If you are a business marketing to other businesses, some recent survey results might help you gauge how you are doing with your marketing efforts.

Preliminary results from a survey by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) show that just under half (42.9%) of business-to-business marketing budgets are going to direct response communications, with 16.1% going to brand advertising and 13.7% to tradeshows.

Within the direct response category, the breakdown looks like this:

• direct mail – 27.5%
• online marketing – 18.8%
• tradeshows – 15.9%
• catalogs – 15.7%
• telemarketing – 12.1%
• RSS, blogs, etc. – 1.5%

Results also revealed that among those surveyed, 65% of b-to-b marketing resources are devoted to new customer acquisition and only 35% to existing customer retention, an interesting finding when you consider that existing customers are generally the largest source of revenue for these companies. A formal report on the survey is being prepared by the DMA.

Tradeshow Marketing
Another recent finding of note was revealed in a report from American Business Media (ABM). For the first time ever in b-to-b media, tradeshow revenue surpassed print (36% compared with 35%), and experts reason that the Internet is a contributing factor. The Internet allows networking associations made at a three-day tradeshow to continue throughout the year. Tradeshows are now the third-fastest-growing segment of business media following eMedia and custom media (targeted-audience publications).

Telemarketing
More than 100 million Americans have registered for the federal government's Do Not Call Registry, a third of the U.S. population. B-to-B Online notes that b-to-b marketing has emerged as the strongest segment of the telemarketing industry, since b-to-b telemarketing is exempt from most of those regulations. In many cases, telemarketing is a major portion of the marketing mix for b-to-b marketers, and telemarketing firms have made the effort to convert their call centers to handle b-to-b rather than consumer marketing.

A Note on eMail Marketing
Further, a recent study from Alterian reported on melissadata.com looked more closely at eMail as a direct marketing tool. Of the marketing service providers surveyed:

• 90% said their clients use eMail for customer retention and cross-selling;
• 72% said their clients use eMail for customer acquisition; and
• 48% said their clients use eMail for transactional communications.

What’s the Best Choice for You?
The stakes are high and the choices for effective b-to-b marketing are many, but how do you know what channels are right for your business? MillerWhite Integrated Marketing can assist you in focusing your efforts in the most effective and cost-efficient direction through its MW Fusion® formula and its marketing/research, advertising and interactive media service lines.

<< back to "mwfusion"