Visibility is key to successful marketing. If you can’t see how your content contributes to your customer’s buying decisions, how can you make informed strategic moves?

Modern marketing means creating content that’s perfectly aligned to your business priorities—and then proving its ROI. But, we at Kapost want to know: do B2B marketing teams really have alignment and visibility?

A successful marketing team:

• Consistently aligns around a central plan with cohesive handoffs and shared vertical and horizontal goals
• Works in strategic and tactical cohesion across departments to eliminate ad-hoc assets and duplicative efforts
• Has visibility into all content assets, with a single source of truth (and thus, no off-brand content)
• Evaluates efforts, activities, and technology regarding their ability to deliver effective ROI and aid in driving revenue

Can you relate? If you checked off every box, you’re a superstar marketer. You’re also in the minority.

The State of B2B Marketing

It’s an exciting time to be in marketing. Our technology is getting more powerful, our customer understanding more substantial, and our ability to work more efficient. So how is this changing the way we view our priorities and goals?

Kapost surveyed hundreds of B2B marketers to understand just that. The results are staggering. Here are some of our favorite statistics we found:

• Lead focus: B2B marketers’ top priority is generating leads, followed by improving lead conversion rate.
• Inconsistent visibility: While 52% of marketing leaders have visibility into how content aligns to business priorities, only 37% of content creators do.
• Barriers to success: Proving ROI of content is the most significant barrier to success for 54% of B2B marketers, followed closely by inefficient internal processes.

Marketing is as dynamic as ever. What does this mean for modern marketers? Here are our insights on the current state of B2B marketing:

ROI Evaluation

Most haven’t truly transitioned to becoming revenue marketers. We still care more about lead generation than revenue contribution. Marketers struggle to evaluate the ROI of technology—tech stacks are important but success is often based on feelings or adoption as opposed to true return on investment.

Content Confusion

The role content plays in an organization is not black and white. Everyone from leaders to operations seems to play a role in content creation. We aren’t yet sure how to divide tactics and strategy based on specific roles to take control of the customer experience.

Best Practices to Meet Revenue

Marketing teams that met or exceeded goals shared some common traits. They had less than a quarter of content produced that was wasted or unused, evaluated ROI of marketing efforts based on lead conversion, and prioritized sales enablement, to name a few.

How Do You Compare?

How does your team stack up? Download B2B Content Strategy and Operations Benchmark to see the full report.