88% of Marketers See Effectiveness of Digital Channels Increasing

As digital marketing continues to mature, marketing professionals are noticing an increase in the effectiveness of digital channels.

Survey results released by Ascend2, titled “2017 Digital Marketing Plans Survey,” indicate 88 percent of companies are seeing improvements across channels; 37 percent report effectiveness is increasing significantly.

According to the data, the most effective channels are the company website (63 percent), email (52 percent) and social media (49 percent). However, website and social media are named as the most difficult channels to execute by 40 percent of respondents. Almost the same amount of respondents – 39 percent – named organic search as a challenge.

Increasing sales revenue (58 percent), generating more leads (47 percent), increasing website traffic (44 percent) and improving lead quality (44 percent) are the most important goals for marketers, the survey found.

However, some of the most important goals are also pain points for marketers. Increasing sales revenue and generating more leads were named by 38 and 36 percent of respondents, respectively, as the most significant barriers to the success of a company’s digital marketing plan.

Interestingly, obtaining adequate budget was only named an important goal by 13 percent of respondents while 40 percent named it as a significant barrier to success.

The survey included 265 marketing professionals, nearly half named their primary marketing channel as B2B.

Enterprises Use an Average of 8 Marketing Channels

Digital marketing channels, in particular websites and social media, are the two top channels used by enterprise marketers, according to Clutch and R2i’s “Enterprise Marketing Survey 2016.” The survey found enterprise companies on average leverage about eight different marketing channels and demand for specialized agencies to consult remains high as companies hope to optimize for better results.

When looking at the marketing channels used most by enterprises, we see websites (84 percent) and social media (78 percent) outpacing more traditional channels like print (65 percent) and television (57 percent).

Comparing B2B vs. B2C channel usage, the data shows that 42 percent of B2B marketers use content marketing, while just 33 percent of B2C marketers said the same.