Do B2B companies have different challenges from their B2C counterparts when it come to an online marketing strategy? They most assuredly do but, sadly, too many B2B’s continue to use a B2C template when it comes to driving new sales and increasing brand awareness. B2B’s must take a different approach and some new research published by Userguiding makes this abundantly clear. The following is taken directly from that published reeport:
- The top marketing lead sources are referrals (65%) and email marketing (38%)
- One out of three B2B companies reserve 5% of their budgets for marketing.
- Website Development (51%) and Digital Marketing (44%) are the lead as the top areas
of marketing spend. - 95% of B2B marketers create social media content.
- Among the top social media B2B professionals prefer are LinkedIn (86%), Facebook (79%), Twitter (60%), and this year Instagram (60%) and YouTube (56%).
- The biggest challenge to social media marketing in B2B is engagement (63%), followed by measuring social ROI (55%).
- 91% of B2B businesses use content marketing.
- B2B marketers reporting high levels of content marketing success said the top two factors contributing to that success were the value their content provides (83%) and website changes (60%).
- 80% of internet consumers appreciate custom content that helps them learn about a product, and 60% of them find themselves inspired to know more about a product after reading pieces of content about it.
- Almost half of all B2B marketers outsource at least one content activity. Last year, 71% of respondents from large companies said they outsourced, compared to 61% this year.
- Most preferred organic content distribution channels B2B marketers use are social media platforms (89%), email (87%), and their organization’s website/blog (86%).
- 80% of B2B decision-makers prefer a blog post/articles over ads from potential partners – and 60% say it lets them make better product decisions.
- 86% of businesses use video as a marketing tool, same as 2021.
- Videos (61%), links that lead to website content (51%), and links to blog posts (43%) resonate the best with marketing audiences.
- Consumers find branded video content more interesting by 43%, while branded photo content (36%) and branded written content (18%) are less interesting.
- 59% of executives prefer watching a video over reading the same content in text format.
- More than half of viewers will watch a video if it’s shorter than 1 minute.
- 75% prefer watching videos horizontally, while only 25% prefer watching vertically.
- User-generated video made up 60% of all videos created.27- 30% of marketers see video as a more important part of their strategy than their website.
-Written by Kevin Sawyer
SearchPro Systems
2023