Email and SEO to Be Top Revenue Drivers for B2B Marketers in 2017

Looking ahead to the remainder of 2017, research shows that B2B marketers have new insight into which tactics can help them achieve their key objectives.

The “2017 State of B2B Digital Marketing” report from DemandWave has found that email continues to be B2B marketers’ top channel (63 percent) for revenue growth. In addition, the same percentage of respondents also claim that organic search is their leading channel for revenue growth, which is a 28 percent increase from last year.

“B2B marketers have become more adept at leveraging SEO to drive leads and sales as the channel has moved from an emerging trend to digital marketing staple over the years,” concluded the authors of the report.

In terms of lead generation, email (73 percent) and organic search (70 percent) also topped B2B marketers’ lists. However, the report indicates that marketers are still struggling to determine how channels are attributing to overall ROI.

More than a quarter (28 percent) of B2B marketers said they do not have an attribution model to measure their digital marketing ROI. Approximately 25 percent said they have a multi-channel attribution model.

How B2B Marketers Use Analytics for ROI Measurement

Although ROI attribution can be difficult, B2B marketers appear to be growing confident in their ability to measure their efforts with analytics.

The “2016 State of B2B Marketing Metrics and Analytics” report from Regalix discovered that 79 percent of B2B marketers believe that identifying effective marketing channels is a leading benefit of utilizing analytics. Sixty-eight percent also said that analytics help them allocate their budget more efficiently.

About 28 percent of B2B marketers who invest in this resource claim that they leverage their data “very effectively” to measure their performance.