Study: SEO and Social Media Are Effective, but Difficult to Execute

The “State of Digital Marketing – Benchmarks for Success” study from Adestra in partnership with Ascend2 found SEO and social media are some of the most effective, but also most difficult digital marketing tactics to execute.

Nearly half of marketers agree that SEO (49 percent) and social media (42 percent) are the most effective tactics, yet 44 and 48 percent also said SEO and social media are the most difficult tactics, respectively.

With that being said, marketers cite email (61 percent) and website (59 percent) as the most effective tactics that are easier to execute. Only 23 percent of respondents said email was the most difficult digital marketing tactic, and 17 percent said website.

The researchers note, “Maybe email is easy because we’ve mastered every aspect of it. Or, because we stopped looking for innovations and improvements. Doing email right — optimizing and personalizing messages, choosing and using the right metrics, learning through testing, attributing email’s contributions accurately, making email so essential to our customers’ lives that they can‘t live without it — is more difficult than some marketers realize.”

Some of the respondents’ most important goals of a digital marketing strategy are increasing lead generation (57 percent), increasing conversion rate (47 percent), and increasing brand awareness (44 percent).

The top four barriers to achieving marketing success include inadequate budget (46 percent), lack of internal skills (36 percent), inadequate analytics (34 percent), and inability to measure ROI (34 percent).

Budgets Continue to Be Barrier to B2B Digital Marketing Success

Marketo and Ascend2’s “2016 State of Digital Marketing” report revealed 43 percent of marketers struggle with inadequate marketing budget. Lack of internal skills (39 percent) and lack of effective strategy (36 percent) were also barriers to digital marketing success.

Similar to the Adestra study, the most important goals of a B2B digital marketing strategy include increasing lead generation (64 percent), increasing conversion rate (49 percent) and improving data and lead quality (42 percent).