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Are Seasonality & the Economy Impacting Marketers in Q4? [Traffic & Conversion Data from 150K+ Companies]

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Are Seasonality & the Economy Impacting Marketers in Q4? [Traffic & Conversion Data from 150K+ Companies]

This time each year, nature – as well as marketing – slows down as we head into colder seasons.

As we enter Q4, marketing departments are preparing for a slowdown in business that comes as people tune out towards the end of the year.

But, while seasonal change is expected and inevitable, this year’s economic shifts might cause some marketers to worry that this year could bring a flurry of poor numbers.

As you see dips or bumps in early Q4, you might wonder, “Is my marketing department experiencing seasonality or an impact of outside events, or are our numbers solely based on the work we’ve been doing?”

To help you gather evidence that proves or disproves the possibility of outside impacts in Q4, here’s a look at how businesses across industries entered the first month of it in October.

About this Data: These insights are based on data aggregated from 158,000+ HubSpot customers globally between July 2021 and October 2022. Because the data is aggregated from HubSpot customers’ businesses, please keep in mind that the performance of individual businesses, including HubSpot’s, might differ based on their markets, customer base, industry, geography, stage, and/or other factors.

Download Now: Free State of Marketing Report [Updated for 2022]

How Marketing Metrics Are Shifting (or Staying the Same) in Early Q4

To learn how metrics were shifting, we looked at data from sample sizes of 120,000+ businesses.

Overall, we’re seeing that most inbound marketing metrics are down year-over-year. Luckily, the good news is that one major, hard-to-win metric, website conversion rate, is trending upward.

When looking month-over-month, numbers seem to be flatter with a mixed bag of small increases and decreases, which could hint that we’re heading into a seasonal time of slow growth, or starting to see some sluggishness due to the economic climate.

Below, I’ll break down each key marketing metric and walk through what we’ve seen across industries in Q4 so far.

Q4 Web Traffic So Far

Month-over-month, we see that fall and winter seasonality hasn’t harmed websites quite yet with most industries seeing flat, low-change in traffic. Only Technology, Information and Media (up 2% MoM) as well as Trade, Transportation and Utilities (up nearly 3%) saw any real change.

While seasonality might not be impacting the industries below, year-over-year data shows significant dips in traffic across industries (a theme we’ve seen throughout the last few months). Professional and Business Services (down 10%) saw the most significant annual loss, while Leisure and Hospitality saw the reverse with a nearly 7% YoY increase.

Industry

MoM

YoY

Sample size

All

1.30%

-10.80%

145,150

Construction

-1.21%

-5.39%

1,405

Education and Health Services

-0.42%

-3.74%

3,659

Financial Activities

1.32%

-11.12%

4,084

Leisure and Hospitality

-1.31%

6.99%

1,114

Manufacturing

-0.19%

-6.43%

4,463

Professional and Business Services

-0.55%

-9.65%

12,999

Technology, Information and Media

2.32%

-4.62%

14,934

Trade, Transportation and Utilities

2.92%

-5.58%

3,480

Why is this happening? Are we continuing to see solid annual traffic drops? We can’t be certain, but a few things that could be causing impacts are:

  • More and more, audiences spend time discovering and even shopping for products on social media directly – no longer relying on standalone company sites.
  • In 2021, many regions were still at least partially quarantined due to COVID-19. While the pandemic continues, most of the world’s lightened precautions, enabling economies to re-open and allowing more people to go out and spend less time surfing the web.
  • Search engines get more and more competitive daily as hundreds of sites aim to rank for the same keywords as their competitors. More competition directly impacts search traffic and, today, search result pages are more saturated than ever..

Website Conversions Grow Despite Traffic Dips

While traffic seems to be a tad sluggish in October, we’re seeing significant YoY gains (+10.95%) overall with Technology, Information and Media leading the pack (+22.1%) and only Trade, Transportation and Utilities, and Construction seeing decreases.

Across the board, we’re seeing a very slight MoM decrease overall, except for Technology, Information and Media which saw a large increase and Trade which saw the greatest decrease (aligning with slow tech business growth reports we’ve seen all over the news.)

Industry

MoM

YoY

Sample size

All

-1.76%

10.95%

124,836

Construction

-5.36%

-5.36%

1,166

Education and Health Services

2.26%

19.35%

3,316

Financial Activities

-4.59%

7.47%

3,542

Leisure and Hospitality

5.00%

9.70%

939

Manufacturing

-6.27%

12.95%

3,905

Professional and Business Services

0.31%

15.41%

11,451

Technology, Information and Media

17.27%

22.10%

13,504

Trade, Transportation and Utilities

-8.41%

-4.39%

2,984

Inbound Leads Stay Fairly Flat… Except in a Few Key Industries

In October, Inbound Leads were a mixed bag. However, the evidence of both positive and negative seasonality patterns become more obvious when looking at this metric.

Month-over-month, inbound leads remained flat with an overall 0.65% decrease. Manufacturing (-6.48%), as well as Transportation and Utilities (-5.6%), saw the biggest dips. Meanwhile, Construction (-8.75%) and Trade, Transportation and Utilities (9.82%) saw significant YoY losses.

Where did inbound leads grow? Technology, Information and Media saw a sizable MoM and YoY increase of 5.22% each. Additionally, inbound leads overall saw a small annual increase with Education and Health Services (16.76%) and Leisure and Hospitality (17.15%) seeing the greatest gains. These boosts contributed to year-over-year growth of 1.63% for overall industries.

Industry

MoM

YoY

Sample size

All

-0.65%

1.63%

132,820

Construction

-4.48%

-8.75%

1,345

Education and Health Services

1.70%

16.76%

3,636

Financial Activities

-2.80%

-1.97%

3,876

Leisure and Hospitality

2.74%

17.15%

1,031

Manufacturing

-6.48%

4.31%

4,287

Professional and Business Services

0.15%

8.02%

12,648

Technology, Information and Media

5.22%

5.22%

14,592

Trade, Transportation and Utilities

-5.61%

-9.82%

3,251

What can we make of this data?

While we can expect year-over-year conversion rate growth with web traffic going down annually, some of the substantial losses and gains are due to more than just web traffic. A few potential impacts could be:

  • Products or services sold within manufacturing, trade, transportation, and utilities can be quite expensive or impacted by inflation. As people tighten their budgets with conflicting economic news, high-priced industries could be seeing some sluggish lead generation as people might only be focusing on just the products or services they need.
  • Seasonality is likely beginning to take effect as people begin to focus more on experiences driven by education, media, and holiday travel, while putting other industries on the back burner.
  • As we keep seeing news of career changes, recession-based company shifts, and the continuing pandemic, people might be more fixated on Education and Health Services industries than in previous quarters, leading to nearly-17% annual lead growth.

Are Marketing Emails Struggling to Be Seen?

In our previous reports, we noted that while marketers have been sending fewer emails – likely to meet the needs of today’s subscribers with heavily cluttered inboxes – they’re still seeing opens and open rates dip.

It’s tricky to guess what the problem could be, but as the HubSpot Blog’s former email manager, one suspicion I have is that email inboxes are far too saturated and competitive these days.

Metric

MoM

YoY

Sample size

Email sends

1.42%

-1.97%

141,791

Email opens

-1.14%

-15.85%

141,791

Email open rate

-2.19%

-13.71%

141,769

Ultimately, if your email isn’t seen in an inbox no one will open it. And, if you’re sending emails with great content, but non-competitive, non-eye-catching subject lines, your readers might not click into them.

Odds are, your subscriber subscribes to many other emails related to your industry. And, because of this, they compare you to competitors sending similar content with similar goals each day. This is why it’s so important for your brand’s emails to seem as interesting, unique, and eye-catching as possible – without looking too desperate.

To learn more about how to boost your open rate and opens, check out this helpful post.

Further Reading

When it comes to key marketing metrics, keeping a pulse on how the business world and your industry are doing can help you determine when and how to get ahead of competition.

For even more helpful data, check out our previous reports, plus a few additional research studies, as you plan your strategies for Q4 and beyond.

Lastly, be sure to check out our free, downloadable 2022 State of Marketing Report below – with data and tips from experts across the global marketing industry.

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What Is AI Analytics?

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What Is AI Analytics?

Our 2023 Marketing Trends Report found that data-driven marketers will win in 2023. It makes sense, but data analysis can be challenging and time-consuming for many businesses.

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Scaling agile with the Agile Marketing Navigator framework

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Scaling agile with the Agile Marketing Navigator framework

Many think that scaling agile means taking it from one team to many. While that’s a part of it, agility at scale is more about culture transformation. Everyone in the marketing organization needs to transform into an agile way of thinking and acting.

The practices we’ve established in the Agile Marketing Navigator help drive culture change and the right behaviors for agility. Today, we’ll focus on Cycle Time, Waste Removal and the roles of Stakeholders and Practice Leads that can help you to take agile marketing to the next level.

Remove waste by overhauling old ways of working

When it comes to waste removal, a team can make changes if they can work autonomously. But more significant effort is required to make impactful changes in larger organizations where systems and processes reach far beyond the team.

Let’s say that several agile teams have identified that too many sign-offs are required to get work delivered quickly and with agility. Now you know this is a systemic issue across marketing that requires more than a Band-Aid repair.

The first step is measuring the problem’s impact on overall marketing delivery. It’s best to do this collaboratively, getting in put from representatives of several teams and levels in the company. You can break down items by the types that seem most problematic. 

Let’s say everyone says the process for launching a landing page on your website is really slow and has the most sign-offs. Take sticky notes and map out all the steps in the process, focusing on each sign-off. This allows you to quantify a baseline for just how many steps are in your process and how long it’s taking today. 

You’ll then look at the total number of average days it takes to deliver the landing page across the organization. In this example, we’ll say it takes an average of 45 business days to launch a landing page from start to finish.

Everyone should then discuss what seems like a more reasonable timeframe. This group decides to strive for 30 days. Now they need to uncover where they can get back those 15 days, most of which are tied up in approvals and wait time.

Because this issue is constraining all marketers, leaders need to be able to step up and be willing to radically empower the change from old ways of working. They will have to allow this change to happen and empower Lean thinking. This often means giving up a bit of security or safety in exchange for speed. And yes, mistakes may happen. But this is where trusting that people will learn from them and the overall change will outweigh the risk.

It’s this type of culture change that will lead to true agility. Leaders: You can’t just hand off agile marketing to your team and walk away. It’s imperative that you empower the teams to identify the issues while actively paving the way for them to implement new ways of working.

Lead Communities of Practice

As you mature in your agile practice and form teams around business needs, you break away from traditionally built departments around disciplines. However, as you involve more and more teams in agile marketing, it will be really important that those disciplines still have strong leadership and best practices.

A Design Community of Practice is a great example. The Practice Lead needs to work with all the designers across all agile teams to ensure branding quality and growth in the field happen. 

A Practice Lead in our framework is typically a department manager, but their role alters with agile marketing. They are no longer assigning or managing work, but they still need to work to ensure everyone in the field can be successful with skills, tools, knowledge sharing and practice standards.

If you’re working in agile today and have found that the functional roles are being diminished, immediately start operating a Community of Practice, and you’ll find that you can succeed with a delivery team that has multiple skill sets, as well as in a community where shared skills are maximized.

As you grow in agile marketing, remember it’s not just a check-the-box process or framework. Really good agile marketing takes great leaders that are invested in true transformation.


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Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.

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The benefits of extending Optimizely into a B2B app

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Evaluating a new A/B testing vendor: Timeline



Paper order forms, faxes and even old-fashioned phone calls still tend to dominate the wholesale sales process. While B2B is way behind B2C, the move to digital commerce is underway and accelerating. This is precisely why ecommerce platforms that specialize in delivering B2B tools, features and functionality (like Optimizely) are seeing such rapid growth.

A recent Gartner report examines the rapid move toward B2B digital enablement and a key finding is that buying decisions and the actual purchases are no longer being driven by sales reps, as online ordering surges. In fact, at the time of the study, only 17% of the wholesale purchase journey was attributed to sales rep interactions and, among millennials, fully 44% said they prefer no sales rep interaction at all when making buying decisions.

This quote from the report struck me as particularly important. “As baby boomers retire, and millennials mature into key decision-making positions, a digital-first buying posture will become the norm. Further, we expect the acute spike in digital buying during the COVID-19 pandemic to have sustained influence on customer comfort with digital learning and buying.”

Covid-fueled retail ecommerce has exploded and B2B is finally starting to catch up. Smart B2B businesses are starting to adopt a “digital-first” stance and considering an app as a logical extension of their online wholesale ordering platforms.

The reason apps play such a big role in B2B is utility. B2B buying is very complex and ecommerce platforms are usually tied into an ERP and CRM. Tools for account-based custom pricing and order list management are typically folded in.

The B2B path to purchase can be a winding one and an app can straighten this road by personalizing the online buying experience and delivering it in an always-on manner, literally in the pocket of buyers. Reducing customer service time/expense and data entry error is often cited as a primary goal of wholesalers considering an app.

After all, all wholesale buyers are consumers themselves and covid-driven retail app adoption and use has skyrocketed in the last two years. Mobile app usage was up 40% during covid. Another factor is that, increasingly, wholesale customers expect an app to make ordering easier and more personalized.

Ask yourself when was the last time you logged into the Amazon mobile browser? Odds are, you never have, since the instantly-personalized experience of the app is far-superior. With an app, there’s no need to enter payment information, no need to type in your address and order history is called up instantly. Page load times are nearly instantaneous and you get the app-only option of using push messaging to drive deeper engagement with wholesale accounts.

Chef’s Warehouse is one of our biggest B2B customers they recently re-platformed to Optimizely. We built their B2B app out to leverage and extend new Optimizely B2B features and functionality and the results have been fantastic. Their reps can easily access customer order history and account-specific pricing, etc. The app consistently delivers a conversion rate that is three times that of the mobile website and the majority of buyers/chefs now use the app for wholesale ordering.

Apps were once thought of as “nice to haves” but this is changing fast, as buyers demand tools to make complex wholesale ordering processes easier. As more and more wholesale businesses move online and the business starts to catch up to retail, the leaders in the space will be first to market with an app, so they can learn and iterate and phase in new features.

According to Digital Commerce 360, in 2021, online B2B sales grew 17.8% to $1.63 trillion from $1.39 trillion in 2020. In fact, B2B ecommerce sales grew faster than all other manufacturing and distributor sales in the U.S.  

Gartner calls the successful delivery of digital, online tools to help smooth the path the purchase “Buyer Enablement” and concludes the research with the following: “Customers are migrating decisively from in-person channels to digital alternatives…new digital channels must be purpose-built to drive sales performance, justified by a simple truth: customers learn and buy digitally.” 

Apps are all we do, we make the process easy, and the ROI is typically rapid. Orders placed on the app “pour into” your current Optimizely operations and data is seamlessly synched between the app and Optimizely.

If you are interested in a custom app to meet your specific needs, please consider visiting our page on the Optimizely solution marketplace. We work with Optimizely customers like Chef’s Warehouse and Binny’s Beverage Depot and can customize an app project specifically designed to meet your unique requirements.

Got app? If not, you should be considering the potential benefits to your wholesale business.  



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