Morning Consult asked participants what factors are very important when considering whether to trust a company. The following table show the 11 factors that were  identified by more than 50% of the survey respondents:

These results are noteworthy because they show that when U.S. consumers are deciding whether to trust a specific company, they place greatest importance on factors relating to reliability. Protect my personal data - make products that work as advertised - deliver on what you promise - treat your customers well.

Morning Consult also presented survey participants several factors that embodied aspects of social and environmental responsibility, but except for "treat employees well," none of these factors were rated as very important by a majority of survey respondents.

I am not suggesting the business and marketing leaders can safely ignore environmental and social issues. Numerous recent surveys have found that younger consumers and business buyers are placing increased emphasis on environmental and social factors when deciding what companies to buy from.

There is also a growing focus in the investment community on so-called "ESG" (environmental-social-governance) investing. For example, 2019 research by Morningstar found that in 2018, there were 351 "sustainable" funds available to U.S. investors, up from 235 such funds in 2017. This research also found that 2018 was the third consecutive year these funds had received record cash inflows.

So it seems clear that environmental and social issues are becoming more important when it comes to earning trust, but right now, the most important factors still relate to reliability.

Top image courtesy of chuks mbata via Flickr CC.

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Unconventional Views on B2B Growth

Last fall, The B2B Institute (a think tank funded by LinkedIn) published a research report that every B2B marketer should read. The 5 Principles Of Growth In B2B Marketing describes the findings of research conducted by Les Binet and Peter Field, two highly-regarded, UK-based experts on advertising effectiveness.

This report is based on an analysis of data contained in the IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) Databank. The IPA is a trade organization representing the UK advertising industry, and the Databank includes extensive data submitted for the IPA effectiveness awards competition. This database includes information about almost 1,500 advertising and marketing campaigns.

In this report, Binet and Field discuss five principles of B2B growth and effective advertising. Most of these principles embody views that run counter to much of the current conventional wisdom about how B2B marketers can effectively drive growth. While Binet and Field accurately describe their findings as tentative - more about this later - this research is provocative and should be given serious consideration.

Below is a brief summary of the five principles discussed in the report.

Principle 1 - Invest in Share of Voice

Share of voice is typically defined as a brand's share of all category advertising expenditures. A long-standing principle in B2C marketing is that brands tend to grow when their share of voice exceeds their market share, if all other things are equal. Brands whose share of voice is less than their market share tend to shrink. Binet and Field found that this principle is equally true for B2B companies.

Principle 2 - Balance Brand and Activation

Binet and Field argue that B2B companies should balance their spending on brand building activities and sales activation activities.  They define sales activation as any marketing activity that is designed to produce an immediate response from a potential customer.

Sales activation activities usually produce results relatively quickly, and their short-term ROI can be high. But the effects of sales activation activities don't last very long, so they don't foster long-term growth. Brand building activities, on the other hand, excel at driving long-term growth because their  effects last longer.

Binet and Field found that the effectiveness of B2B marketing is maximized when a company allocates about 46% of its marketing budget to brand building and about 54% to short-term sales activation.

Principle 3 - Expand Your Customer Base

The growing importance of customer experience, and the shift to subscription-based business models have led some B2B marketers to place greater emphasis on programs intended to improve customer retention and loyalty. However, the research by Binet and Field found that customer acquisition strategies are much more effective at driving growth than customer retention/loyalty strategies. They also found that reach strategies - strategies that seek to engage both customers and non-customers - tend to be most effective of all.

Principle 4 - Maximize Mental Availability

According to psychologists, human beings use a variety of mental shortcuts called heuristics when they make decisions. One of the most important mental shortcuts is the availability heuristic, which says that when people are facing a choice between several options, they will tend to prefer the option that comes to mind most easily.

Marketers have long known that the availability heuristic plays an important role in B2C marketing. The research by Binet and Field found that mental availability is also critical in B2B marketing, and that marketing activities that increase share of mind are highly effective at driving growth.

Principle 5 - Harness the Power of Emotion

Binet and Field found that emotions are almost as important in B2B buying as they are in B2C buying. Specifically, they found that B2B advertising messaging that appeals mostly to emotions is far better at creating brand preference than more rational content. Conversely, rational arguments perform better than emotional appeals when the main objective is short-term sales activation. The researchers also argued that emotional brand building programs can improve the effectiveness of rational sales activation programs.

Caveats

As I noted earlier, Binet and Field acknowledged in the research report that their conclusions should be viewed as tentative for several reasons:

• The research was based on an analysis of less than 50 cases in the IPA Databank, so the sample size is very small.
• The campaigns analyzed may not be representative of B2B marketing in general.
• The campaigns analyzed tended to have relatively large budgets.
• Most of the campaigns analyzed were run in the UK.

Despite these caveats, the research by Binet and Field raises several important issues, and I hope to see more research on these issues. Much of the conversation in B2B marketing focuses on how many things have changed. The research by Binet and Field reminds us that some things may not have changed as much as we usually think.

Image Source:  The B2B Institute (LinkedIn)

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Remembering the "Disruptive" Work of Clayton Christensen

The business world lost one of its leading thinkers last month when Clayton Christensen died on January 23, 2020. He was 67.

Professor Christensen joined the faculty of the Harvard Business School in 1992, after working as a consultant at Boston Consulting Group and co-founding an advanced materials company. He achieved management guru status after the success of his 1997 book, The Innovator's Dilemma. The Economist magazine called The Innovator's Dilemma one of the six most important business books ever written.

In his groundbreaking book, Professor Christensen introduced the concept of "disruptive innovation." He argued that many of the practices that help the best companies succeed can also lead to their ultimate failure. Professor Christensen's ideas have become so popular that "disruption" is now firmly entrenched in the lexicon of business.

In 2003, Professor Christensen and Michael Raynor co-authored The Innovator's Solution, which further developed the concept of disruptive innovation and also discussed what we now call the "jobs-to-be-done" framework of buyer decision making. Professor Christensen acknowledged that he did not originate the jobs-to-be-done framework, but his adoption of the idea has helped make it part of mainstream business and marketing thinking.

Like thousands of others, I have been greatly influenced by the thinking and work of Clayton Christensen. When I learned of his death, I looked back at the posts I've published here and discovered that I first referred to his work almost eight years ago. To commemorate his life and work, I've reproduced that first post below.

Fair winds and following seas, Professor Christensen.

"For Great Marketing Content, Focus on the Jobs Prospects Need to Get Done"
April 14, 2012

The first step to creating compelling marketing content is to understand what your prospects are trying to accomplish when they purchase products or services like those you provide. Most buyers, particularly business buyers, don't purchase a product or service because they want that product or service itself. Instead, when they become aware of a job that they need to get done, they look for a product or service that they can "hire" to perform the job. Theodore Levitt, the legendary marketing professor at the Harvard Business School, captured this concept in a memorable way when he said, "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole."

In The Innovator's Solution, Clatyon Christensen and Michael Raynor provide an interesting example of hiring a product to get a job done. A fast-food restaurant chain wanted to increase sales of milkshakes, and it commissioned market research to better understand how to accomplish this goal. The most surprising finding of the research was that almost half of all milkshakes were purchased in the early morning. The milkshakes were usually the only item purchased, and they were rarely consumed on the premises.

The researchers found that most of the morning milkshake customers were people on their way to work. They faced a long commute, and they needed something to make the drive more interesting. In addition, while they weren't necessarily hungry when they bought the shake, they knew if they didn't eat something, they would be hungry by mid-morning. Most of these customers also faced similar constraints. They were in a hurry, they were usually wearing their business clothes, and they only had one free hand.

These customers sometimes "hired" other foods to fill their morning needs, but most of the alternatives had significant disadvantages. Bagels got crumbs on their clothes, bananas were eaten too quickly to last for the whole commute, and breakfast sandwiches made their hands and the steering wheel greasy. It wasn't so much that these customers "liked" milkshakes better than bagels or bananas or breakfast sandwiches, but milkshakes were better than these alternatives at performing the job the customers needed to get done.

It's not hard to find examples of this idea in the business world:

• No business owner really wants accounting software, but many buy such software because they realize they need to generate invoices faster, know how much they owe to vendors, and understand how well their company is performing financially. Accounting software enables them to perform these jobs more efficiently than a manaul bookkeeping system.
• No business owner really wants property insurance, but most will purchase insurance because they know they need to protect themselves financially in case of a fire. Insurance is the best-available tool for performing this job.
• No business owner really wants a company brochure, or a direct mail campaign, or for that matter, a website, but many will invest in those things because they see them as effective tools for performing the job of increasing sales.

As businesspeople and marketers, it's easy for us to forget that most potential buyers aren't really interested in our products or services per se. What they are (or can become) interested in is what our products or services can help them accomplish. Our products or services are simply the means to an end, and this fact should determine the primary focus of our marketing content. To use Levitt's analogy, our marketing content needs to be more about quarter-inch holes than about quarter-inch drills.

To create such content, you have to know what jobs your prospects are trying to get done, why those jobs are important, what happens if those jobs don't get done, and what issues or problems can prevent prospects from performing those jobs. The answers to these questions will provide the basis for your marketing content.

Image courtesy of Betsy Weber via Flickr CC.

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What "Professional" B2B Buyers Want

For obvious reasons, B2B marketers have always craved insights about their current and potential buyers. Such insights can enable astute marketers to craft more compelling value propositions, run more effective marketing programs, and deliver better customer experiences.

Every year, I review several research studies that focus on the attitudes, preferences, and behaviors of B2B buyers. In most years, these studies address a diverse set of specific topics, as the following examples from 2019 illustrate:

• Service is the new sales (Accenture Interactive)
• The B2B Millennial Buyer Survey Report (Demand Gen Report and The Mx Group)
• Creating Epic Customer Experiences (Marketo)
• The 2019 B2B Buying Disconnect (TrustRadius)

Most of the published B2B buyer research focuses on "non-professional" buyers. By "non-professional," I mean individuals who do not work in their company's procurement/purchasing function. The research has given far less attention to the attributes and behaviors of individuals whose primary job responsibility is purchasing goods and services for their company, even though many B2B companies derive significant revenue from sales involving these "professional" buyers.

Late last year, PROS (a provider of dynamic pricing software) published a report that provides important insights about "professional" business buyers. What B2B Buyers Want was based on a survey of 1,053 "leaders in procurement and purchasing" that was conducted in association with Hanover Research. The objective of this survey was to capture insights about the current expectations of professional business buyers and identify what matters most to them.

Here is an overview of some of the major findings.

Most Professional Buyers Prefer Incumbent Suppliers

The buyers polled in this survey exhibited a strong preference for incumbent suppliers. Sixty percent of the survey respondents said they switch suppliers occasionally or less frequently (24% said rarely and 4% said never). This preference for incumbents isn't difficult to understand. First, switching suppliers requires time and effort. And second, buying from a new supplier can entail significant risk if the products or services involved are mission critical.

The preference for incumbent suppliers is not, however, unconditional. Buyers will remain loyal if they believe the prices they are paying a supplier are fair and reasonable given the current market conditions. In this study, nearly three-quarters of the survey respondents indicated that they are very or extremely confident they are paying fair prices. When the survey participants were asked what had caused them to switch suppliers, 39% said it was because of price increases, and 30% said it was because they found a cheaper supplier.

Professional Buyers Value Personalization

The buyers participating in this study want personalization if it helps them increase the value they obtain from a supplier. Ninety-two percent of the survey respondents said they desire personalized recommendations, and 69% strongly or somewhat agreed that personalized offers and recommendations enabled them to obtain more value from their suppliers.

A majority of the buyers in this research acknowledged that personalization can have real economic value. More than half of the survey respondents said they are willing to pay a higher price to receive personalized product and service recommendations.

Ecommerce Becomes Mainstream

The PROS research also found that professional B2B buyers are increasingly using digital channels for self-service purchasing.

• Only 15% of the survey respondents said they were making the majority of their purchases online two years ago.
• 30% said they are currently making the majority of their purchases online.
• 44% said they expect to make the majority of their purchases online within two years.

This finding does not mean that professional business buyers see no value in person-to-person interactions. In fact, a majority of the survey respondents said they prefer talking with a sales representative in several circumstances. For example:

• When products involve complex configurations - 61%
• When asking about special prices - 61%
• When inquiring about specific purchase terms - 58%
• When learning about new products - 52%

The Takeaway

The findings of the PROS survey provide three important takeaways for B2B marketing and sales professionals:

1. Professional business buyers are risk averse, so they prefer to work with trusted suppliers.
2. They want personalization, so long as it provides pragmatic value.
3. They are shifting more of their purchases to digital self-service channels, but they still want access to a human when facing more complex decisions and when learning about new products or services.

Image Source:  PROS Holdings, Inc.

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Three Critical Steps for Thought Leadership Success

It's now abundantly clear that compelling thought leadership content has become a vital component of effective marketing for most B2B companies. Numerous research studies have demonstrated that business buyers are relying on thought leadership content and that it has a significant impact on purchase decisions.

The 2020 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study by Edelman Business Marketing and LinkedIn provides more convincing evidence that good thought leadership content has become essential for successful B2B marketing. This research involved a survey of 3,275 global business executives across a wide range of industries and company sizes.

The survey was fielded in September - October of last year, and respondents were drawn from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, France, Germany, India, and Singapore. Nearly 1,200 of the respondents were located in the United States.

The Edelman/LinkedIn study clearly shows the importance and value of compelling thought leadership content. For example:

• Nearly half of the survey respondents (48%) said they spend at least one hour per week consuming thought leadership content, and 17% reported spending four hours or more per week.
• 69% agreed that consuming thought leadership content is one of the best ways to get a sense of the caliber of an organization's thinking.
• 48% said that thought leadership content had led them to award business to a company.

It's also clear, however, that thought leadership can be a double-edged sword. In the Edelman/LinkedIn survey, only 17% of the respondents rated the quality of the thought leadership content they consume as very good or excellent, while 28% rated the quality as mediocre or very poor. One in four of the respondents (25%) said that consuming a company's thought leadership content had directly led them not to award business to the company.

What Makes Thought Leadership Content Effective

Several research studies have identified the attributes that make thought leadership content persuasive. While the exact descriptions used in these studies vary somewhat, the research findings demonstrate that three attributes are critical.

1. It must address a topic and provide information that is relevant and important to the target audience.
2. It must provide information that is novel (not previously available).
3. It must be authoritative (supported by credible evidence).

Laying the Foundation for Thought Leadership Success

Producing thought leadership content that will earn and keep the attention and respect of your target audiences is not an easy task, but there are three preliminary steps you can take to lay a sound foundation for your thought leadership effort.

Step 1:  Set high standards for your thought leadership content. Remember that thought leadership content must address subjects that are relevant and important to your target audience, it must provide novel information or insight, and it must be authoritative. Don't make compromises regarding these standards.

Step 2:  Be realistic about the volume of thought leadership content you can produce. Effective thought leadership content almost always requires original research, and original research takes time. Therefore, you need to set realistic goals for the amount of thought leadership content you will produce during any given period of time.

Step 3:  Before you start, conduct sufficient research to get a clear understanding of the "knowledge landscape" that's relevant for your business, and keep that understanding up to date. You can't identify topics that will be appropriate for thought leadership content until you know what subjects have already been addressed. To develop thought leadership content that is novel, you will usually want to avoid topics that have already been discussed. However, there are three notable exceptions to this general rule.

• First, a broad topic may have been previously discussed, but specific aspects of the topic may not have been thoroughly covered. These particular aspects can be good subjects for thought leadership content if they are relevant and important to your customers and/or prospects.
• Second, if a topic has not been addressed for a significant amount of time, it can be appropriate to take a fresh look at that topic.
• And third, if a topic has already been addressed but the existing treatment is flawed or incomplete, that can be an appropriate subject for thought leadership content.

Obviously, these three steps are not all that's needed for a successful thought leadership program. You will also need to conduct any required original research, produce the thought leadership content resources, and implement activities to distribute and promote those resources. But these three preliminary steps will provide a solid foundation for an effective thought leadership effort.

Illustration courtesy of Abhijit Bhadurl via Flickr CC.

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Our Most Popular Posts of 2019

This will be my last post of 2019, and I want to thank everyone who has spent some of his or her valuable time reading this blog. My goal for this blog has always been to provide content that readers will find informative, thought-provoking, and useful, and I've been immensely gratified by the attention and engagement this blog has received.

For the past several years, I've used my last post of the year to share which posts have been most widely read. For this list, I'm only considering posts that were published in 2019. I've ranked the posts based on cumulative total reads, so posts published early in the year have an advantage.

So in case you missed any of them, here are our five most popular posts for 2019:

1. Have Marketers Fully Embraced the Growth Challenge?
2. Both Market and Customer Expertise are Needed to Drive Growth
3. Three Ways to Make Your Case Studies More Persuasive
4. A Fresh Look at Millennial B2B Buyers
5. How to Identify Revenue Growth Opportunities

Happy New Year, everyone!

Image courtesy of Republic of Korea via Flickr CC.

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Four Keys to Strong Customer Relationships

A recent report by Accenture Interactive provides several interesting insights on both the fragility of B2B seller-buyer relationships and what B2B companies need to do to strengthen long-term customer relationships. Service is the new sales was based on interviews with 748 business buyers and 1,499 B2B sellers across 10 countries and 16 industries.

All of the study respondents were directly involved in (or had oversight of) their company's buying or selling strategy or processes. About 75% of the respondents were manager-level or above, and about 25% were C-level. All the companies represented in the research had annual revenues of at least $25 million.

Accenture's report opens with some rather disconcerting statistics. The research found that 44% of B2B buyers had switched sellers in the 12 months preceding the study. The percentage was even higher among buyers who made weekly B2B purchases. Sixty-two percent of those study respondents said they had switched sellers in the previous 12 months. Another 36% of these frequent buyers said they plan to switch sellers in the coming 12 months.

When Accenture asked buyers why they had switched (or plan to switch), the three top reasons - each identified by 25% of the study respondents - were:

• Uncompetitive pricing
• Long lead times for delivery/fulfillment
• Missed delivery dates

This finding indicates that business buyers are a pragmatic group, and it suggests that, before anything else, B2B sellers need to be sure they are getting the basics right.

On a more positive note, half of the buyers interviewed by Accenture said they had increased their average number of items per purchase and grown average purchase values with those sellers who met their needs and helped them succeed.

The Accenture research also sought to identify important attributes and behaviors of B2B "leaders," as compared with "laggards." The report does not provide a precise definition of "leaders" and "laggards," but it does describe how Accenture made the distinction:

"To discern the leaders from the laggards, we weighted responses to 12 questions from the sellers' survey across three key pillars of B2B transformation:  organizational strategy, activities, and infrastructure. To give a robust and accurate picture of the global state of buyer-seller relationships, greatest weighting was given to questions reflecting the objective and measurable elements of B2B sales and service."

With this "definition" in mind, here are some of the major differences between leaders and laggards that the Accenture report highlights.

Personalization - Leaders were twice as likely as laggards to track buyer behavior and more likely to make personalized offers based on "the sum of all behaviors." The Accenture study found that leaders consistently offered greater personalization at all stages of the customer journey.

Digital and Human Interactions - Laggards tended to prioritize digital sales channels over channels with a human touch. Leaders, on the other hand, emphasized interaction channels that provide a dialogue with buyers. This includes digital channels such as chatbots and traditional sales reps and call centers.

Organizational Commitment - Leaders were more likely than laggards to view customer experience as an ongoing work-in-progress rather than as a one-time effort. Seventy percent of leaders said that providing good service and experiences had been a top or high priority in their company for at least three years.

Functional Integration - Forty-eight percent of leaders said they had fully integrated marketing functions across channels, compared to only 19% of laggards. Leaders were also more likely than laggards to have partially or fully integrated their sales and marketing teams.

The Accenture report also highlighted the benefits of being in the leader category. Ninety-seven percent of the leader respondents said they had gained market share, 96% reported higher profitability, and 90% said they had won a greater share of their customers' wallets.

This research also confirmed the importance of blending digital and human-to-human interactions to build and sustain strong customer relationships.

Image Source:  Accenture Interactive

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Think "Close and Deep" to Maximize Growth

During the Cold War, U.S. Army leaders in Europe faced a disconcerting situation. Their mission was to defend NATO member nations in the event of an attack by the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. The problem was, U.S./NATO ground forces were greatly outnumbered. During this period, Soviet army doctrine was to throw wave after wave of forces at defenders until they were overcome, and U.S. military leaders weren't confident they could win that kind of war.

To address this problem, the U.S. Army developed a warfighting doctrine that reintroduced the idea of depth to the battlefield. Under this doctrine, U.S./NATO forces would extend the battlefield deep on the enemy's side of the front lines and attack rear-echelon forces, while simultaneously engaging front-line forces. The objective was to break up the enemy's momentum and deplete enemy forces before they can get into the main fight. The principle of fighting close and deep at the same time remains a basic tenet of U.S. Army operational doctrine.

Some of you may be wondering what this brief foray into military history has to do with revenue growth. Quite a bit, actually. To generate consistent revenue growth over an extended period of time, business and marketing leaders must design and execute their activities so as to maximize performance in the present (fighting close), while simultaneously investing in activities and capabilities that will lay the foundation for success in the future (fighting deep).

In many ways, this challenge comes down to a question of resource allocation. Regardless of company size, the available resources are rarely sufficient to enable senior business leaders to do everything they'd like to do. Therefore, resource allocation is an intrinsic part of every significant business decision, and the challenge for senior company leaders is to spend their finite resources on those activities and capabilities that will produce maximum results.

Deciding where and how to invest finite business resources has never been simple or easy, but these decisions have become more complex because today's business leaders have more options and more factors to consider then ever before. Resource allocation decisions are made even more complicated by the need to address both current and longer-term needs. As Jack Welch, the former Chairman and CEO of GE once said, "You've got to eat while you dream. You've got to deliver on short-term commitments, while you develop a long-range strategy and vision and execute it."

Fortunately, there's a good rule of thumb called the "70-20-10 rule" that business leaders can use to address the current vs. future aspect of the resource allocation challenge. The 70-20-10 rule has been used for a variety of business purposes. For example, Google has reportedly used it to manage the innovation process, and Coca Cola has reportedly used a version of the rule to guide marketing investment decisions.

Below is a brief overview of how the 70-20-10 rule can be used to guide resource allocation decisions in marketing. Keep in mind, though, that the rule can also be used for several other kinds of resource allocation decisions.

The 70%

The marketing version of the 70-20-10 rule says that about 70% of your marketing resources should be devoted to capabilities and programs with a proven track record of acceptable performance. These will include marketing channels, techniques, and technologies that your company is currently using successfully.

The 70-20-10 rule does not mean that companies should simply "keep on doing what we're already doing." It means that marketers should evaluate how well their "bread and butter" programs are performing and continue to invest in those that are delivering acceptable results.

The primary goal of these capabilities and programs is to drive incremental performance improvements in the present and over the near-term future.

The 20%

According to the 70-20-10 rule, about 20% of your marketing resources should be invested in "new" but promising capabilities and techniques. This category would typically include channels and techniques that a growing number of other companies are using successfully. In many cases, these channels and techniques will be approaching mainstream adoption.

Investments in this category are not quite as safe as those in the 70% group, but they often relate to capabilities or technologies that will become critical to your success in the near-term future.

The 10%

The remaining 10% of your marketing resources should be invested in truly new capabilities and techniques that have just emerged on the scene. Obviously, these are high-risk investments that aren't likely to produce short-term benefits.

For small and mid-size companies, the investments in this category may consist primarily of learning about the new techniques or capabilities - e.g. sending members of the marketing team to conferences or other educational events. Larger companies may also decide to launch small pilot programs to experiment with a new capability or technique.

Caveats

As with other rules of thumb, marketers should view the 70-20-10 rule as a general guide rather than a precise prescription. The specific percentages in the rule may not be appropriate for every business in every competitive situation. The benefit of the rule is that it leads marketers to give appropriate consideration to both current and future needs and thus increases the odds of successfully producing consistent revenue growth.

Image courtesy of winnifredxoxo via Flickr CC.

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How to Identify Revenue Growth Opportunities

Driving consistent, profitable revenue growth is one of the most persistent challenges that business and marketing leaders face. The key word in that sentence is "consistent." Many companies can produce substantial revenue growth sporadically or over a short period of time. But it's exceptionally difficult to consistently generate above-average growth over the long term.

In my last post, I wrote that business and marketing leaders must perform two distinct but related tasks to maximize revenue growth:

1. They must identify what growth opportunities are (or can be) available to them and determine which of those growth opportunities are most attractive.
2. They must find the right balance between short-term and long-term growth opportunities.

In this post, I'll focus on how business and marketing leaders can identify growth opportunities. I'll cover balancing short-term and long-term opportunities in my next post.

Structural Sources of Growth

The first step in identifying potential growth opportunities is to understand the dynamics of revenue growth - how it happens or, more accurately, where it originates. There are, in fact, several distinct sources of growth. These structural sources of growth are not dependent on how a company is organized or the types of products or services it sells. Instead, they are based on the business and marketing strategies that a company uses to tap into each source.

This topic has been discussed in management and marketing literature for a long time. In a 1957 article for the Harvard Business Review, Igor Ansoff identified four structural sources of growth and four related types of growth strategies:

1. Sales of existing products in existing markets (market penetration strategy)
2. Sales of existing products in new markets (market development strategy)
3. Sales of new products in existing markets (product development strategy)
4. Sales of new products in new markets (diversification strategy)

In a 2004 article in the Harvard Business Review, Michael Treacy and Jim Sims identified five structural sources of growth:

1. Continuing sales to existing customers (base retention)
2. Sales won from the competition (market share gain)
3. New sales in an expanding market (market positioning)
4. Sales from expanding into related markets (adjacent market expansion)
5. Sales from expanding into new, unrelated lines of business (diversification)

I've used both of these models when working with clients to frame our discussions about how to grow. But over the years, I've expanded on these models to create a more detailed framework of the alternative ways to generate growth. The current version of my framework is shown in the diagram at the top of this post.

This framework is a good tool for stimulating your thinking about how to grow your business and for identifying the growth opportunities that are (or can be) available to your business. When using this framework, it's important to keep several things in mind.

First, the good news is that these structural sources of growth are always present, at least to some degree. Their existence isn't dependent on the market conditions a company is facing at a particular moment in time. However, the volume of revenue that a company can obtain from each source is greatly influenced by the market and competitive environment. So the framework identifies potential sources of revenue growth, but it doesn't tell you about the relative attractiveness of those sources. To perform that evaluation, you'll need to use traditional market and competitive analysis tools and techniques.

Second, no single source of growth is likely to provide all the revenue you need to reach your growth objective.

And third, each source of growth has distinctive attributes and dynamics. So you'll need a specific strategy and game plan for each source of growth you choose to pursue.

In my next post, I'll discuss the importance of balancing short-term and long-term growth opportunities.

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How to Address the Growth Challenge

Growth is to a business organization what oxygen is to a living organism. It is the life force of the organization. For decades, sustained profitable growth has been the linchpin of long-term business prosperity. Profitable growth creates a virtuous cycle of forces that supports and drives business success. When a company stops growing, these same forces begin to run in reverse, creating a vicious cycle that makes success difficult to achieve.

My first post of 2019 asked the question:  "Have Marketers Fully Embraced the Growth Challenge?" Back in January, I answered that question this way:

"The recent research indicates that leading business growth is more of an aspirational goal than a current reality for most marketers. Overall, the studies show that most marketing leaders are still relying on conventional marketing communications tools to drive growth, and they remain much less involved in other business activities that have a significant impact on growth."

Research published this year indicates that my conclusion is still largely accurate. For example, in the February 2019 edition of The CMO Survey, respondents identified driving growth as the top challenge for marketing leaders. Yet only 43.4% of the respondents reported that the marketing function leads revenue growth in their organization. In the August 2019 edition of the survey, the percentage of respondents saying that marketing leads revenue growth dropped to 36.0%.

(Note:  The CMO Survey began asking this question in August 2016. Since then, the percentage of respondents reporting that marketing leads revenue growth has ranged from a low of 29.0% to a high of 43.4%.)

This fall, the CMO Council published a strategic brief that discussed the importance of growth and the major issues surrounding growth. The brief also discussed some steps that companies need to take to successfully address the growth imperative.

How to Achieve Transformational Growth described the issues surrounding growth in emphatic terms:

"For many companies, growth is the driving force that brings it all together. Yet questions loom:  Where do you find it? How do you inspire it? What hinders it? How do you invest in it? Who within the organization orchestrates and owns it?"

The CMO Council observed that many companies are addressing the growth challenge by creating new C-level positions to lead growth initiatives. The brief noted that:

• According to research by Singular, more than 21% of brands with at least $50 million in advertising spend now have chief growth officers (CGOs).
• More than 6,000 executives profiled on LinkedIn have the CGO title.
• 15,000 executives on LinkedIn report being the chief revenue officer (CRO) for their company.
• 28,000 of the executives say they are chief commercial officers (CCOs).

The CMO Council discusses three keys to maximizing growth:

1. Align the functional areas of the organization that play critical roles in driving growth. This will include marketing, sales, product, customer experience, technology, and analytics.
2. Create a growth culture. Nurture inclusiveness and encourage input from all organizational levels.
3. Set a growth agenda that identifies attractive growth opportunities and builds a sound strategy for exploiting those opportunities.

Regardless of whether growth is led by the CEO, CMO, CGO, CRO, or CCO, companies face two distinct but related tasks when addressing the growth challenge. First, they need to identify what growth opportunities are (or can be) available to them and which of those opportunities are most attractive. And second, they need to balance short-term and long-term growth opportunities.

I'll be discussing both of these issues in upcoming posts.

Image courtesy of Mike Lawrence (CreditDebitPro.com) via Flickr CC.

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Why Your Marketing Content Should Be "Job Focused"

The first step to designing an effective marketing strategy and creating compelling marketing content is to understand what your potential customers are trying to accomplish when they purchase products or services like those you provide. In most cases, people don't buy a product or service because they want that product or service itself. More often, what they really want is what the product or service will help them accomplish.

Theodore Levitt, the legendary professor of marketing at the Harvard Business School, captured this idea in a memorable way when he often reminded his students that, "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole."

In The Innovator's Solution, Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor built on Professor Levitt's idea to describe what is called the jobs-to-be-done framework. The basic idea of this framework is that when people become aware of a "job" they need to get done, they look for a product or service they can "hire" to perform the job.

Christensen and Raynor argue that this is how customers "experience life." Their thought processes begin with an awareness that they need to get something done, and then they seek to hire something or someone to to the job as effectively, conveniently, and inexpensively as possible.

What Milkshakes Can Teach Us About Marketing

Christensen and Raynor also provided a memorable example of hiring a product to get a job done. In their case study, a fast-food restaurant chain wanted to increase sales of milkshakes, and it commissioned market research to determine how to accomplish this goal. The most surprising finding of the research was that almost half of the milkshakes were purchased in the early morning. The milkshakes were usually the only item purchased, and they were rarely consumed at the restaurant.

Digging a little deeper, the researchers found that most of the morning milkshake customers were people on their way to work. Many of them faced a long commute, and they needed something to make the drive more interesting. Also, they were in a hurry, they were usually wearing their business clothes, and they only had one hand free.

These customers sometimes "hired" other foods to fill their morning needs, but most of the alternatives had significant disadvantages. Bagels left crumbs on their clothes, and breakfast sandwiches made their hands and the steering wheel greasy. It wasn't so much that these customers "liked" milkshakes more than bagels or breakfast sandwiches, but milkshakes were simply better than those alternatives at performing the job the customers needed to get done.

The Magic of Job-Focused Marketing

The jobs-to-be-done framework is often used to guide the process of developing new products or services, but it also has implications for marketing. What it tells us is that one key to effective marketing is to focus the majority of our marketing messages and content on the jobs our potential buyers need to get done.

To create compelling "job-focused" messages and content, marketers need to thoroughly understand the jobs their potential customers are trying to get done, including:

• What the specific jobs are
• Why the jobs are important
• What happens if the jobs don't get done
• How potential buyers are trying to perform the jobs - what tools and processes they are using
• What is preventing them from getting the jobs done effectively and efficiently - the limitations and shortcomings of their existing tools and processes

As marketers, it's easy for us to forget that most potential buyers aren't really interested in our products or services per se. What they are (or can become) interested in is what those products or services can help them accomplish. Our products or services are simply the means to an end, and it's critical to keep this in mind when planning our marketing efforts. 

To use Professor Levitt's metaphor, our marketing strategy and our marketing content should be more about quarter-inch holes than quarter-inch drills.

Image courtesy of GotCredit (www.gotcredit.com) via Flickr CC.

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Two Ways to Improve Your ROI Credibility

With the fourth quarter of 2019 well underway, many marketing leaders will have already started planning for 2020. In most cases, the planning process will include an analysis of how well marketing performed in 2019. and many marketing leaders will use return on investment (ROI) as the primary tool for conducting this assessment.

Over the past two-plus decades, ROI has become the "gold standard" for measuring marketing performance and for communicating the performance and value of marketing to senior company leaders. So you would think that, by now, marketing leaders would thoroughly understand what marketing ROI is, and how to calculate it correctly. Unfortunately, however, that is not always the case, as a recent survey conducted by LinkedIn Marketing Solutions makes clear.

The LinkedIn Research

The Long and Short of ROI report is based on a survey of 4,000 B2B and B2C marketing professionals from 19 countries. Survey respondents worked in a wide range of industry sectors, including technology, financial services, professional services, and manufacturing. The survey was conducted in June 2019.

Most of the results presented in the survey report refer to "digital marketers." Unfortunately, the report does not define who "digital marketers" are, nor does it indicate whether all of the survey respondents were "digital marketers." With that caveat in mind, here are the "headline" findings from the LinkedIn study:

• 70% of digital marketers claim they are currently measuring ROI.
• 77% of digital marketers measure ROI during the first month of a campaign, even though 55% of those marketers reported having a sales cycle that is at least three months long.
• When most digital marketers say they are measuring ROI, they are actually measuring a variety of key performance indicators (KPIs), but not true ROI.
• 63% of digital marketers don't have a high level of confidence in the "ROI" metrics they are currently using.

The LinkedIn survey report argues that marketers should (a) clearly distinguish between KPI-based metrics and ROI, and (b) measure ROI over the length of the sales cycle in order to obtain accurate results.

When You Say ROI . . .Mean ROI

The findings of the LinkedIn survey highlight two of the still all-too-prevalent ways that many marketers are misusing ROI. First, many marketers use "ROI" as a catch-all term to describe a wide variety of benefits produced by marketing activities. But return on investment is a specific financial metric that has a well-established meaning among management and financial professionals.

This means that none of the following constitutes ROI:

• Increased brand awareness
• Increased market share
• Increased customer lifetime value
• Increased average deal size
• Improved conversion rates
• Improved response rates
• Improved NPS/customer satisfaction scores

For many companies, tracking some or all of these performance measures will be valuable, but they do not constitute marketing ROI. Calling any of these benefits "ROI" reflects a misunderstanding of what ROI is, and if a marketing leader presents one of these kinds of ROI calculations to a CEO or CFO, his or her credibility will be weakened.

Calculate ROI Correctly

The second way that many marketers misuse ROI is to calculate it incorrectly. The basic formula for marketing ROI (MROI) is:

MROI = (Gain from Marketing Investment - Cost of Marketing Investment) / Cost of Marketing Investment

So the basic MROI formula contains only three components:

1. The financial gain from the marketing investment
2. The cost of the marketing investment
3. Time - Although the formula doesn't expressly contain a "time" value, MROI is always measured for a defined period of time.

While the basic MROI formula appears to be quite simple, that simplicity is deceptive. In reality, calculating MROI accurately can become a complex task because every component of the formula presents questions that require thoughtful answers and sound judgment calls.

I've addressed many of these issues in several previous posts, so I won't repeat that material here. However, I've provided links to my ROI-related posts below. If you're involved in calculating MROI, I encourage you to take a look at these posts and carefully consider the issues they discuss.

Image courtesy of Rick B via Flickr CC.

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Why Proving the Impact of Marketing is Difficult

For Better Marketing Decisions, Think Incrementally

Increased Profits, Not Higher Revenues, Determine Marketing ROI

Let's End the Obsession with Marketing ROI

Stop Trying to Measure Marketing ROI

Analyzing the ROI Formula - Part 3

Analyzing the ROI Formula - Part 2

Analyzing the ROI Formula - Part 1

The Basic Idea of Return on Investment

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