B2B email marketers who perceive that their firms are struggling to get a grip on digital growth are right.
For one thing, executives are underestimating their competition, judging by early results from the 2021 Growth Marketing Maturity Study, a report developed by Stein IAS in collaboration with WARC and The Effectiveness Partnership.
B2B practitioners are much more likely to identify primarily as growth enablers — 48.5% see themselves that as such and 36.3% as growth drivers. Only 15.2% say they are sales enablers — an apparent no-no, although it may well include laborers in such silos as email.
In contrast, 40.4% believe their peers at other companies are mostly sales enablers. That tops the 38.4% who consider themselves growth enablers and the 21.2% who feel they are growth drivers.
Why it’s important to focus on being a growth enabler first is unclear. The study reports that sales & results planning has the greatest impact on growth, scoring 7.91 on a scale of one to 10.
Second is marketing communications & GTM, with 7.59. This is followed by operations & deployment (7.47), core strategy (7.44), marketing insight & intelligence (7.26), data & technology (7.22) and digital experience & service design (7.17).
Sadly, respondents don’t give their firms the highest marks when it comes to competence. Here are their perceptions, on a scale of one to five:
Email specialists doubtless fall into the marketing bucket, which is in second place in competency and also in impact on growth.
What’s more, 81.8% focus on each of these growth layers, versus 33% who focus on sales & results planning. Also, 57.6% focus on market insight & intelligence, 56.4% on core strategy, 55.6% on core strategy, 54.5% on digital experience & service design,
Meanwhile, the leading barriers to growth are: