Note: This cumulative data based on 100 clients spends whose ACV average is $10K USD and sales cycle north of 45 days.
- Google Ads is still the most effective inbound acquistion channel at scale, but LinkedIn is catching up!
- Demand generated/captured via LinkedIn is converting at comparable rates vs. Google solidifying the signficance of ABM and SMM as growth levers.
After interacting with over 300 founders and marketing leaders in 2023, We have identified several significant trends.
1. 8 out of 10 companies we work with lack a proper data and revops infrastructure. This makes it difficult for founders and marketers to understand performance and measure outcomes. Scaleups are hesitant to take on revops projects due to concerns about project timeline and compromising lead and data flow.
2. Every marketer is eager to learn, implement, test, and experiment with ABM for their company. However, getting alignment from sales and budget for this has become increasingly challenging.
3. Paid search marketers are transitioning from manual bidding strategies to automated ones. Many marketers prefer smart bidding, predictive analytics, and automated campaign management. There is also a higher adoption rate for new inventories such as performance max, dynamic search ads, and more.
4. Demand gen leaders prioritize speed to lead. The adoption and growth of new martech tools, such as RevenueHero, Factors.ai are on the rise.
5. Paid social media advertising is primarily used for retargeting and aircover for ABM in most SaaS companies. However, some companies also utilize paid social media for content distribution, demand generation, and testing value propositions and use cases to gauge resonance with their ICPs. Linkedin ads % spend increases from 10% of overall paid marketing spend last year to around 30% this year
6. Target predictions for most companies were significantly inaccurate. While marketing leaders favor a bottoms-up approach, Revops and the executive team base targets solely on top-down metrics.
7. Many companies fail to effectively utilize creative and copy testing frameworks and playbooks. Paid marketers do not frequently share insights about creative performance with designers and copywriters.
This post was originally shared by Shiyam Sunder on Linkedin.