If you’re a B2B marketer working in 2017, you’ve likely switched over to an inbound marketing approach, based on the three stages in the buyer’s journey: awareness, consideration, and decision. But has your sales team made the same switch in how they sell your product or solution?

Are today’s B2B customers empowered? Or are they overwhelmed? For the purchasers of complex solutions, such as enterprise software applications, high-end industrial equipment, or medical technology, information overload can bog down even the most enthusiastic prospect, even at the beginning of their customer journey.

Why is it so hard to measure ROI for B2B marketing activities? Because it is hard – B2B marketing is complex, it involves multiple parts of your organization, and it takes place over a long period of time. In comparison, measuring return on investment for B2C marketing initiatives is easy. You run an ad, you observe the impact on sales. Or you monitor the path from first contact with your website to an online order. It’s a simple action/reaction model, with the measurement metric built right in.

Is your primary B2B marketing goal to drive sales? Probably – but unless you define it more specifically, it may be hard to achieve. Eighty-five percent of B2B marketers cite lead generation as their most critical marketing goal. But to choose the goals that are most relevant for your organization – whether it’s B2B lead generation, closing sales, or improving customer satisfaction - you need to start from an in-depth understanding of your organization and the environment in which you’re operating.

If you’re a B2B marketer, you already know the most important thing about setting goals – it looks easy but it’s really quite hard. Anyone can toss out a random number – for leads, sales, website visitors, followers or any other metric – but unless it’s based on relevant, specific information, it’s just that – a random number.

You’ve launched your customer reference program, and created several reference cases – now how do you measure the results? Just like all your other initiatives, you need to be able to measure the return on your marketing investment. There are many different measures that you can use to gauge the impact of your customer reference program (CRP). Here are a few examples:

You did everything right when you launched your customer reference program – you ensured that you had buy-in from sales, you held a high-profile launch event and you developed a clear, comprehensive process to manage all related project flow.

Customer reference programs are one of the most powerful tools in the B2B marketing toolkit. Whether you call them success stories, testimonials, reference stories, or advocate marketing, these profiles of your customers and their experiences with your company and product are extremely influential.

Unlike in secondary school, likes on your B2B Facebook page aren’t just about how popular you are. Instead, they’re a key metric in your Facebook marketing strategy. When somebody likes your B2B Facebook page, they’re initiating a relationship with your company and signaling an interest in doing business with you. So how do you keep increasing your Facebook likes and strengthen your engagement?