If there’s one common complaint among business-to-business marketing professionals, it’s about how difficult it is to measure and attribute the results of their campaigns across marketing channels.
Now, a new survey of marketing professionals conducted Demand Gen (sponsored by marketing forecasting firm BrightFunnel) shows that nothing has particularly changed in recent times.
The survey sample isn’t large (around 200 respondents), but the findings are quite clear. Only around 4 in 10 of the respondents believe that they can measure marketing pipeline influences. As to why this is the case, the following issues were cited most often:
- Inability to measure and track activity between buyer stages: ~51% of respondents
- The data is a mess: ~42%
- Lack of good reporting: ~42%
- Not sure which key performance indicators are the important ones to measure: ~15%
And in turn, a lack of resources was cited by nearly half of the respondents as to why they face the problems above and can’t seem to tackle them properly.
As for how B-to-B marketers are attempting to track and report their campaign results these days, it’s the usual practices we’ve been working with for a decade or more:
- Tracking web traffic: ~95%
- E-mail open/clickthrough rates: ~94%
- Contact acquisition and web query forms completed: ~86%
- Organic search results: ~77%
- Paid search results: ~76%
- Social media engagements/shares: ~60%
None of these hit the bullseye when it comes to marketing attribution, and that’s what makes it particularly difficult to find out what marketers really want to know:
- Marketing ROI by channel
- Cross-channel engagement
- Customer lifetime value
It seems that a lot of this remains wait-and-wish-for for many B-to-B marketers …
The full report from Demand Gen, which contains additional research data, is available to download here.
Nones Notes 