The revelations people provide when they respond to online marketing polls include a wealth of industry information. Poll data shows what marketers are thinking about in a variety of important subjects, ranging from everyday tasks to far-reaching future trends. Over the past four months, we've utilized our TopRank Marketing Twitter channel to publish a weekly poll, asking a range of questions to B2B marketers. Today, we share some of the data we've collected throughout this series of 17 polls.
Social Media Polls
Our first two polls asked B2B marketing about social media, and the responses can help us gauge the pulse of marketers on the social platform front. Each week more social platforms are experimenting or implementing hiding some of the forward-facing counts we've all been used to seeing for years, such as the number of followers a page or person has, and how many people have liked a particular social message, image, or video. Our very first poll in the series asked about hiding like and follower counts.
Fifty-three percent of marketers said they wouldn't support hiding like and follower counts on Instagram, while 18% stated they would support such a move. Furthermore, 17% said they would support dropping just the like counts and 12% just the follower tallies. Our second poll also marketers to share which channels (other than LinkedIn) they'd seen the most B2B success with: 
Outside of LinkedIn*, 50% of marketers shared that they've found B2B marketing success using Twitter, followed by 20% who said Facebook provided surprising success. Instagram also came in at 20%. Finally, YouTube came in last at 10%. Our most recent poll asked a more traditional question of B2B marketers. 
Unsurprisingly, 63% of marketers viewed LinkedIn as their top choice social media platform for finding B2B industry content. Twitter came in second with 23% of the vote, and Facebook and Instagram each came in at 7%.
Blogging & Blog Promotion Polls
We ran several polls that asked B2B marketers their input regarding blogging and blog promotion.
Fifty percent of marketers see interactive elements as offering the biggest potential performance increase in blog posts, followed by 42% for images and 8% for animated GIFs. Surprisingly, no respondents choosing embedded video as their top choice. Another polls asked respondents about the number of channels they use when promoting blog content. 
A whopping 73% of marketers promote blog posts to an average of two to five online channels, while the remaining 27% shared that they promote to just one channel.
Influencer Marketing Polls
Several additional polls have dug in to B2B marketers' takes on influencer marketing.
Fifty percent of B2B marketers said their top challenge with influencer marketing is measuring its impact, while 18% said finding top influencers as their biggest hurdle. In addition, another 18% said that getting initial buy-in for influencer marketing was the leading challenge, followed by utilizing influencers at 14%. Another influencer marketing polls looked at 12-month trends. 
When it comes to influencer marketing trends for 2020, 38% of B2B marketers said increased use of artificial intelligence (AI) will be the most important, followed by the rise of micro-and-macro influencers at 31%, quality metrics at 19%, and experience management at 13%.
Analytics & Website Optimization Polls
We also touched on analytics and website optimization questions in two of our recent polls.
Thirty-five percent of respondents said that using insights from data is the top challenge in measuring campaign performance. As for other struggles, 26% said that inadequate tools topped their list and 22% said that proving the value of analytics. Lastly, 17% shared that having too much data at hand was their top issue. An interesting recent poll question looked into how long B2B marketers will tend to wait for a webpage to load before giving up. 
Forty-four percent of marketers will abandon a slow-loading page within three to five seconds, while 33% leave after six to 10 seconds. In addition, 19% after 11 to 15 seconds and 4% said they'll wait until a page times out before giving up.
The Rise of Podcasting Poll
The rise of podcasting's popularity caused us to inquire about the matter with a poll.
Sixty-five percent of marketers said they use podcasts in their campaign efforts and plan to increase their use, while 35% said they don't use podcasting currently but plan to start. As you can see, zero respondents indicated that they would do less podcasting in the coming year or didn't plan to start.
Content Marketing Polls
The majority of our polls have dealt with various aspects of content marketing, such as this one looking at the importance of captioning in online video.
Fifty percent of marketers polled said they plan to use the same level of video captioning going forward, while 33% plan to do even more captioning, and 17% plan to start captioning their video content. Content re-purposing was the subject of another of our content marketing polls. 
Fifty-four percent of marketers said that blog posts were the top performing type of content for re-purposing use, followed by interviews at 31%, and both eBooks and white papers coming in at 8% each. The components making up our content marketing toolkit were also examined in a poll. 
Sixty-eight percent of marketers said that video is the format that brings the most engagement to B2B content, followed by interactive assets at 26%, and virtual reality (VR) and AR at 5%. With video holding the top spot in that poll, we were curious how many channels B2B marketers typically promote video content to. 
Eighty-five percent of marketers said they promote videos on two to five online channels on average, with 8% promoting videos to between six and 10 channels, and the same percentage promoting video to just a single channel.
Email Marketing & Search Polls
Email marketing has remained an important part of many campaigns, and we explored two aspects of the practice in recent poll, including the following poll that generated the most engagement yet among our polls.
Fifty-five percent of B2B marketers view the reputation of the sending the most important factor in choosing whether to open an email newsletter. Twenty-three percent said that an interesting subject line was most important, followed by the anticipation of the content at 13%, and a desire for unique content at 9%. Another email marketing poll asked what causes us to unsubscribe from an email newsletter. 
Sixty-seven percent of B2B marketers said the top reason they unsubscribe from email newsletters is receiving mail from sources they never subscribed to in the first place. Furthermore, 33% shared that lack of original email newsletter content was their number one reason for unsubscribing. Search marketing was the subject of one week's poll. Recent study data has shown that for the first time the majority of Google searches don't result in additional clicks from the results page. 
Forty-six percent of respondents said their initial Google search provided the information they need between 110 and 50% of the time, with 38% saying results answered their queries most of the time. Surprisingly, a combined 16% said their queries are only answered 1-10% of the time or never.
Including Poll Insights in Your 2020 Marketing Plans
By taking the time to listen to what B2B marketers are saying through their answers to these poll questions, you'll have an inside glimpse at where our industry is heading as we near 2020 and all the changes it will inevitably bring. While we happened to use Twitter's polling feature, if you're interested in conducting your own series there are poll options available for numerous social media platforms, along with polling plug-ins and built-in functionality for various website and content marketing system types. It can be ideal to ask poll questions on the digital channel that best suits your particular audience. Some organizations even choose to conduct polls on several platforms and to then compare the results, or even compile them together to get a larger sample answer size. Do you have your own poll questions you'd like us to ask on our Twitter channel? Leave a comment below and we may include your question in a future poll.The post 17 Revealing B2B Marketing Insights From Poll Data appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.
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