2013 Research Study Results

John Follett

Business Focus

Photo Source

If you haven’t noticed, Demand Metric Research Corporation is living up to its name: we’ve done a lot of research in past six months.

No doubt, you’ve had several survey invitations land in your email inbox. It may look like just a lot of spam to some, but this research is producing insights that benefit the marketing community. If you have not responded to a survey, seen one of the study reports or attended a benchmark study results webinar, here is a quick review of just some of what these studies are revealing:

  • Marketing analytics: you get what you pay for. Organizations that allocate at least 6% or more of their marketing budgets to analytics are claiming the greatest impact and highest credibility from their efforts.
  • Sales & Marketing alignment: integration = achievement. The presence of and integration between CRM and Marketing Automation facilitates alignment and revenue attainment. 80% of companies with highly integrated systems achieved their revenue goals. Just 36% with no integration made their goals.
  • B2B Email Marketing Effectiveness: know thy recipient. Significant inhibitors to email marketing effectiveness include catch-all, invalid and high-risk email addresses, but marketers are chronically underestimating their impact on campaign effectiveness. 62% of study participants had no idea what their digital reputation was, as measured by SenderScore.
  • Online Advertising: ignorance isn’t bliss. Over half the study participants said online display advertising was an important or very important marketing/lead generation strategy. Of this group, fully 77% either had not heard of or were not using Real Time Bidding, an intelligent way of purchasing online ad inventory.
  • Sales Enablement: bi-polar disorder is common. Most organizations define this function strategically, as one that “develops strategy to help improve the sales process.” However, 54% of organizations surveyed said that their function is primarily operationally oriented.

We’ve just completed a study on Sales & Marketing Data Quality that establishes a link between how clean an organization’s data is and their ability to grow revenue. We’ll share the detailed results during a free webinar on November 20, 2013. Each of these studies provides data for benchmarking and comparison, and many of them identify best practices to help make practical application of the results.

Demand Metric is currently conducting studies on several other topics that will yield more practical insights:

  1. The Digital Marketing Landscape: we’re examining which digital marketing practices are in use, are planned and what is producing the best results.
  2. Marketing & Sales Analytics Technology: this study’s goal is to better understand the data sources, tools, collaboration and results sharing that are part of the analytics process.
  3. Employee Engagement: in this study, we examine the influence of employee engagement on tangible customer metrics like retention, loyalty, and even revenue.

Click on any of the links listed above to participate in these studies by taking the survey. To thank you for your input, we’ll provide you with a free copy of the study report when published.

None of this research is possible without your input, and we’re grateful for your participation. We are continuing to expand our research agenda, so you can expect to receive more invitations to take our surveys. For this reason, we want to make sure the marketing community understands that these survey invites are not spam, but the gateway to learning and understanding topics in which the community has expressed an interest. If you’d like to learn more about Demand Metric research, participate in a study or sponsor a study, please let us know.

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