Survey Finds 80% Of Respondents Unhappy With Demand Generation Campaigns

If you happen to be a salesperson, marketer or ad agency with serious misgivings about the effectiveness of your company’s demand generation campaign, rest assured you are not alone.

The quarterly survey conducted by Corporate Visions has found that 80% of the respondents feel that way, describing their demand generation campaigns as either ineffective or semi-effective.

While belonging to the majority may afford little consolation in this case, it could be helpful to see what colleagues consider the greatest challenges to creating and executing successful campaigns. Corporate Visions’ second-quarter poll on demand generation included over 400 B2B sales and marketing professionals worldwide. Since only a fifth of them were perfectly happy with their campaigns, current practices obviously leave a lot to be desired so let’s have a look at the major weaknesses brought to the fore by the survey results.

One of the key issues is the apparent lack of connection between sales and marketing content, Corporate Visions said. Almost two-thirds of the respondents (65%) stated that less than half of the content prepared by their marketing departments for demand generation campaigns was utilised by sales teams. Meanwhile, 60% said that the messaging focus was wrong since campaigns fixated on the company’s products and services instead of putting customer pain points at the centre.

Asked about the major obstacles to success, 37% pointed to inadequately engaging content, while 31% cited lack of alignment between sales and marketing departments. For 29% of the poll participants, demand generation campaigns were falling short because of budgetary constraints, content shortage or lack of executive buy-in.