A mere six percent of B2B marketers are truly masters of their digital domain, according to a new report.
The Digital Marketing Maturity Index (DMMI), conducted by Stein IAS and Oracle Marketing Cloud, was designed to serve as an empirical benchmark to give B2B marketing leaders a way to compared their digital marketing capabilities with their peers.
The agency created the index and an accompanying app to help B2B marketers do a self diagnostic of their digital capabilities and see how they rank, says Tom Stein, CEO/Americas, Stein IAS, which was named the BMA B2 Agency of the Year earlier this week.
The index breaks down marketing maturity to three levels, digital explorers, who are doing well at the top of the funnel with acquiring leads and basic reporting; digital pragmatists, who are more advanced in their use of media, marketing dashboards and integrating their online efforts; and digital masters, who have achieved one-to-one targeting, retargeting across all channels and closed the reporting loop.
Of the nearly 300 responses studied in the report, only 6% were truly mature. “We thought it would be higher,” says Marc Keating, director of digital and innovation for Stein IAS.
Respondents were asked questions about their initiatives in four areas ranging from initial engagement through nurturing and conversion, and they how well they were analyzing marketing information. While most companies did well with connecting with prospects at the top of the funnel, there was a lack of follow-through down the funnel.
There’s also a significant disconnect between marketing and sales in many organizations, notes Keating. Thirty-seven percent of respondents admitted that they are simply pushing out generic content on semi-regular intervals, with no real targeted strategy. A whopping 69% make no attempt to score leads, according to the report.
B2B marketers are most successful at what Stein IAS calls the “reach and attract stage,” with 40% of global brands (and 80% of U.S. B2B brands surveyed_ utilizing a wide range of channels and data profiling techniques.
The industry is slowly getting more advanced at optimizing websites to effectively target customer segments. Only a third of respondents are creating their sites focused on an “old world” product- or solution-focused architecture, and more than half are now creating sites focused on a sector, user goal or job function.
To see how your company rates on the Digital Marketing Maturity Index, visit http://dmmi.steinias.com. To download the complete DMMI report, click here.
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