Business to Business Key Findings: April 2013
B2B Marketers See Lead Conversion as Higher Priority than Branding
Today’s B2B marketing environment has never been more challenging: tough economic times and increasingly savvy and reluctant buyers continue to turn up the heat on marketers. According to interviews with more than 1,700 B2B marketers cited in the latest B2B Marketing Benchmark Report published by MarketingSherpa, the top challenges facing marketers today are generating high-quality leads (74%) and generating a high volume of leads (49%). When asked to rank the effectiveness of B2B marketing strategies, marketers indicated their dissatisfaction with just about all tactics listed. Website design, management and optimization ranked highest with an anemic 31%, as SEO ranked 29%, email marketing 26%, tradeshows 20% and all others less than 19%. An interesting shift was indicated from surveys conducted in years past as marketers said they now prioritize lead conversion (57%) over branding, reputation and awareness (45%). “Marketers (and the marketplace in general) now see the importance of supporting sales conversion as a Marketing and Sales function, and not just a job for Sales alone,” says the authors of the report. However, the report indicated that marketers lack resources and struggle with knowing how to accelerate sales pipeline performance. (www.marketingsherpa.com)
Bullets
- 64% of B2B marketers who indicate greater adoption of modern marketing practices still say that email is their most important digital activity. Interestingly, social media (42%) follows email, though it trails by a relatively large margin. PR, blogging, and customer case studies (31%) and search marketing (28%) remain in the mix, while webinars and virtual events have become more important over time, cited by 28% of respondents. (marketingcharts.com)
- 40% of U.S. online time is spent on just three activities: social networking, playing games and emailing. Mobile internet activity is different, however, with the dominant share of time (42%) spent on email, and just 11% on social media. (webbiquity.com)
- Blogs, social media and organic search are the least expensive marketing channels. SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate, while outbound sourced leads have a 1.7% close rate. 65% of B2B companies report that they have acquired a customer through LinkedIn. (hubspot.com)
- 86% of business technology decision makers use social media for professional reasons. (toprankblog.com)
- Only 24% of small businesses have integrated social media in a structured way in their business and only 49% of small businesses consider social media marketing effective. (sba.gov)