UPDATED 13:39 EDT / MARCH 04 2016

NEWS

B2B marketers grumble about ad spending results

B2B marketers see a lot of room for improvement overall in their digital advertising programs, but at least they’re happy with the advertising results their ads on social networks deliver, according to a new report by Demandbase Inc. The results of the survey of 500 management-level B2B marketers, which was conducted by Wakefield Research, casts light on the reasons so much investment is flowing into marketing analytics right now.

Seven in 10 respondents said their organization’s digital B2B advertising efforts fail to meet expectations all of the time or some of the time. Nearly half strongly agreed with the statement that “it is inevitable the digital B2B advertising will reach a significant number of people outside of its intended target.”

Targeting is all the rage in B2B marketing these days because of growing evidence that buyers ignore messages that don’t apply to their specific needs at a given point in time. Companies like IBM are betting that big data analytics can be used to profile buyers according to common characteristics and send messages that are targeted to their specific state in the buying cycle.

Marketers surveyed by Demandbase indicated general dissatisfaction with their digital marketing mix. Asked if they didn’t agree with the statement that “my organizations of digital marketing mix is not optimized,” 38 percent agreed strongly and 51 percent agreed somewhat. The greatest challenges B2B marketers cited were difficulty measuring ROI (46 percent), long sales cycles (44 percent) and lack of quality leads (42%). The ROI problem has long plagued B2B marketers and is another reason investments in automation and measurement tools are growing.

One third of the marketers said conversion rate is their best metric for measuring effectiveness, significantly outstripping the second most-cited metric, which was cost per impression.

Progress can still be made on the lead management front, apparently. Nearly half of respondents said 25 percent or more of their digital B2B leads are never followed up by the sales team, and 17% said half or more are aren’t followed.

In the coming year digial B2B marketers expect to increase spending most on website/search engine optimization, followed closely by mobile and direct response advertising. Although 92 percent expressed satisfaction with B2B advertising on social media platforms, researchers did not ask about intent to increase spending there.
Photo by Justin Ladla via Flickr CC


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