June 30, 2009
Article

New Chart: How Well Managed is the Hub of Your Marketing Strategy?

SUMMARY: The foremost change in B2B marketing during the past decade or so has been the emergence of a company's website as the primary point of contact with prospects and customers.

The website has also become an extremely efficient platform for integrating and automating the lead generation process. As a result, the role of a company's website has been elevated from simply a spoke in the marketing mix wheel to the hub of the marketing strategy. The following chart represents a snapshot of how well B2B websites are being managed.

How Well Managed is the Hub of Your Marketing Strategy?


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Rather than ask client-side marketers to self-evaluate their own performance, we asked their agencies and marketing consultants to provide a more objective assessment. This chart shows how they graded their clients’ efforts.

Agencies gave their clients relatively high marks across the board for how well they manage their websites. While many website capabilities are being managed at a high level, or clients were at least doing a good job of managing them, we found that system integration which enables the flow of leads generated on a website to the CRM system was a weak point. The lead management process has become critical to the success of marketing and sales programs, and it all begins with the timely transfer of leads from their source to the lead management automation.

For the most part, agencies and consultants also thought their clients failed to update websites efficiently and on schedule, or regularly optimize content for search engines at a high level. These tasks are critical to web marketing effectiveness and, if not well managed internally, can be easily and inexpensively outsourced.

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