Demandbase released the findings from a survey about B2B demand generation last week and the survey has gotten a lot of attention. The results have been covered at Marketing Charts, The CMO Site, Marketing Interactions, ZDNet, BtoB Online and more. Some key findings include:
- Executives cite the website as the top online source of sales leads, but 80% of B2B marketers don’t believe their site is generating leads to it’s full potential
- While 90% of non-technical respondents felt the website has not been performing to its potential, only 52% of IT respondents felt that way
- 87 percent of respondents report that the website needs to improve on the tracking and reporting of unregistered site users
- The major challenge in website analytics is not the data itself, but the ability to act on the data
B2B corporate websites are the leading demand generation engine for new sales leads, but B2B companies are struggling to optimize site performance and analyze insights around customer behavior once they arrive. And while companies have invested heavily in the corporate website, they are doing little to optimize the Web experience for those very audiences they have worked so hard to attract.
That being said, as we have been working with the media and sharing these results we noticed an interesting trend about what our survey says about social media as a lead generation tool. The single statistic the media challenged the most was the fact that social media, as a B2B lead generation source, was outperformed by personal connections and referrals, the corporate website, email marketing, and advertising.
Heck, even “other” performed better than social media.
There have been some interesting studies about social media as a lead generation tool. For example, Eloqua released this “Chart of the Week” a few weeks back about Klout and Conversions. In it they examine the performance of content that is shared via Twitter by individuals with high Klout scores … a metric for measuring social media influence.
“Content that is tweeted by highly influential people had an 6X lift in total visitors, AND those visitors were more then twice as likely to submit a form on our site in the future.”
Generally speaking, though, most B2B content never gets tweeted by @GuyKawasaki or @MarketingProfs. And Joel Rothman from Eloqua admits that “…the content was really great, and might have performed equally well without the high profile tweets. It’s hard to say that the tweets are what caused the response, or if the response triggered the tweets.”
In the opinion of our respondents, when it comes to consistently driving conversions, social media simply isn’t as reliable and scalable as other demand generation sources for B2B. And that one statistic was the number one thing that the press and bloggers pushed back on. None of my B2B marketing friends and colleagues were surprised or found it hard to believe, but articles about the findings were full of quotes like this one from Marketing Vox:
“More than likely they also don’t integrate their social media campaigns across all channels, online and offline. This is an important step, a survey by Gallup recently found – but one that few companies take.”
And this one from ZDNet:
“…this isn’t to say at all that businesses should abandon social media. It’s really only the beginning for this realm of marketing, and other studies and analysts have shown that this medium really resonates with younger generations. Thus, these results could be vastly different within a few years.”
It’s clear that there is some resistance to downplaying the role of social media marketing. It’s also interesting (and telling) that the study ZDNet links to is that it is not from a B2B company … it is a B2C study from Ford Motors and Twitter.
Full disclosure, we here at Demandbase are social media junkies just like many of you. I know my Klout score, and regularly access Facebook and use Tweetdeck to monitor Twitter for both my corporate and my personal interests. One of the leading drivers for “net new” names for events like webinars often come from PPC advertising on social media networks. But what is the right answer here? If you are a B2B marketer, where are your leads coming from? How reliable is social media as a lead generation source? And are things like PPC advertising on Facebook and LinkedIn muddying the waters? Is it social media or is is PPC?
And why do people find it so hard to admit that social media isn’t the best source of new leads?
Would love to hear your thoughts.
