Report: B2B Marketers Still Seek Demand Gen Strategy Improvement

The “Lead Flow That Helps You Grow” report released by the CMO Council has found that many B2B marketers still do not find their demand generation strategies to be effective. In fact, just two percent of respondents labeled them as “highly effective.”

According to the data, the bulk of respondents (32 percent) said their strategies’ effectiveness falls “someplace in the middle.” Thirteen percent said their strategies are “moderately ineffective.”

B2B marketers cited causes for their lack of effectiveness in the report. Only 12 percent believe they have content marketing engines programmed to target the right audiences. Twenty-one percent of marketers say they are total partners with their sales and business counterparts, while 22 percent that sales teams are often roadblocks.

“Generating demand and ensuring the consistent flow of high-quality, actionable leads is paramount to the success of today’s business-to-business marketer,” notes Donovan Neale-May, Executive Director of the CMO Council. “Sales enablement and pipeline performance remain key mandates as organizations look to fine-tune their content marketing practices to be high-performance growth engines.”

Nearly a quarter of respondents (24 percent) said that white papers delivered the best leads. Videos, webcasts and analyst reports (22 percent, respectively) were also cited as quality lead generators.

Leveraging Content to Improve Lead Quality

The “2015 Benchmark Report on B2B Content Marketing and Lead Generation” published by Starfleet Media found that most marketers are using content to increase the quality of leads.

In the report, 87 percent said that they would like to generate better leads through the use of content. A majority of respondents (67 percent) claimed that they had put case studies to use over the past 12 months. Sixty-two percent said they had released white papers, while 58 percent cited webinars and videos.