Survey: Marketers Show Confidence in Measuring Direct Response Efforts
A recent survey conducted by Visual IQ discovered that when it comes to brand versus direct response marketing, marketers are more confident in measuring their direct response efforts.
In fact, 85 percent said they are “very” or “extremely” confident in their organization’s ability to measure the impact of their direct response marketing tactics. This is significantly more than the 64 percent who claimed the same about their branding efforts.
A lack of measurement tools (48 percent) and the inability to calculate a single engagement score (40 percent) were the top brand marketing challenges cited in the results.
Brand marketing typically requires marketers to utilize a wide variety of media over an extended period of time, while direct response marketing involves the use of targeted ads to provoke consumers to take action (e.g., email or call the company for its services).
“Because the objective of branding initiatives is not to produce a direct response, such as a conversion, it’s understandable that measurement in this area is more difficult,” said Manu Mathew, co-founder and CEO of Visual IQ. “The findings of this study make it clear there is work that needs to be done to quantify performance as it relates to branding.”
B2B Social Media and Brand Awareness
Despite the difficulty associated with measuring brand awareness, B2B marketers continue to make it an objective, and social media has become critical to their brand-building efforts. The “State of B2B Social Media Marketing 2015” report published by Regalix found that 99 percent of marketers believe that social media is extremely important to their communication campaigns. Ninety-four percent claim that their key social objective is to build brand awareness.
In terms of platforms, 64 percent said that LinkedIn is the most effective when it comes to customer engagement at the pre-sales stage of the buying cycle. Fifty-one percent cited LinkedIn when asked about the most effective channel for the post-sales stage as well.