How B2B Marketers Generate Revenue — State of Pipeline Marketing 2016 [Infographic]

Lauren Frye — December 17, 2016

The reality that B2B marketers can have a huge impact on real-time revenue results is not a new concept to today’s B2B marketing community. But the question remains — how do marketers actually generate revenue?

Which metrics are B2B marketers using? What does their channel mix look like? Which channel has the highest impact on revenue generation? What percentage of organizations invest in account-based marketing, and if so, to what degree? See the answers to these questions and more via the infographic below.

The 2016 State of Pipeline Marketing Report (sponsored by Bizible, Heinz Marketing, Radius, Reachforce, and Uberflip) shows specific, tactical, strategic, and results-oriented responses of over 350 respondents, the vast majority of which were B2B marketers.

Primary objectives and metrics, account-based marketing strategy, top revenue channels, rates of ROI, and measurement are just some of the issues covered in the report and included in the infographic.

PRIMARY OBJECTIVES

B2B marketers are primarily focused on generating demand and converting demand to revenue, which isn’t a surprise. Both of these answers accounted for a dramatically higher percentage of responses, leagues ahead of other options like, “understanding ROI,” “sales and marketing alignment,” and “reducing cost of customer acquisition.”

PRIMARY METRICS

It’s encouraging to see that only 11% of B2B marketers are primarily measured based on lead generation. An increasing number of B2B marketers use down-funnel metrics like opportunities, revenue, and ROI to evaluate the performance of their marketing strategy.

TOP SEVEN CHANNELS

The top seven most-used B2B marketing channels are an interesting mix of online and offline channels. Also, they’re a combination of mass communication strategies and personalized outreach. The list is as follows, in order of popularity…

• Email
  
• Social media
  
• Content marketing
  
• SEO (tied)
  
• WOM / referrals (tied)
  
• Conferences / events
  
• Paid search

TOP REVENUE CHANNEL

Never underestimate the power of a strong referral. When this survey was run last year in 2015, WOM/referrals wasn’t an optional answer to this question, but we included it this year. We were surprised to find that a greater number of marketers selected this answer (22.3% of respondents) than selected the top revenue channel from last year’s list of options (email marketing at 14.73%).

ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING

While organizations are adopting ABM at different rates, account-based marketing has proven to be a powerful tool for B2B marketers. As new types of martech, new integrations, and other valuable tools continue to ramp up in support of this highly-targeted form of B2B marketing, it’s highly probable that the percentage of account-based marketing orgs will continue to rise.

ROI OF 2X OR MORE

A B2B marketer’s rate of return on their efforts (considered in terms of marketing spend and revenue generated) is one of the most telling metrics. 34.8% of respondents who reported their ROI fall into the category of generating more than 2x ROI on their marketing spends, and the infographic highlights some key characteristics about these high-performers…

• 70% use attribution (and 31.7% use multi-touch attribution modeling)
  
• 73.3% plan on expanding their content marketing channel
  
• 73.0% have adopted account-based marketing strategies
  
• 50.5% are using (or plan to use) predictive analytics

ABILITY TO MEASURE MARKETING PERFORMANCE

20% of respondents reported they felt confident (a 4 or 5 on a scale of 1-5) in their ability to measure marketing performance. Like their high-performing counterparts in the ROI category, we were curious about notable stats that set them apart…

• 84.7% use attribution (and 45.9% use multi-touch attribution modeling)
  
• 74.1% are confident in the accuracy of their marketing data
  
• 63.5% consider themselves to be pipeline marketers
  
• 54.8% report marketing ROI higher than 1.5x

(215)