The Highlights: 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report

We’ve had a lot of industry coverage and engagement with our 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report. Since you’re a busy marketer, I wanted to put together the highlights for you to easily read and share in case you missed it last week!

You can download the full report here.

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Here are the 6 key findings

1. There is clear cyclicality in the B2B space with first quarter of 2012 and from September to mid-November, showing the strongest performance in terms of traffic.

There is clear cyclicality in the B2B space in terms of traffic volume. Q1 (January-March) and September to mid- November are the peak seasons, while summer time and the end-of-year exhibit slow traffic trends.

2. Google is the single most important referring domain to B2B websites, responsible for over 36% of all visits.

Google’s share of organic traffic to B2B websites in the study, topped 90% in November, 2012. It averaged 88.21% in 2012 and showed a consistent increase for most of the year.

3. Social Media is still a small fraction of traffic and leads to B2B websites, contributing on average less than 5% of all traffic and leads.

Organic Search is the #1 driver of traffic to B2B websites, followed by direct traffic (40%) and referrals (11.50%). ” Despite the increased adoption of social media by B2B in 2012, itʼs still only a fraction (1.90%) of total traffic to B2B websites.”

4. Email shows high engagement rates as well as strong conversion rates with an average 2.9% lead conversion rate.

Just over 3 pageviews per visit seems to be the standard for most sources, with email proving to be a strong source for conversion rate as well as engagement. Social media once again is at the bottom of the list with the lowest engagement levels followed by paid search.

5. Paid search usage showed a constant decline among B2B marketers in 2012. Over 10% of companies in the report discontinued their paid search campaigns during 2012.

In 2012, paid search usage (as measured by number of companies running paid search campaigns) has dropped by over 10%. Companies who actively kept and managed paid search campaigns have seen a strong contribution to visits and leads from these campaigns as well as a healthy, above-average conversion rate.

6. Twitter is the strongest social media channel for generating leads, outperforming Facebook and LinkedIn 9-to-1 with 82% of social media leads coming from Twitter.

While Facebook drove the highest percentage of visits from social media, Twitter outperforms it in terms of lead conversion by over a 9-to-1 ratio.