The State of Digital Marketing 2014: B2B and B2C

How to sum up the state of digital in 2014? In a word: insane. What social media was to 2010, lead generation and sales are to 2014. And marketers everywhere are working to not only understand how to get their arms around the data that's relevant to them, to filter the noise and find the good stuff, but they're also working to figure out how to use data to drive strategies that lead to increased leads and sales. That's a good thing. More and more I'm noticing that we've gone beyond trying to convince people that SEO, content and social need to be intertwined and collectively will help fuel your sales and lead generation efforts--also a good thing. And now, the battle cry of marketers everywhere is "more sales, more leads."

Those thoughts (mine) are supported by a recent survey by Stan Ventures, The2014 State of Digital Marketing. The survey questioned more than 500 marketers about their top digital goals and challenges for this year and discovered that, while last year’s priority of content marketing was still important, the top priorities this year are focused elsewhere. For B2B marketers, the top priority is lead generation and for B2C marketers, it's sales.

The survey’s findings were condensed into a video, which you can find below, but in case you want the facts first, here are a few of the things we found most interesting:

Top Objectives for 2014

The top three goals for both B2B and B2C marketers are generating leads, improving awareness and driving sales. The two groups though differed in the order of importance, with B2B marketers placing greater emphasis on generating more leads with for B2C marketers putting driving sales at the top of the list. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

Where is the marketing budget being invested?

Digital marketing looks like it’s still the poor relation when it comes to the share of the marketing budget with only 25% being spent online. Nearly two thirds of respondents said that they plan to spend on content and three quarters indicated that they plan to spend more on mobile, so it appears that finally the message is getting through about the critical importance of mobile marketing.

The top challenges for marketers

Generating leads is not only the top objective for B2B marketers but also the top challenge in the B2B space overall this year. For B2C marketers, measuring ROI is their greatest challenge, while producing and integrating content across all channels is a challenge for all marketers. Measuring ROI across all channels appears to remain a struggle for all kinds of marketers with 26% not knowing which channel delivers the best leads and a third not knowing which generates the most revenue. Need I mention that this is problematic, given a goal of lead generation (or sales)?

Top priorities for the year, increased budget allocations

The top priorities across the board for marketers are:

• Driving increased conversion rates (47%)
• Increasing and improving brand awareness (46%)
• Collecting, measuring and using behavior based data (29%)

And marketers reported they plan on increasing budget allocations for:

• Data and Analytics (61%)
• Marketing Automation (hooray) (60%)
• Email Marketing (58%)
• Social Media Marketing %57%)
• Content Management Systems (57%)

No surprises there, certainly based on what we’re seeing as we work with our clients and based on marketing strategies we’re putting together. Data-driven marketing, smart marketing automation, email, all powered by social and content – it only makes sense.

Driving customer engagement

Nearly two thirds of respondents said that driving subscriber engagement is their primary lifecycle challenge. That’s actually where the importance of marketing automation and what you’re doing with email come in. The challenge to marketers across all verticals today is how not to become a commodity with customers – and developing and maintaining strong relationships with them, before and after the sale, is key. The majority view email and social engagement as being core to their business, while 80% believe that their mobile strategy improves ROI.

Future trends

The survey revealed some interesting thoughts about the digital trends that marketers are seeing:

• Email – Emails with social sharing increase CTR by 158% (I love this stat and think it’s so important!)
• Social – Marketing budgets are predicted to double over the next 5 years.
• Content – Almost half of companies surveyed now have a content marketing strategy.
• Events – More than two thirds of B2B marketers consider event marketing as the most effective strategy. Not only is that smart, it’s one of the most effective tactics. Now, if they can only figure out how to connect what they’re doing offline at these events with what they’re doing online, it’ll be even more beneficial for them.
• SEO – 33% of traffic from Google search results go to the first item listed.

What Troubles Me

Here's the thing. Back in the day, the battle cry was "We need more followers!" because followers, of course, meant success in social media, so everybody clamored to add Facebook fans and Twitter followers. Now, we've shifted to "We need more leads" and I think that the biggest problem that still exists is that marketers often aren't knowledgeable enough about lead generation and lead nurturing, the importance of cross-channel attribution and how important the roles of content and social networking are to the process. It's like there's some executive sitting in an office yelling "Bring me the leads" and marketers are scurrying about trying to make that happen, without a clear strategy and a deep understanding of the myriad of things that are involved in not only generating more leads, but generating the right kind of leads and qualifying them, and nurturing them as part of the sales process. And if we just go find more leads, they are going to do us just as much good as all of those untargeted Facebook fans that that some idiotic agency convinced us to spend a ton of money to acquire.

What To Do From Here

Remember when SEO vendors sent emails that promised you first page of Google results? Today, they've been supplanted by marketing automation vendors who are promising their platforms deliver more leads and marketers are biting - hook, line and sinker. The problem? You don't buy a solution before you know what your needs are. And you don't ask sellers of marketing automation software to help you figure that out, you work with marketing automation experts who are platform agnostic, but determined to help you find the best solution to meet your needs.

Whether you're a B2B marketer or a B2C marketer, don't fall for the hype. Don't get caught up in the "We need more leads" or "We need more sales" calls to action. You need the right kind of leads and the right kind of sales. To do that, you need to know who your prospects are, what they want and need, where you can find them and you need to understand that in order to build a relationship with them, they don't need your sales pitch. They need information. They need information that helps solve problems they have. They need information that makes them smarter and more effective at what they do. They need information that helps them trust you as a credible source. And you don't get that from a marketing automation platform - you get that as a result of the combined total of your integrated marketing strategy. Online, offline. SEO, user experience, email, content, social, video, inside sales, outside sales, trade shows, online learning -- knowing how to leverage all of that and make all these channels work together to deliver value to customers? That's where you'll find more leads. And more sales.

Here's the whole presentation, in case you'd like to go through it - it was pretty interesting.

The survey results are also available as an infographic at Stan Ventures.

Interesting stuff – although I’d be remiss not to mention that an infographic that’s filled with typos is less than comforting in terms of accuracy overall. I found three - see how you do. Do the results reported here reflect your priorities and challenges for this year or those of your clients? I’d love to hear your feedback.

Other resources on this topic:

Mobile Marketing and Customer Retention for the B2B Marketer
ExactTarget: State of Marketing 2014