"THE GROWTH BLOG" - A RESOURCE FOR B2B LEADERS, MARKETERS, SALES & SERVICE PROFESSIONALS

B2B Marketing: Findings from Marketing Sherpa's 2011 Report: Part 2

In this second installment of our review of Marketing Sherpa's 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Study we turn our attention to how respondents rated the effectiveness of a number of marketing tactics for their organisation.

A clear winner in this category was "website design, management and optimisation" with 50% of respondents rating it highly effective and 43% rating it somewhat effective. Virtual events and webinars came a reasonably close second at 43% and email marketing took out third place with 40%.

At g2m Solutions we are passionate advocates of inbound marketing and its is encouraging to see that B2B Marketers are starting to agree in increasing numbers. The top 3 are all recognised Inbound Marketing techniques and represents the fundamental shift occuring in B2B Marketing towards inbound marketing. This poses a question to Australian B2B Marketers; what is your inbound marketing strategy? For small and medium Australian businesses there is a great opportunity to punch well above your weight by deploying  a sound inbound marketing plan.

Inbound Marketing is an integrated approach to online marketing, firstly by attracting visitors to your site, developing compelling content to keep inbound table finalthem there and nurture your new lead by adding genuine value to your new relationship, whilst being able to comprehensively analyse what tactics are working and what are not.  

Outbound marketing (the opposite of inbound marketing) or traditional marketing such as print advertising and direct mail score very low in the survey. These tactics are expensive and have a low ROI. Only 10% saw print advertising as effective while a mere 22% rated Direct mail as a good investment of their precious marketing dollars.

Interestingly, social media, the new media darling, is still failing to produce the results marketers were hoping for; indicating it has some maturing to do before it becomes a truly effective part of the B2B marketers toolkit. However 56% of respondents rate social media as "somewhat effective", indicating there is a large swell building...watch this space and use this time to experiment with social media in your own organisation.

Do you have an inbound marketing strategy?

Topics: content marketing b2b marketing closed loop marketing