10 Essential Reports and Research for B2B Marketers
With new online marketing tools, tactics, and channels cropping up daily, it’s easy to become overwhelmed with opportunity. While these opportunities are designed to help B2B marketers address common challenges like lead generation, lead nurturing, and improved brand awareness, choosing the appropriate tools and channels requires due consideration.
Thankfully, as B2B marketers, we’re able to tap into the wants and needs of B2B consumers via online surveys, research reports, etc. These reports and surveys can often spark new ideas, or provide statistical support to reinforce the existence of current strategies. As such, we’ve pulled together a list of 10 recent (free) reports and research data that could be beneficial for B2B marketers across industries.
Moz’s 2013 Search Engine Ranking Factors
Moz’s biennial Search Engine Ranking Factors research gathers opinions from reputable search marketers from around the globe to better understand the complex workings of search engine algorithms. In the 2013 survey, Moz interviewed more than 120 search marketers who offered their opinions on more than 80 ranking factors.
This year, search marketers still believe the most important part of the algorithm is links (approximately 40%) and just 7% believe social factors are important in the 2013 algorithm. Aside from these statistics, the report provides results that could benefit marketers as they work their way through B2B SEO initiatives in the new year.
Ad Age Survey: What Advertisers Really Think About Facebook
Ad Age partnered with RBC Capital Markets to evaluate Facebook’s reputation among 1,200 Ad Age subscribers. The study was conducted to see how Facebook has changed from an experimental channel where marketers where reluctant to invest into a mature part of the marketing mix.
Seventy-four percent of marketers surveyed said their Facebook budgets now include Facebook ad spend and 56% believe their Facebook ad budgets will increase over the next year.
CMI’s B2B Content Marketing 2014 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends
The Content Marketing Institute partnered with MarketingProfs to report on the findings of their B2B Content Marketing 2014 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends survey. The report includes data from 1,217 respondents who identified themselves as B2B marketers in North America.
As reported in one of our previous news articles, nearly all B2B marketers (93%) have a content marketing strategy in place. CMI’s survey results also revealed 42% of B2B content marketers consider themselves effective, up from 36% a year ago.
CMO Club’s CMO Impact on Customer Experience
Neolane and the CMO Club polled more than 200 heads of marketing from the CMO Club’s diverse global member base. The survey results showed nearly all (90%) of today’s CMOs are personally responsible for the overall customer experience. However, only 11% actually own the customer profit and loss (P&L) results.
These numbers suggest that CMOs are not fully equipped to be customer experience leaders within their organizations. The report goes on to identify other obstacles that stand in the way of delivering a positive customer experience as well as the tools that marketers see as essential in delivering a positive experience.
Custora’s E-Commerce Customer Acquisition Snapshot
Custora examined data from 72 million customers across 14 industries in an effort to reflect on the rapidly changing landscape of customer acquisition and shed light on the direction of future e-commerce growth. The report indicates, as we move into the future, the savviest marketers will be looking at the value of new customers from across channels, platforms, and geographies.
Google AdWords’ Measuring AdWords Conversions in a Multi-Screen World
Google AdWords rolled out its Estimated Total Conversions, aiming to help marketers better understand how their online advertising is driving conversions. In addition to this new tool, AdWords also released these statistics, gathered from data across thousands of advertisers, to learn more about cross-device conversion patterns.
Conversions come in many forms (i.e., visits to stores, phone calls, app downloads, website sales, etc.) and this report takes a closer look at current conversion trends across various user experiences.
Janrain’s Social Login Trends across the Web for Q3 2013
Social logins are becoming more prevalent on websites of all types. In fact, Janrain’s Social Login Trends across the Web for Q3 2013 shows 87% of internet users have come across buttons that ask for authentication via popular platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
To understand which social networks are the most popular, Janrain analyzed the social login preferences for online users across all websites using their service. Facebook is leading the way, but Janrain takes a look at the other networks that are popular via social login.
Holger Schulze’s B2B Content Marketing Report
Led by Holger Schulze, founder of the Technology Marketing LinkedIn group, the 2013 B2B Content Marketing Report gathered 815 responses based on a variety of content marketing related questions.
B2B marketers are increasingly using content marketing tactics to engage B2B buyers with compelling content to educate, inform, entertain, and guide them. As noted in a previous news article, 82% of marketers plan to increase their content creation in the upcoming year.
Pardot’s The State of Demand Generation
To better understand buyers and their purchasing processes, Pardot surveyed more than 400 B2B marketers to evaluate how the purchasing cycle has changed in recent years.
Per a SearchEngineWatch blog post highlighting report information, 72% of product research for a future business purchase begins on Google. Take a look at the full results to learn more about B2B buyers and their purchasing habits prior to sales.
TechTarget’s Content Essentials for Technology Buying Teams Worldwide
Thanks to the multitude of online channels that B2B technology buying teams can use to access vendor information, the need to engage directly with organizations during the research process is decreasing.
TechTarget fielded responses from more than 2,300 technology buyers worldwide to better understand current and future best practices for marketers to leverage in their strategies.
We hope this list was useful in determining B2B marketing best practices or simply to reinforce existing strategies. This list is by no means exhaustive, so feel free to suggest some reports that may be of value or let us know your thoughts on our list in the comment section below!