How To Get Started As A B2B Marketing Analyst

Do you like data and want to leverage your interest in numbers by helping out Marketing teams? Then you’re on your way to becoming a B2B marketing analyst.

B2B marketing analysts typically take one of two paths: product marketing, or demand generation.

Product Marketing

The first track a B2B marketing analyst can assist with is Product Marketing. Product marketing focuses on analyzing things like:

• Changes in the market
• Survey responses
• Modeling of pricing changes (i.e. revenue operations)
• Customer behavior (i.e. how they’re using the product or service in the aggregate)

Essentially, B2B analysts who focus on product marketing synthesize market research to enable companies to make smarter decisions on which products or services to sell, to which customers, and at what price point.

Alternatively, if the company already has an established product or service, the analyst will help them to improve their offering or how it’s marketed based on market conditions, competitive analysis, and consumer behavior.

Demand Generation

The other track for a B2B marketing analyst is assisting with demand generation strategy and related marketing efforts.

As part of the demand generation process, you’ll be working heavily in testing around specific channels in the customer experience. Some of the most common areas for marketing strategy testing include:

• Ad copy
• Call-to-action (CTA)
• Forms
• Landing pages
• Email marketing (i.e. subject lines, messaging, design, length of email campaigns, etc)
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) testing (i.e. descriptions, meta tags, title tags, etc)
• Banners (i.e. colors, messaging, CTA, sizes, etc)
• Website optimization
• Content marketing optimization (i.e. blogs, social media, webinars, case studies, whitepaper, etc)

All demand generation testing is focused on answering questions like, “how do I get a higher conversion rate from B2B buyers,” and “how do I get more traffic to the site?”

The remainder of this post will be primarily focused on the demand generation track.

3 Ways to Provide Value as a Demand Gen Analyst

Let’s take a closer look at how an analyst would answer the questions above and how it benefits their client.

In most cases, B2B companies build something and then continue to go on and build the next thing without ever stopping to optimize what they’ve built. In doing so, they miss opportunities to gain more qualified leads or potential customers.

This is where a demand generation analyst can provide value- by testing and analyzing how to improve brand awareness, inbound marketing campaigns, and the buying process.

Additionally, because so much of what lead generation involves occurs in the digital marketing realm, the feedback loop is much faster and often this can mean quick wins for the client.

So, where do you get started?

1. Get Certified In The Right Tools

The best thing a data analyst can do to provide value in B2B lead generation is to become an expert in the marketing automation and analytics tools you’ll use to run your tests and evaluate quantitative data. Here are a few we use at Interrupt Media.

• Marketing analytics tools like Google Analytics
• Optimizely, Google Optimize, or VWO
• Marketing data tools like Google Data Studio
• Tableau
• Marketing Automation, Marketing Operations, and CRM tools like Salesforce, Hubspot, Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua, or SharpSpring

The more marketing experience you have in the tools that you’ll ultimately use to run your experiments, the better off you’ll be at knowing which experiments to run and how to mine your results for insights that you can communicate back to your marketing manager or stakeholder. That experience also helps as companies look for an ideal candidate.

As B2B technology marketers ourselves, we know all too well that when you’re getting started in your career, you need to get lots of reps with an assortment of tools, so you can figure out which ones you like and the role that those play for the marketing team members overall.

2. Understand The Marketing Funnel

Another important stop for the marketing analyst roadmap is to get a good understanding of the marketing funnel, the metrics associated with the funnel, and the marketing budget. At the top of the funnel, you have everybody that learns about specific brands or companies, and that’s your awareness stage.

At the very bottom, they’ve gone through some type of process either quickly or not quickly to say, I’m ready to do business with you, or I want to talk to you. This is the purchase stage. And the task for a demand generation analyst is to get someone from the awareness stage to the purchase stage.

Everybody knows who Nike is, but not everybody wants to buy their shoes. But as long as you know who Nike is, to begin with, Nike at least has a shot of getting you to buy from them.

If nobody knows some obscure shoe brand, but they have the best shoes on the planet, no one’s ever going to buy from them because they don’t know who they are.

They’re going to be different ways to analyze different things based on the buyer’s journey within that funnel. Your test could be the very top of funnel-focused. It could be very bottom of funnel focused. It could be somewhere in the middle.

And your testing could have varying levels of impact depending on the success that a marketer has with getting their buyer personas into their funnel and ultimately achieving marketing goals.

3. Perform Mock Demand Generation Analyses

Before pursuing a role working as a B2B marketing analyst, try running a survey for your friends.

You could ask your friends and family about buying behavior and pain points during COVID. How have their behaviors changed? Come up with ten questions that you want to ask, see what all the answers are. Mine their responses for insights and write a piece of content about it on LinkedIn.

An Example of a Demand Generation Marketer in Action

Now that you’ve learned how you can gain experience as a demand generation analyst, we’re going to give you an inside look at an example of how our demand gen analysts optimize marketing programs to yield high-quality leads.

When evaluating websites as part of a lead generation strategy, we often evaluate which landing pages generate the most conversions. There’s a term called “assist-click conversions”, which indicates the pages on a site attributed to the final conversion.

A lot of times somebody goes to one page and fills out the form, and that’s it- you give credit to that one page. However, other times, there’ll be visitors that go to a page, then go to another page (or multiple other pages) before they convert.

The B2B marketing analyst would then figure out which pages were added to the experience before the new leads were gained. They’ll look for any commonalities among the pages to optimize the buyer journey on the first page to get more people to the second page. In doing so, we know that there’s a higher probability they’ll convert on the second page at a higher rate.

When it comes to measuring success, you don’t necessarily need a 50% change, even a 1% change is fine. Then you do that 10 times, that’s a 10% lift and if you have 10 million visitors, that’s a huge gain! And all these little incremental gains when the numbers are really big, are really meaningful.

By having the certifications in the essential tools to provide demand generation data analysis, having a deep working knowledge of the marketing funnel and how it works, and creating some mock analyses to get reps under your belt, you’ll be ready to crush it as a full-time demand generation analyst. Good luck!

Topics: A/B Testing, B2B Marketing, Demand Generation, Digital Marketing

Topics: A/B Testing, B2B Marketing, Demand Generation, Digital Marketing