B2B Marketing Measurement Remains a Top Priority Despite Challenges

Although most B2B marketers agree that marketing measurement is critically important, new research suggests that they are still struggling to gauge their efforts.

In the “2017 Marketing Measurement and Attribution Survey Report” from DemandGen, 91 percent of B2B marketers said that marketing measurement and reporting is a “top priority” at their company. However, 40 percent stated that their ability to measure and analyze performance needs improvement. Nine percent of respondents said that their efforts are poor/inadequate.

At the moment, the majority of B2B marketers (70 percent) said they are reporting on their results with data from their CRM. Sixty-eight percent are using reports from web analytics, while 65 percent are using reports generated from their marketing automation system. Most of the respondents (54 percent) claimed that their inability to measure impact across channels/campaigns was their biggest challenge.

“Marketing measurement is also limited by lack of resources—especially those of the human, financial and data variety,” wrote the authors of the report. “Forty-three percent of respondents said that they do not have enough resources to effectively measure marketing performance, while 42% say their messy database is also a challenge.”

Marketers Struggle with Inaccurate Data

Marketers are utilizing many resources to gauge their efforts, but previous research suggests that they are still struggling to get a better picture of their ROI.

A survey conducted by Conversion Logic and IDG Connect discovered that most marketers are using at least six different tools to measure their performance. However, 50 percent are concerned about their accuracy.

For 50 percent of respondents, data collection and centralization is their biggest challenge. Forty-six percent stated that they struggle with gaining actionable insights from their reports.