Marketing Analytics

At a DemandCon event session earlier this month, Jon Russo, Founder and CEO of B2B Fusion Group, asked a room full of marketers how many were still using Excel spreadsheets to track their performance. About 90% of them raised their hands.

Russo said he wasn't surprised at the show of hands. But he is definitely concerned about it.

"This is risky business for a marketing organization," he said. "Executives are now accustomed to seeing metrics integrated with tools like Salesforce. When they see these reports dumped onto spreadsheets, they're going to question the validity of the data."

Over the past 12 months, we've seen a series of high-profile studies that establish the relationship between marketing automation, marketing ROI metrics and successful lead-generation strategies. This week, there's an especially notable addition: the 2012 Lenskold Group/The Pedowitz Group Lead Gen Marketing Effectiveness Study.

The study (conducted with assistance from Demand Gen Report) polled more than 370 professionals working for B2B marketing organizations. About 80% of the respondents were U.S.-based marketers, ranging from companies with less than $5 million in annual revenue to enterprises with $50 million or more in revenue.

B2B buyers are using a wider variety of sources to research their purchases, and social media continues to play a more important role in the purchasing process, according to the 2012 Demand Gen Report B2B Buyer Survey.

The survey, which included more than 170 responses, was designed to gauge the latest trends in how, when and why B2B buyers engage with sellers, move through the marketing process and consume B2B-focused content. This year's study also included a number of questions designed to weigh the impact of social media on the B2B buying process.

Search retargeting – a tactic which employs a simple but profitable intersection of display advertising and search – has long been a popular marketing tool for consumer companies. Now, retargeting is also gaining traction in the B2B market.

While consumer-focused retargeting is relatively simple, however, for B2B firms it will be a more complex process.

“As a B2B company you want to be able to get to the customers that raised their hands,” said Chris Mann, VP of Project Management for Bizo. “For B2B marketers there will be a creative set of solutions to accomplish that.”

Mann is referring to the solutions required to overcome the reach and scale issues that until very recently made B2B search retargeting a lower priority.

Social media today is an important part of the big picture of B2B marketers. Yet keeping track of what your customers are saying about you on social media – and turning that chatter into useful insights – can be an incredibly challenging task.

On Tuesday, CRM vendor SAP announced a new product designed to cut this challenge down to size. Dubbed "Rapid-Deployment Solution (RDS) for Sentiment Intelligence with SAP HANA," SAP says the application can be deployed in as little as six weeks to extract and analyze real-time customer data from social media feeds.