Latest news with #NikosLemanis
Forbes
18-07-2025
- Business
- Forbes
B2B Forecasting Is A Guess; Responsiveness Is A Strategy
Nikos Lemanis is Strategy Director at Luxid Group, an award-winning, agile team of creatives, technologists and marketing strategists. We find ourselves in unpredictable times, and for B2B marketers, this presents a significant challenge. Until recently, B2B was enjoying a long period of relative stability, coupled with the kind of advancements in channels, technologies and data that gave marketers ever-increasing capabilities to do their jobs. But now, macroeconomic factors such as global political instability and volatile tariff policies are increasingly affecting supply chains, market demand and the shape of the competitive landscape. And behavioral factors such as complex and increasingly AI-powered self-service buyer journeys are impacting the quality of, and access to, valuable audience insights and purchase intent data. The technological advancements that once provided a level of certainty for B2B marketers are now arguably contributing to instability. All of this means that we're seeing an increase in factors that B2B marketers simply can't control, and these directly affect their ability to forward-plan with the level of certainty they have taken for granted for many years. This isn't a temporary blip. The rules have changed, and they aren't changing back. This means that the market has to rethink the long-established practice of annual planning. The traditional model of annual marketing budgets is based on an outdated belief in predictability: a series of assumptions about the coming 12 months that rely on the stability of past experiences, analysis of current trends and availability of resources. Although many businesses still cling to this well-worn path, the time has come for B2B marketers to pivot away from trying to rigidly forecast the future and toward building systems and processes that respond rapidly to it. Rigidity Is The New Enemy Of B2B Marketing Rigidity is the key word here. It's not the 12-month planning cycle itself that's problematic; it's the built-in rigidity that so often comes with it. Rigidity locks in spend, regardless of shifting returns. It promotes inertia and prevents the agility to see or act on timely opportunities. And it leads to delays in reacting to downturns, crises or changes in the market. There are some very clear examples of this in B2C. For over a decade, Netflix publicly resisted the idea of including advertising in its streaming platform. But in 2021, its subscriber and revenue growth slowed. The company's response was to announce a new ad-supported tier and launch it within six months. It was a remarkably fast timeline for a major platform shift and a brave reversal of strategy. And it worked. Advertisers have been eager to get on board, and the tier is popular with users. It's been estimated that the company's advertising business could earn $10 billion in annual revenue by 2030. The lesson? Be prepared and able to pivot quickly and decisively from some of your core beliefs and strategies. And be prepared to act when your assumptions break. 'Flexibility And Agility' Is The New Mantra Of B2B Marketing Most businesses don't have a business model like Netflix that could demand such a seismic shift, but it illustrates the level of flexibility and agility that all businesses should aim for in their planning model. So, what does embracing flexibility and agility in B2B planning look like in practice? At the most fundamental level, make sure you have access to actionable data to aid your decision making, and that your budget review cadence is more than a box-ticking exercise. At a campaign level, include built-in flexibility that is tied to performance data, with realistic allowances for downtime if and when a change of direction is needed. Create cross-functional budget pools that allow marketers to pull funds based on evolving priorities. You could even consider broadening this to promote collaborative budgets with sales, IT and customer success. Embrace the unknown and put the pieces in place to make fast and accurate decisions about how to apply your budget. It's no longer about predicting the path. It's about building the muscle to change direction without losing momentum. Of course, certain elements—your brand—need to retain consistency. Agility doesn't equal a lack of identity. Although you may see the need to change what you align your brand with over time, quickly pivoting its essence and ethos is rarely the way to do that effectively. The entire business must become comfortable with the fact that rigid 12-month planning is guesswork and that it's not conducive to success. Responsiveness needs to be institutionalized, and there are ways to promote that and to overcome the doubts of stakeholders who are uncomfortable with the shift. Clearly document responsive budgeting in your plans to show that it stems from robust thinking rather than a lack of confidence or foresight. Include scenario planning ('what happens to this budget if ...'), regular review and reallocation windows, and exactly how you will govern flexibility responsibly. Directly incorporate the finance team into your agile planning and reporting processes. Get It Right, And You Will Have More Control Your marketing team might perceive that this shift comes with a loss of control or focus. You will need to take them along on the journey. Show them that, through continuous monitoring and optimization, they will actually have more control, with additional freedom to pivot and take advantage of timely opportunities that move the needle. This evolution isn't just a process shift; it's a mental shift. And it's about managing the organizational expectations that stop you from breaking from the status quo. Real strategy now lives in how fast you can adapt, not how well you can guess. And success won't belong to the best planners; it will belong to those who have a robust mechanism for responsiveness. Forbes Agency Council is an invitation-only community for executives in successful public relations, media strategy, creative and advertising agencies. Do I qualify?
Forbes
10-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
The Pressure On B2B Marketers To Justify Budget Raises Key Questions
Nikos Lemanis is Strategy Director at Luxid Group, an award-winning, agile team of creatives, technologists and marketing strategists. We're seeing two potentially contradictory narratives coming from B2B marketing leaders as we move further into 2025. On the one hand, we're now seeing the results of a somewhat experimental year where growth-at-all-costs industries decided to cut marketing and aim for profit instead of growth. This approach resulted in profits that more or less equated to cuts in marketing budgets, while growth flatlined. The general conclusion is that marketing is indeed vital for growth (who would have guessed?), even if its total contribution can't always be measured. This is good news for marketing leaders. On the other hand, the pressure to justify marketing spend is greater than it has ever been. According to a survey shared with Marketing Week, 51% of B2B marketing leaders in the U.K. are required to justify their budgets monthly, while 87% admit that it is getting harder to measure the long-term impact of campaigns. This is the situation for many B2B businesses and is, of course, bad news for marketing leaders. So, while marketing budgets may start to come back, what can leaders do to secure the budgets they need and lower these unprecedented levels of scrutiny, while still showing results? Let's start with an inescapable truth: Measurement should be a businesswide commitment that's part of a company's cultural fabric, not a task for each department to figure out for themselves. Even with the wealth of data-driven metrics that are available to track marketing's impact on revenue, the full value of marketing cannot be calculated through quarterly or annual money-in, money-out reporting. So, if measurable results are required to justify budgets, then sensible metrics and targets need to be set and understood by everyone. And while revenue-adjacent success factors such as lead volumes paint an important part of the picture, how do you track the longer-term value of brand building and other activity that doesn't directly feed a pipeline? One solution is to consider the options that exist between vanity metrics (such as views and clicks) and revenue or revenue-adjacent metrics. I've seen more marketing leaders start to champion measurements of success such as share of search, share of model and sentiment analysis through social listening. These metrics are difficult to inflate or manipulate and can be tracked across multiple periods. Their relevance is also extendable into the era of AI search, and they are broadly understood by senior leaders. By introducing these into your marketing reporting, you can start to spread the burden of proof away from just short-term results. More fundamentally, there is an industrywide lack of consensus about whether marketing should be treated as a cost center or a revenue generator, with different businesses taking different stances. In my experience, most marketers identify as revenue generators, but the problem isn't which side of that fence marketing lands on; it's that the measures of its success don't fully align with the full value it brings to the table. There is a growing understanding that even if you can't easily directly attribute marketing's contribution to growth, that growth flatlines if you cut marketing. But that hasn't stopped budgets from getting mercilessly cut in the past, and it won't be enough to guarantee it in the future. Fulfilling performance targets focused on short-term revenue generation helps maintain the narrative needed to constantly justify marketing budgets, but it doesn't help solve the underlying problem. A great marketing mix has a combination of brand building and performance marketing, with each exponentially boosting the other when done well. And as changes in B2B buyer behavior continue to redefine the role of sales and the increased overlap of sales and marketing, the core definition and role of marketing need to change too. Forrester predicts that in 2025 more than half of large B2B purchases will be processed through digital self-service channels, which will have consequences for large sales teams. It also strongly suggests that brand equity, personalized content and omnichannel experiences—all within the remit of marketing—will become more important for converting sales. But an increase in self-serve buying doesn't automatically solve marketing's measurement challenge. Perhaps a new paradigm is needed, where the elements of marketing that directly enable sales are aligned with the sales function and judged as a single revenue generation engine, and the elements that focus on building long-term brand equity, trust and presence are considered separately. So rather than defining the split as marketing and sales, you instead define it as revenue generation and brand equity development. There are many reasons why such an adjustment will be difficult to implement, but the change in B2B buyer behavior suggests that a reassessment is imperative. Short-term pressures often get in the way of implementing positive change. And the pressure on marketing leaders to continuously justify budgets won't go away on its own. But there are some smaller steps you can take toward alleviating the pressure and evolving expectations toward a more balanced and productive future. First, build the case for a more accurate reporting of success that doesn't only focus on short-term results. For this, you will need the data and tools to measure the impact on things like brand sentiment and share of search, and a clear plan for how you incorporate those into your reporting cadence. If you're expected to report monthly, it needs to be clear what (if any) changes in these metrics will be visible between one report and the next. Then, start to assess how new buying behaviors align with your current marketing and sales capabilities. It will likely become clear that servicing these expectations will require greater investment in the personalization of content, the elevation of cross-channel experiences and stronger brand marketing. B2B companies need to be preparing for this sooner rather than later, meaning that confident investment in longer-term marketing impact needs to start now. Forbes Agency Council is an invitation-only community for executives in successful public relations, media strategy, creative and advertising agencies. Do I qualify?
