Demand Generation

Only 2.8% of enterprise B2B marketers rate their demand generation campaigns as effective at achieving goals and fewer than half use buyer personas in their planning and strategy.

Those are just some of the finding of ANNUITAS’ 2014 Enterprise B2B Demand Generation Study, which focuses on enterprise-level firms with revenues in excess of $250M per year and most with more than 500 employees. Demand Gen Report was provided with a preview of the study, which will be released on Nov. 6.

Hootsuite has launched the Global Agency Partner Program, which is designed to provide education and resources to agency account teams regarding the latest social media trends and strategies.

Announced at the company’s Connect via Hootsuite event in New York City, the program will provide members with training workshops, networking opportunities with industry leaders and support for specific business needs and client delivery models.

The expanding and evolving role of marketing was a consistent theme at MarketingProfs’ 2014 B2B Marketing Forum in Boston last week. With creative sessions running the gamut from “Become a Marketing Change Agent,” “Metrics & Analytics,” and “How NOT to be a Content Marketing Zombie,” the sold-out Forum drew more than 800 registrants.

Kicking off with the opening keynote from Scott Stratten, the President of UnMarketing, the agenda of the Forum was heavily focused on marketing’s growing influence, not only on lead generation and revenue contribution, but also on building long-term relationships with customers.

Email continues to play a pivotal role in the B2B marketing landscape.Marketing Sherpa states that 60% of marketers say that email marketing is producing ROI for their organization, demonstrating the continued value of the channel to B2B marketers.

With the average person projected to send and receive close to 200 emails per day — according to a report from the Radicati Group — email management services such as Mailstrom and Unroll.me have grown more appealing, causing many B2B email marketers to revisit their best practices for timing and frequency of emails. These services are designed to give users control of when, how often and in what format they receive emails from specific senders.

Sungard Availability Services (Sungard AS) provides disaster recovery, business continuity, and managed IT services. Sungard AS runs a highly successful demand generation program — an integrated mix of both online and offline campaigns — to generate a consistent flow of leads to the company’s sales force. 

As a company that thoroughly tracks and measures the ROI from its various marketing efforts, Sungard AS knew that increasing the revenue contribution from demand generation meant either driving more leads into the top of the funnel, increasing the rate at which those leads convert into sales, or a combination of both. In support of the company’s aggressive growth plans, the marketing team set out to focus energy on increasing the rate at which raw inquiries converted to qualified sales leads, opportunities and deals.