How Do You Really Know if You’re B2B Marketing is Working?

Mark Evans
1 min readJan 18, 2024

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B2B SaaS CEOs often struggle to know whether marketing is working.

Attribution is increasingly challenging.

With zero-click marketing, people consume your content but don’t visit your Website.

Meanwhile, gated content has less appeal so collecting email addresses is more difficult.

And it’s difficult to correllate marketing activity to specific outcomes — aka if we do X, why will happen.

Marketing leaders are under pressure because it’s harder to quantify success.

CEOs and CFOs are less patient and, not surprisingly, the CMO’s have shorter shelf lives.

To assess the success of B2B marketing, look at the entire marketing mix, not just specific channels or campaigns.

In B2B SaaS, a prospect often turns into a lead or customer after multiple touches.
They read a LinkedIn post, listen a podcast, see an ad, and download an ungated guide.

The steps in journey are hard to attribute but cumulatively influence the buying decision.

For B2B SaaS companies, particularly those with longer sales cycles, the key to sales is conversations.

You need to do marketing that motivates and encourages people to reach out for a demo or a discovery call.

What are the signals (other than a lack of leads and sales) that your marketing isn’t working?

Looking to jump-start your marketing. Check out my 90-marketing sprints, which combine strategy and tactics to improve brand awareness and leads.

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Mark Evans

A fractional CMO for B2B SaaS looking to attract & engage better prospects. I focus on positioning, planning, and content-driven marketing. marketingspark.co