Benchmarking is important to businesses of all shapes and sizes. It provides a reference point for you to measure your performance against others in the industry - whether it’s goals, competitor performance, or internal metrics like click-through-rates and conversions.
From a B2B marketing perspective, determining how your company’s performance stacks up against competitors is crucial, but getting your hands on the data can be tricky.
Fortunately, the B2B marketing gurus at Green Hat have published their annual 2022 B2B Marketing Outlook Report, bringing some very insightful data to life. For example, when surveying B2B marketers from across Australia, the report revealed that the number one challenge for B2B marketers is growing and measuring brand awareness.
KLIQ has created this article to use as a handy guide to help you discover how your data and results align with the latest B2B benchmarks. If you need assistance gathering insights from your data, reach out to our digital marketing experts who will be happy to help you unlock your business potential.
B2B Google and Bing Ad Benchmarks: Wordstream
It’s vital to know whether your ads are performing well or not, to maintain a high level of search marketing campaign performance. How do you know if your CTR or conversion rate is where it should be?
Wordstream compiled a 2022 Microsoft and Google Ads Benchmark Report in an interactive format to ensure businesses can see how they measure up against the rest. The data is intended to help maximise your campaign budget with data pulled from over 18,000 client campaigns.
Analysis of the search advertising benchmarks in the report for the B2B Services industry found:
- Average cost per click (CPC): $4.85
- Average cost per lead (CLP): $73.70
- Average click through rate (CTR): 5.17%
- Average conversion rate (CVR): 5.31%
To see the interactive search advertising benchmarks hub with data from each industry, click here.
B2B Email Marketing Benchmarks: Mailchimp
As one of the most fundamental parts of nurturing your prospects, knowing how successful you are in measuring email marketing open rates, click throughs and bounce rates is essential to campaign success.
Mailchimp has published the 2022 Email Marketing Statistics and Benchmarks report; it reveals how your emails compare with the average unique open, click and bounce rates by surveying thousands of their users.
Email Open Rates
Analysing your open rates is one of the most effective ways to gauge the performance of your email marketing efforts. Interestingly, the average email open rate across all industries was 21.33%.
Other examples of average open rate data from the report include:
- Business and finance: 21.56%
- Consulting: 20.13%
- Non-profit: 25.17%
- Travel and tourism: 20.44%
- Restaurants and hospitality: 19.77%
This data signifies that when people are either interested in a topic, or feel obliged to be informed, they are more likely to consistently open emails. The key takeaway being that your email content should be useful, informative, relevant and exclusive.
Click Through Rates
Click through rates (CTRs) are useful for determining whether your audience finds the information useful enough to click through after reading it.
The Mailchimp benchmark report found the following average CTRs:
- Business and finance: 2.72%
- Consulting: 2.49%
- Non-profit: 2.79%
- Travel and tourism: 2.25%
- Restaurants and hospitality: 1.34%
Read the full report to find out how your email marketing efforts compare in your industry.
B2B Social Media Benchmarks: WeAreSocial
Social media agency WeAreSocial released its Digital 2022 Australia report, which sheds light on the online behaviour of Australians throughout the past year. It’s no surprise that by the beginning of 2022, Australians started spending even more time online, and as a result, spending more money.
The report notes that by the completion of 2021, 82.7% of Australians were active on social media, with the average time per day increasing to 1 hour and 57 minutes.
In terms of the most used social platforms, Facebook still reigns supreme, with TikTok becoming more popular each year:
- Facebook: 76.8%
- TikTok: 32.2%
- Twitter: 29.5%
- LinkedIn: 26.2%
This tells us that while the traditional channels are still the most viable for B2B - and LinkedIn is still king in this domain - it does make sense to start looking to diversify depending upon the audience you are targeting.
LinkedIn B2B Ad Benchmarks
How are your LinkedIn ads performing - are they going better than your competitors? This is a common question we frequently hear. The most important thing to remember is that it is entirely dependent upon your ad objective and the ad formats you are using.
In terms of LinkedIn ad click through rates (CTRs), the global average is between 0.44%-0.65%. However, there are differences in CTRs according to ad type:
- Sponsored Content (Single Image): 0.56%
- Sponsored Content (Carousel): 0.40%
- Sponsored Content (Video): 0.44%
- Message Ads: 3% with open rates at 30%
- Dynamic Ads Standard: 0.06%
- Dynamic Ads Dynamic: 0.08%
- Text Ads: 0.02%
When it comes to B2B LinkedIn cost-per-click (CPC), the global benchmark is $5.58. However, the job function plays an important role in determining this accurately.
For example, benchmarks across each industry are:
- Accounting: $5.00
- Business Development: $6.30
- Education: $4.90
- Engineering: $5.10
- Finance: $6.90
- Human Resources: $6.00
- information Technology: $7.90
- Marketing: $6.80
- Media and Communications: $5.60
- Operations: $5.70
- Product Management: $7.30
- Sales: $5.40
While these are the most common job functions targeted by businesses on LinkedIn, you can get a more specific CPC for your audience and region by utilising LinkedIn’s forecasting tool in the campaign manager section.
Digital CX B2B Benchmarks: Contentsquare
Improving your company’s digital CX increases awareness and ensures your brand stands out from the rest. The 2022 B2B Digital Experience Benchmark Report from Contentsquare contains expert analysis and guidance on how to improve digital CX, and details what type of data you can use to make informed updates to your digital strategy.
The report analyses more than 100 metrics and billions of data points across 25 countries during a 12 month period. To see the report in full, you can download it here.
How KLIQ Can Help
Are your B2B marketing results missing the mark? KLIQ can help.
We’re a data-focused digital agency specialising in helping sustainable businesses get the most out of their marketing efforts.
With in-depth, measurable data and insights obtained by understanding your customers, we find out what makes them tick, and determine where your brand fits into their lives through actions, inaction and perceptions.
Check out our services or get in touch with us to find out how we can help your business.
