B-to-b companies are significantly more likely to allocate a higher percentage of their media budgets to new media than their b-to-c counterparts.
These are the results of an online survey of 146 b-to-b, 107 b-to-c, and 73 hybrid marketers conducted by research company Guideline in June.
B-to-b companies appear to be earlier adopters of new media platforms, with 31% of the respondents reporting an allocation of 20% or more of their budgets to online marketing. As reported by BtoB Magazine, Frank Dudley, VP-marketing at Guideline, new media platforms fall into three distinct tiers:
- Top tier – like proprietary Web sites, e-mail marketing, online ads, search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing and webinars. This is where the bulk of the budget dollars will be spent.
- Middle tier – which includes blogs, RSS feeds, podcasts and video on demand.
- Bottom tier – which consists of wikis, mobile, viral video, social networks and Second Life.
Where are those budgets coming from?
For b-to-b, 52% are planning to shift money from traditional advertising, while the percentage is higher for b-to-c, at 73%. And 40% of b-to-b companies plan to increase their budget incrementally; only 33% of b-to-c marketers plan to do so.
Who’s been using what?
60.3% of b-to-b marketers have been using e-mail marketing and 33.6 % webinars for more than three years compared to 41.1% and 7.5% respectively for their b-to-c colleagues.
The biggest surprise to me yet was that the survey also found that 21.2% of b-to-b marketers have been using blogs and 12.3% wikis from one to three years; b-to-c marketers compare at 10.3% and 5.6%.
Where are b-to-c marketers more experienced? According to the survey: viral video, social networks and mobile marketing. That would make sense for professionals who work in the consumer goods field.
What are their primary objectives?
For b-to-b the primary objective is lead generation. They do so by using top tier platforms and reserve brand building for middle and bottom tier media, as you can see in the charts I recreated. This is very much a bottom line approach. B-to-c companies, on the other hand, use new media marketing to focus more on brand building.
What works best?
So far for b-to-b those are webinars and podcasts, which in my estimate are activities that help deliver thought leadership content, at 54% and 21% ratings respectively compared to 27% and 13% for the same activities in b-to-c.
The behaviors marketers valued to measure new media effectiveness were downloads of white papers and brochures for b-to-b. For b-to-c measurement consisted in site visits.
What are the barriers to adoption of new media?
They are lack of experience and perceived inability to prove effectiveness and ROI.
And this is the reason for this post.
I’ve been researching rich text media ads metrics and so far I have not come up with a recent study that supports adoption rates based on documented ROI.
I have found some useful information on DoubleClick's web site. I was looking for experiences from you as well. Have you seen a rich text ad that works? Why does it work for you? Are there metrics anywhere to support ROI of this medium?
While these questions are specifically my focus, I will be thrilled to gather any other stories around the successful use of new media in b-to-b, especially for demand generation and customer loyalty.