I came across some awesome benchmark data about B2B marketing budgets, courtesy of SiriusDecisions. (If you are not familiar with SiriusDecisions, you should be — they are doing some of the best research available on B2B marketing and sales.)
Their data show how B2B companies of various sizes allocate their marketing program budgets. Here are the budget allocations for B2B companies with $0-100M revenue:
- Field Marketing / Demand Generation: 64.7%
- Corporate Communications: 15.0%
- Product Marketing: 9.5%
- Branding/Advertising: 7.2%
- Channel Marketing: 2.5%
- Market Intelligence: 1.1%
SiriusDecisions further broke the Field Marketing / Demand Generation data into sub-categories, as follows (this is for all B2B companies, revenue from $0 to $1B+):
- Tradeshows: 16%
- Tele-prospecting: 13%
- Email: 13%
- Live events / seminars: 10%
- Webinars: 9%
- PPC Search Marketing: 5%
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): 4%
- Other (direct mail, associations, online, etc.): 30%
Besides being useful for budgeting purposes, what can we learn from this? I’m not surprised that the largest spend is on the most measurable category, demand generation. That trend will continue as marketing works to be ever more accountable for driving revenue. At the same time, I’m baffled by the fact that the largest spend category within demand generation continues to be tradeshows. Surely companies do not find better ROI from tradeshow spending than they do from channels like search marketing and email? If you disagree, please let me know!
By the way, I know it’s been more than two weeks since my last post. My excuse is that Marketo launched our beta product last week and I’ve been swamped with customer meetings (including a few with folks I met through this blog!). So far, things are going great – but it does make it hard to find time to write worthy blog posts. I’ll do my best to keep posting at least once a week during the next few busy weeks, but if you’re looking for something to read in the meantime, be sure to check out the Big List of B2B Marketing Blogs.
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