Professionals involved with business-to-business digital marketing are struggling to make significant improvements in reaching their marketing goals, a new study finds.

In the “2016 State of B2B Digital Marketing” study, based on interviews worldwide with 275 marketing, sales and other business professionals, respondents said their biggest obstacle to effective digital marketing was inadequate marketing budgets, followed by lack of staff skills and lack of an effective strategy. The study was conducted by marketing technology and services firms Marketo and Ascend2.

Study respondents cited lead generation and increased conversion rates as their top marketing goals. They said email was the most effective tactic and also one of the least difficult to carry out. They cited paid search and search engine optimization as among the most effective tactics, but also noted they were the two most difficult to conduct.

Following are the percentages of respondents citing their most important goals of digital marketing:

Lead generation, 64%

Increased conversion rates, 49%

Improve data in leads, 42%

Improve brand awareness, 42%

Increase measureable ROI, 40%

Increase website traffic, 27%

Increase the ability to attribute sales to a marketing tactic, 16%

The following percentages of respondents cited the most significant barriers to digital marketing success:

Inadequate marketing budget, 43%

Lack of staff skills and training, 39%

Lack of an effective strategy, 36%

Inadequate analytics/reporting, 29%

Inadequate data/lead quality, 29%

Inability to measure ROI, 29%

Lack of marketing technology, 25%.

The following percentages of respondents cited the most effective digital marketing tactics:

Email, 66%

Website content, 62%

Search engine optimization, or SEO, 55%

Social media, 33%

Paid search ads, 33%

Display ads, 10%

Mobile marketing, 9%

The following percentages of respondents cited the most difficult tactics to execute:

Social media, 54%

SEO, 45%

Mobile marketing, 36%

Paid search ads, 27%

Email, 21%

Website content, 195

Display ads, 18%

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