Digital Marketing Benchmark Report

Introduction

Digital marketing has gone from being an exotic, new dish to a staple in every marketer’s diet. Every modern marketer knows that most marketing is digital, and that the set of available processes and channels to promote a product or service, or to build a brand, is vast. So vast, in fact, that even the term “digital marketing” has become too broad to represent all that happens under its definition. Demand generation, social media, content marketing, web analytics and other areas are so important that entire teams are being segmented from this broad category to provide the proper digital focus.

Marketers are faced with the challenge of keeping up with new, hopefully better, strategies that emerge at a rapid rate, while cutting ineffective practices waning in popularity. It’s very valuable for marketers to have benchmark data about how the current digital marketing landscape looks, what’s new, what’s working and what isn’t. Quite often, marketers can gain a competitive advantage simply by being quick to adopt new digital marketing strategies in advance of mass adoption that eventually dilutes the impact of new things.

This study, sponsored by Demandbase, took a close look at digital marketing to understand current practices, goals, strategies, metrics and effectiveness. Furthermore, the study investigated how well organizations understand their chosen markets, who in those markets they target as prospects and what their biggest challenges are in the pursuit of success.

Finally, this report investigates a digital marketing strategy that is in the early-to-mid stages of adoption: Account-Based Marketing. This report details the findings and provides insights in each of these areas.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Executive Summary
3. Digital Marketing Importance & Goals
4. Digital Marketing Tactics
5. Digital Marketing Metrics
6. Market Understanding
7. Market Targets
8. Account-Based Marketing
9. Digital Marketing Challenges
10. Analyst Bottom Line
11. Acknowledgements

12. About Demandbase
13. About Demand Metric
14. Appendix - Survey Background

Research Methodology

This Demand Metric Benchmark Study survey was administered online during the period of October 2, 2014 through October 24, 2014. During this period, 268 responses were collected, 239 of which were complete enough for inclusion in the analysis. The data was analyzed using SPSS to ensure the statistical validity of the findings. The representativeness of these results depends on the similarity of the sample to environments in which this survey data is used for comparison or guidance.