We are seeing two potentially contradictory narratives coming from B2B marketing leaders as 2025 gathers momentum.
On the one hand, the results of a somewhat experimental year where growth-at-all costs industries decided to cut marketing and aim for profit instead of growth. This approach resulted in profits that more-or-less equated to cuts in marketing budgets, while growth flatlined. The general conclusion is that marketing is indeed vital for growth (who would have guessed?), even if its total contribution can’t always be measured. Good news for marketing leaders.
51% of marketers have to justify their budget each month
On the other hand, the pressure to justify marketing spend is greater than it has ever been. 51% of B2B marketing leaders in the UK reported that they are being required to rationalize their budgets monthly, while 87% admitted that it is getting harder to measure the long-term impact of campaigns (Marketing Week). This is the situation for many B2B businesses and is, of course, bad news for marketing leaders.
So, while marketing budgets may start to come back, what can leaders do to secure the budgets they need and lower these unprecedented levels of scrutiny, while still showing results?
We need to rethink metrics and targets
Let’s start with an inescapable truth. Measurement should be a business-wide commitment that is part of a company’s cultural fabric, not a task for each department to figure out for themselves.
“If measurable results are required to justify budgets, then sensible metrics and targets needs to be set."
Even with the wealth of data-driven metrics that are available to track marketing’s impact on revenue, the full value of marketing cannot be calculated through quarterly or annual money in, money out reporting. So, if measurable results are required to justify budgets, then sensible metrics and targets needs to be set and understood by everyone.
And while revenue-adjacent success factors such as lead volumes paint an important part of the picture, how do you track the longer-term value of brand building and other activity that doesn’t directly feed a pipeline?
Marketers need to go beyond vanity metrics
One solution is to consider the options that exist between vanity metrics (such as views and clicks) and revenue or revenue adjacent metrics. I have seen more marketing leaders start to champion measurements of success such as share of search, 'share of model’, and sentiment analysis through social listening.
Share of search can help improve conversion rates
Share of search measures the proportion of online searches for a brand compared to the total searches in its category. In many ways it resembles market share, but looks at search volume as a landscape, rather than sales or revenue proportions in relation to the market. Based on freely available Google Trends search data, it’s relatively inexpensive to measure using industry tools. It has become a standard for many brands to track as it can:
- Help manage sales predictions
- Indicate the success of your marketing
- Track and improve PR efforts
- Drive your conversion rate.
And market data suggests that brands with a higher and increasing share of search will enjoy sales growth in the future.
Share of model: Understand AI brand awareness
Share of model is a new way of measuring a brand’s presence within AI data sets. Essentially, it’s the number of mentions of a brand by one or multiple LLMs as a proportion of total mentions of brands in the same category. Share of model covers a vast amount of data – everything in the datasets about a brand, its touchpoints, its communications and, increasingly, what consumers think and do in relation to it. And it extends to how each model compares a brand to its competitors. Tools are now being developed to measure and extract the insights from AI data sets, and best practice is being established to help optimize AI brand awareness.
Brand sentiment: Drive business reputation
Brand sentiment measures how people feel about a brand and is done by analyzing text data to identify its intent. It’s important as it measures intangible and often hard-to-quantify feelings surrounding a brand, and highlights factors that can have a significant impact on business outcomes. Sentiment analysis tools can handle vast amounts of data, enabling you to determine sentiment and to:
- Track sentiment over time
- Analyze sentiment by topic
- Break down sentiment by discussion
- Understand sentiment by specific authors
- Know you share of sentiment
Crucially, tools can cope with shades of positivity and negativity and are based on Natural Language Understanding (NLU). Brand sentiment insights can help a business to improve products and services, be more responsive to customer feedback and improve brand reputation.
These three types of metrics are difficult to inflate or manipulate and can be tracked across multiple periods. Their relevance is also extendable into the era of AI search, and they are broadly understood by senior leadership. By introducing these into your marketing reporting, you can start to spread the burden of proof away from just short-term results.
Marketing’s measures of success don’t align with its business value
More fundamentally, there is an industry-wide lack of consensus about whether marketing should be treated as a cost center or a revenue generator, with different businesses taking different stances.
In my experience, most marketers would self-identify as revenue generators, but the problem isn’t which side of that fence marketing lands on, it’s that the measures of its success don’t fully align with the full value it brings to the table.
There is a growing understanding that, even if you can’t easily directly attribute marketing’s contribution to growth, if you cut marketing then growth flatlines. But that hasn’t stopped budgets getting mercilessly cut in the past, and it won’t be enough to guarantee the same in the future.
A great marketing mix has both brand building and performance
Fulfilling performance targets focused on short-term revenue generation helps maintain the narrative needed to constantly justify marketing budgets, but it doesn’t help solve the underlying problem. A great marketing mix has a combination of brand building and performance marketing, with each exponentially boosting the other when done well.
And as changes in B2B buyer behavior continue to redefine the role of sales and the increased overlap of sales and marketing, the core definition and role of marketing need to change too. Forrester predicts that in 2025 more than half of large B2B purchases will be processed through digital self-service channels, which will have consequences for large sales teams. It also strongly suggests that brand equity, personalized content, and omni-channel experiences – all within the remit of marketing - become more important for converting sales.
More than 50% of large B2B purchases will be self-service processed in 2025
B2B needs a new marketing budget paradigm
But an increase in self-serve buying doesn’t automatically solve marketing’s measurement challenge. Perhaps a new paradigm is needed, where the elements of marketing that directly enable sales are aligned with the sales function and judged as a single revenue generation engine, and the elements that focus on building long-term brand equity, trust and presence are considered separately. So rather than defining the split as marketing and sales, you instead define it as revenue generation and brand equity development.
"Rather than defining the split as marketing and sales, you instead define it as revenue generation and brand equity development"
There are many reasons why such an adjustment will be difficult to implement, but the change in B2B buyer behavior suggests that a re-assessment is imperative.
What are the steps for positive change?
Short-term pressures often get in the way of implementing positive change. And the pressure on marketing leaders to continuously justify budgets won’t go away on its own. But there are some smaller steps towards alleviating the pressure and evolving expectations towards a more balanced and productive future.
1 - Build the case for a more accurate reporting of success
This shouldn’t only focus on short-term results. For this you will need the data and tools to measure impact on things like brand sentiment and share of search, and a clear plan for how you incorporate those into your reporting cadence. If you’re expected to report monthly, it needs to be clear what (if any) changes in these metrics will be visible between one report and the next.
2 - Assess whether you are aligned with new buying behaviors
Assess whether your current marketing and sales capabilities are aligned with new buying behavior. It will likely become clear that servicing these expectations will require greater investment in the personalization of content and the elevation of cross-channel experiences. And in stronger brand marketing. B2B companies need to be preparing for this sooner rather than later, meaning that confident investment in longer-term marketing impact needs to start now.
If you’re struggling to justify marketing budget to C-suite and want to talk with experts that have years of experience in measuring marketing outcomes and proving ROI, then contact us at Luxid.
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