For many marketers, digital B2B advertising fails to meet their expectations. In its Ad Waste Survey, account-based marketing provider Demandbase found that 71 percent of B2B marketers believe their digital advertising doesn’t make the grade.
An earlier poll in January 2015 showed that most B2B marketers intended to put more than half their overall marketing budgets toward digital, Demandbase says that their latest findings show that most understand that elements of their programs are ineffective.
The No. 1 challenge marketers cite is the difficulty in measuring ROI, while 96 percent say that their digital advertising inevitably reaches a significant number of people outside of their intended target, leading to ad waste, and 89 percent say that their digital marketing mix is not optimized and a different mix would yield better results
“B2B marketers are realizing that while their digital advertising strategy may be reaching a large audience, it’s not necessarily delivering the right results,” says Peter Isaacson, chief marketing officer at Demandbase. “This ad waste dilemma isn’t new – most companies know that they are wasting a significant part of their digital ad dollars, but the problem is they don’t know which part. B2B marketers need to adjust their strategy away from B2C best practices and look at B2B-focused solutions that can deliver more effective advertising, personalization and sales programs to the specific accounts that will really deliver business results.”
The Demandbase Ad Waste Survey was conducted by Wakefield Research among 500 B2B marketers at the manager level or higher at companies with 250 or more employees between February 3 and 12, using an email invitation and online survey.
