B2B Marketing Channels: Where to Spend Your Time

Time Spent on Organic Social Media

Where a company’s staff spends its time on B2B marketing varies by industry and other factors.

NP Digital surveyed 118 companies in different verticals, generating at least $100 million in annual revenue.

Presumably, based on NP Digital’s customer base, the surveyed companies were both B2B and B2C.

The two questions that were asked were:

  • What Percentage Of Your Revenue Does Each Marketing Channel Drive?
  • What Marketing Channels Are Companies Spending Their Time On?

The Survey Results

CEO Neil Patel posted the survey results on X.

Percentage of Revenue from Marketing Channels

The post resulted in many replies, including ones that questioned:

  • Channel attribution (first, last, multi)
  • What’s in the ‘Other’ category
  • Whether ‘Other’ is too large a category
  • Where YouTube videos fit in

Neil explained the large ‘Other’ category as “in-person events, speaking at events, conference booths, PR, radio, handwritten notes, etc…”

I questioned why SEO and blogging were separated. Neil’s answer was,

“For the study we separated out blog traffic… yes a blog gets traffic from seo, social, etc… but felt it should be split out as in most large companies the blogging has its own team and resources.”

Despite the survey’s imperfections, the results are worth paying attention to. Among respondents:

  • An excessive amount of time is spent on organic social media relative to its revenue influence
  • SEO and blogging combined drive over a quarter of revenue
  • SEO is the most efficient marketing channel in terms of revenue vs. time spent
  • Companies spend comparatively little time on podcasting, and the results reflect this

Your B2B Marketing Mix

The mix of your B2B marketing channels time spent and revenue may look very different from the charts above.

One reply to the X post was from a marketing agency CEO who said, “We get 90% of our business from organic social.”

Over the years, our CRM consulting group has acquired almost all its new customers from organic search, which has been the main channel for our audience to date.

Based on the survey results, are there any marketing time allocations you may change?

As an exercise, you could enumerate your marketing channels in a spreadsheet and assign the percentage of time spent across all team members.

Here’s a fictional table and associated pie chart.

ChannelPercentage of Time Spent
Blogging & SEO25.0%
Cold Email & Phone Outreach25.0%
Organic Social Media10.0%
Networking & Referrals0.0%
Paid Ads10.0%
List Emails10.0%
Podcasting5.0%
Attending Events7.5%
Speaking at Events2.5%
Press Releases5.0%
Influencer Marketing0.0%
Total100.0%
Fictional time spent on each marketing channel

From there, you can approximate the allocation of revenue to each channel.

Example of Revenue Allocation to Marketing Channel

If you change your channel time allocation, you can redistribute existing content on some channels to others.

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