Lead Generation: Content among the most difficult tactics, but also quite effective

To determine the most used lead gen tactics and map that to their effectiveness and difficulty, we asked the following questions in the MarketingSherpa 2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report …

Q. Which of the following lead generation tactics does your organization currently use?

Q. Please indicate the LEVEL OF EFFECTIVENESS (in terms of achieving objectives) for each of the lead generation tactics your organization is using.

Q. Please indicate the DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY (time, effort, and expense required) for each of the lead generation tactics your organization is using.

And then, we asked your peers for their feedback on this data…

Be the resource

I can’t entirely agree that content marketing is one of the most difficult tactics, although I agree that it is the most effective for lead generation. Marketing these days is about educating your target market, engaging with them, and only selling when they’re ready to buy. Until that time comes, be the resource that they go to while researching solutions to their problems.

– Jen Picard, Digital Marketing Manager, Meltwater Group

Difficulty and effectiveness is impacted by how you execute

I find email is less difficult and more effective with the right content.

– Jim Naro, President, The Naro Group

Content is complicated to do right

The content was labeled as most difficult because business owners don’t have the resources or time to run a proper content marketing campaign. Counting in:

• Solid keyword research
• Separating texts to target different stages of lead interest (just looking, comparing services, emotional purchasing triggers)
• Proper writing for the Web (scanability, active language, short sentences, bullet lists, etc.)

The list is pretty long, and not everybody has the time to learn all that and then apply it. Compared to, say, PPC, content is challenging.

As Jen said, it’s all about feeling the pulse of your Web visitors. The power of content is that you can use different content pieces to speed up their pulse and get them to a purchasing decision by moving them deeper into the conversion funnel. Aside from email, hardly any other tactic is as effective of a convincer as content.

– Igor Mateski, Owner, WebMaxFormance

Mobile is bigger than social media

My attention was drawn to mobile marketing designated in the social media circle. While this is certainly true, increasingly, people are accessing their email from their smart devices. I believe mobile is bigger than just social media and could significantly impact the performance of campaigns in the future.

Increasingly tracking multi-channel behavior will also play a role in assessing the marketing performance.

– Joseph Ruiz, Owner, Strategic Marketing Solutions

Very true, Joseph. To be clear, social media and mobile marketing were treated as separate tactics in the benchmark report. For this specific chart, they both had similar effectiveness and difficulty, so they occupy a similar place.

However, I can see that the way we displayed the chart, with mobile marketing almost looking like a little moon orbiting social media, could easily deduce that we implied for mobile marketing to be seen as a subset of social media. That was not our intention.

Related Resources:

MarketingSherpa Lead Gen Summit 2013 – September 30 – October 3, San Francisco

SEO and Email: The Best Marketing Efforts You Can Undertake (via WebMaxFormance)

Content Marketing: Your questions on B2B online lead gen, metrics, content from SMEs and more

Lead Generation: B2B content generates $700,000 in leads via email