Last week IAEE called our attention to a new report from MarketingSherpa, the 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report – Budget Basics. The 16 page report, sponsored by Vocus, can be downloaded for free and contains data that will be of interest to event marketing professionals.
Several charts from the report particularly caught my interest.
Take a look at the chart labeled “Allocation of Marketing Budgets by Organization Size.” For both medium-sized and large-sized businesses, budget outlays for tradeshows are greater than budget allocations for any other piece of the marketing pie. For small-sized businesses, tradeshow outlays represent the third-highest outlay of marketing dollars, still a significant beneficiary of corporate marketing spending.
Now take a look at the chart labeled “Effectiveness of B2B Marketing Tactics.” For all organizations responding to the survey, tradeshows ranked in the bottom one-third of effectiveness for all responses. Only 25% of responders indicated that tradeshows are very effective. That compares with very effective ratings of 50%, 43% and 40%, respectively, for website, webinar and email marketing. That’s probably not news to any marketer. The cost effectiveness of web and email marketing has been driving increased use of these tactics for years.
Not surprisingly, a third chart measuring the anticipated delta in marketing budget allocations for 2011 indicates that only 22% of all responding organizations expect to increase their investment in tradeshows. A walloping 69% expect to increase their investment in web marketing.
The disparity is worth noting, especially in light of a fourth chart, “B2B Marketing Challenges Becoming More Pertinent to Organizations.” What’s the #1 challenge for marketers? Quality of leads. Generating high quality leads outweighs all other concerns by a landslide. No surprise there, especially for event marketers who have been struggling for the past 10 to 15 years to increase the quality of leads generated at tradeshows and events.
It’s a bit of a death spiral, isn’t it?
Tradeshows represent the largest outlay in the marketing budget. Organizations want highly qualified leads. Compared to other marketing tactics, tradeshows are considered ineffective in delivering highly qualified leads. So organizations decrease spending on tradeshows and increase budget for the marketing tactics that are perceived as most cost effectively providing the quality.
What’s the answer?
The report points out that “Organizations are combating this challenge by defining sales funnel processes that include a lead nurturing stage for non-sales-ready leads and lead scoring methodologies to determine when a lead is ready to be contacted by a salesperson so that only high-quality, sales-ready leads are delivered to the sales team.”
I know several brands that use scoring systems to determine which leads move to sales and which leads remain with the marketing team for nurturing. What is your organization doing to monitor, identify and improve the quality of leads generated at trade shows? Share your ideas and help us all improve.