Business-to-Business

The top benefits of social media marketing are increased exposure (89%) and increased traffic (75%), finds Social Media Examiner in its annual "Social Media Marketing Industry Report" [download page], which surveyed more than 3,000 marketers on their social media activities. A majority also report benefits such as developing loyal fans (65%), lead generation (61%), and improved search rankings (58%), but only 43% say their efforts have boosted sales. Nevertheless, study results indicate that for those willing to take the time, sales will follow. Read more »

B2B publishers, especially larger publishers with more than $5M in annual revenues, continue to have difficulty diversifying their revenue sources away from print advertising, finds FOLIO: magazine in its latest annual B2B CEO survey. Print advertising was the dominant source of revenue for the larger publishers last year, at 48% share, which actually represents a small increase from 47% in 2011. E-media (20% from 17%) and events (17% from 14%) are the only other sources contributing double-digit share of revenues. Read more »

Fresh on the heels of a report finding that 4 in 10 global marketers around the world will be reallocating budgets to digital marketing (a report which itself came shortly after a US-based study indicating the same trend), a new study from Accenture has emerged looking at the topic from the perspective of CMOs around the world. And the takeaway is much the same: digital marketing is going to get more of the overall marketing budget next year. About 2 in 3 respondents said they would be devoting at least 25% of their budgets to digital marketing next year, up from 46% who said they would allocate that much this year. Read more »

A survey of about 400 B2B salespeople and marketers around the world, conducted by Corporate Visions, has found that salespeople are not being armed with the right tools to deliver new product messages. In turn, almost 60% of respondents believe that only a minority of salespeople are delivering new product messages the way they were intended. Among the issues uncovered: only 38% of companies offer formal training to sales reps for new product launches at least three-quarters of the time, and only 22% said sales reps are required to demonstrate proficiency in message delivery. Read more »

41% of marketers say that inbound marketing demonstrates ROI for their company, compared to 9% who believe it doesn't, according to HubSpot's newly-released "State of Inbound Marketing 2013" report. But another one-third cannot (or do not) calculate ROI. A difficulty in tracking reliable metrics may be why despite healthy inbound implementation rates and projected spending increases, a leading 25% of inbound marketers say that proving ROI is their top challenge. Read more »

While only 9% of B2B marketers (primarily from the UK) currently consider Google+ to be their most useful social media marketing channel, 29% believe it will be so in the next 12 months, according to results from a B2B Marketing survey. The researchers indicate this is part of a wider shift towards content-focused platforms, with Slideshare (+10%) and Pinterest (+5%) also seeing a positive net change in perceived usefulness over the next year. By contrast, more popular platforms such as Twitter (-26%), LinkedIn (-20%) and Facebook (-13%) are slated for a net decrease in usefulness. Read more »

The Search Agency has released an analysis of paid search trends in the US in Q1 2013 across devices and verticals. Looking at the B2B vertical, the study finds that impressions rose 27.2% year-over-year, while clicks stayed flat. On a quarter-over-quarter basis, impressions were up 35.5% and clicks up 15.6%. The data also reveals that while click-through rates grew by 16% year-over-year on average for all industries (to 3.15%), B2B companies saw a 21.6% drop (to 2.07%). Read more »

Bad customer service experiences are more likely to be shared than good ones, according to results from a ZenDesk-sponsored survey conducted by Dimensional Research. Separate results from the survey [pdf] indicate that not only are bad service experiences shared often, they're also likely to have a long-term impact on customers. Respondents were asked to think about experiences with mid-sized B2B or B2C companies whose good or bad customer service impacted their behavior. Fully 39% of respondents who had a bad experience said their behavior was impacted for at least 2 years after the negative experience. Read more »

More than 4 in 10 small businesses host events, with 71% of those believing that they're important to their organization's success, according to new data released by EventSpot by Constant Contact. On average, these businesses are hosting 13-14 events per year, with the most common types being workshops/seminars/lecturs (63% B2B; 56% B2C) and classes (52% B2B; 48% B2C). Somewhat intuitively, the results show that conferences are more popular among B2B than B2C businesses (44% vs. 23%), while the opposite is true for social gatherings (36% vs. 47%). Read more »

63% of rich media ads are viewable, finds DG MediaMind in a new report that uses analyzed data from the month of September 2012 to arrive at its conclusions. Viewable rates ranged from a high of 73% for the travel vertical to a low of 50% for the financial vertical, with CPG (68%) and B2B (67%) among the higher performers and retail (63%) right on the average. Viewability was found to (not surprisingly) impact click-through rates (CTRs): those 63% in-view had a 54.5% higher CTR than the average. Read more »