A quarter of enterprise B2B marketers noted that limited resources were their biggest obstacle to meeting their demand gen goals, according to a new study from Annuitas. The demand gen consulting company said marketers also cited lack of budget (18%) and lack of a defined strategy (15%). In addition, more than half of these organizations (57%) have a dedicated demand generation team, but 61% say that this team is run by the corporate marketing or product marketing teams.
“While demand generation performance is making incremental improvement year over year, one of the reasons we are not seeing more rapid advancement is the lack of true demand generation focus in terms of content development and execution,” said Carlos Hidalgo, CEO and Principal of Annuitas, in an interview with Demand Gen Report. “Relying on corporate marketing or product marketing is not feasible and is one of the key things holding organizations back.”
The 2016 B2B Enterprise Demand Generation Survey surveyed enterprise organizations earning more than $250 million in annual revenue. When asked to select their top-three goals for their demand generation initiatives, many of the marketers surveyed stated that their primary goal is to increase lead quality, followed by increasing cross-sell and upsell opportunities and lead volume.
More than half of respondents (56%) said they run 15 campaigns or more in a year, compared with the 49% who ran more than 15 campaigns in 2015.
Other findings from the report include:
- Close to two-thirds (65%) utilize buyer personas to plan demand gen program;
- Only half (50%) of demand gen marketers are leveraging their KPIs to optimize program performance; and
- Roughly a third (32%) of those leveraging KPIs review them monthly, followed by quarterly (21%) and weekly (19%).
