Generating Quality Leads To A Top Challenge For B2B Marketing

DemandWave’s “State of Digital Marketing B2B” report highlights the growth of trust in digital channels, the greater certainty on ROI, and the propensity to strengthen investments, in particular in paid search and social media. But it is necessary to enhance the contents, and it is essential to make the sites mobile-friendly.

To accelerate the growth of revenues in B2B digital marketing, the quality of leads is the main lever and the primary concern of companies. This is how the 200 B2B marketers (managers and C-Levels) interviewed by DemandWave in the United States at the end of 2016 responded to the new “State of Digital Marketing B2B” report, which explores all the most relevant topics for marketers.

Improve Your Ability To Measure ROI

Providing quality leads is cited as the number one goal of digital marketing initiatives by 48% of respondents (a 26% increase year over year), while generating more leads is the goal for 23%; increasing ROI stops at 12% of responses. Generating quality leads is also at the top of digital marketing challenges (32%); measuring and demonstrating ROI (24%) falls to second place.

The return on investment, therefore, remains crucial but is less pressing because, the study highlights, the ability to measure it objectively has improved, also thanks to a more widespread adoption of attribution models.

Increasing Budgets For Digital Channels

Marketing is increasingly digital, even in B2B, and almost half of the top managers are ready to dedicate new resources to it. Most marketers use all the digital channels available: social media, email, and organic search, which account for the lion’s share, and paid search and display advertising (which grow the most, at 11% and 17% per year, respectively, on year).

Currently, 38% of those interviewed spend at least 60% of their overall marketing budget online, and 55% spend at least 41% of their planned investments on the Internet; in 2017, however, 48% of managers plan to increase the budget for digital marketing, spending more, especially on paid search and social media.

Email And SEO To Increase Earnings

Among the channels used to increase revenues, email maintains pole position (63%) but is on par with SEO (63%). Email is also in first position (73%) for its ability to generate leads; organic search follows closely (70%).

Digital marketing is also a prolific producer of content: blogs and videos are the most used (each by 82% of marketers), but white papers (chosen by 73%) are content that generates the most revenue (40% say so % of the sample; 30% cite videos and 28% blogs). Among social networks, the most used channel for B2B digital marketing is, as is well known, LinkedIn, followed, in order, by Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

Focus On Mobile

Also important is the ability to address users who increasingly connect from smartphones and tablets: almost 40% of marketers say that 21-40% of web traffic comes from mobile devices, and 87% of sites are already mobile-friendly. Of the managers who still need to do so, 61% declare that this year they will invest in making their site optimized for mobile devices.

The Next Challenge: Optimizing Content

American B2B digital marketing can, therefore, see pink: a better ability to measure ROI increases the level of trust in digital and drives investments; furthermore, the skepticism that persists regarding new technologies, such as predictive lead scoring, website personalization or account-based marketing, will be mitigated as the technologies themselves mature.

Now, however, it is essential for marketers to invest wisely: for example, despite planning to spend more on paid search, only 44% say they have made money from it so far. Above all, it is necessary to optimize content to transform it into a growth engine for revenues: 82% of B2B marketers use some form of content marketing, but no more than 40% can confidently attribute a profit to the different types of content.