As we’re fast approaching the last quarter of their year, it’s time to take stock of how well your marketing is performing, by benchmark your efforts with your peers, to see both how well you’re doing and
what lessons you can learn.
As the adage goes, ‘if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’. But what are the key metrics you need to judge activities by?
We’ve pulled together a collection of key statistics and considerations, for marketing financial services and technology. Links are included to full reports, a few are gated, but they only ask for your email address.
With the 2024 budgeting season asks well under way, you may also find these key data points and consideration points will help justify your requests.
Gartner’s predictions of what marketing will focus on in 2023.
Just for fun, see if you have embarked on any of these within your own organisation.
No 1 – ‘AI-augmented operations allow for smarter data-driven decisions’.
Companies utilising AI in their marketing stack, will enable them to shift 75% of their activities away from production and more into strategic activities. So let AI manage the doing, leaving you time to focus on the thinking.
No 2 – To counter the vast volume of fake content by establishing a dedicated team to authenticity.
This goes hand in hand with the rapid increase in gen-AI produced content.
No 3 – Consumers will look favourably at product placement.
With 70% of brands using around 10% of their budget for product placement deals. We’d rather see product in our shows that be annoyed with separate ads.
No 4- Loyal customers are essential to growth
This will lead to rapid increase in companies launching their own loyalty program, to both retain priority customers and help with first party data collection.
No 5 – AI used in marketing, can be for good or bad.
CMOs will include a focus on ethical accountability on the use of AI within their marketing efforts.
For the full report:
https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/what-will-marketing-focus-on-in-2023
Key metrics for Financial services marketing.
The smart people at www.ruleranalytics.com dug into the data pool (they help tie revenue and attributions to campaigns), and came up with these:
Average conversion rate of 4.3%.
Some top performers achieved as high as 23%!
Word of mouth drives traffic.
26% of traffic to financial services site was direct traffic and Referrals was the best converting channel, further proving how word of mouth is key.
Search is where many customers start their journeys.
41% of traffic came from organic search with a conversion rate of 4.7%
24% of traffic came from paid search with a conversion rate of 6%
Paid social only converts at 1%
Email marketing works well for conversion.
Emails had an average conversion rate of 5.8%
For the full report: www.ruleranalytics.com/blog/reporting/financial-services-marketing-statistics/
Key considerations for Tech marketing.
Gartner have produced a hugely insightful report, that rallies tech CMOs to focus their teams to activate in-market buyers, which will contribute to the revenue growth for their organisations. We do have a separate blog that focuses on deal acceleration, to close live opportunities (www.bbpagency.com/post/from-abm-to-dbm-closing-the-gap).
Here’s a summary from Gartner Research 2023 Tech Marketing Benchmarks: Top-Line Insights and considerations when planning your activities.
Reduced marketing budgets
-has led to a need to prove ROI by increases in revenue and funnel conversion and deal-acceleration.
Growth in staffing numbers
-21% of high growth organisations are optimistic of increasing headcount this year.
-only 7% of low growth organisations expect a headcount increase.
Lack of time and long-term focus results in marketing finding it hard to demonstrate success
-slower growth companies are stating short-term tactical focus is holding them back from achieving success.
-higher performing companies are stating lack of time is holding them back, not budget or resource issues.
A broader mix of channels helps demand generation/lead-gen success.
-tech companies seeing high growth are including PR, direct mail and third party digital events in their channel mix.
The full report:
So how are you measuring up?
We hope the above has given some great insights that will help as you move into the last quarter of 2023 and your planning for 2024.