This June, MarketingSherpa’s research team conducted our third annual study of business technology marketing—what works in the real world. Some 1,900 marketers participated either online or by phone (thanks, everyone!).
The results, as always, were fascinating. You’ll find a link below to the complete study, but I thought you’d like to see this particular chart immediately:
Highly Effective Lead Generation Offers by Type of Technology Being Marketed (click here for chart)
Here are my top takeaways from this fresh information:
1) Blogs (and soon podcasts) are primary lead-gen vehicles.
This year for the first time, blogs have joined top-rated tactics to entice prospects. (One-third of b-to-b services providers, 35% of software and ASP marketers, and 19% of hardware sellers rated them “very effective.”) I suspect this is as much due to the traffic generated from the search engine friendliness of blogs to the thought leadership that management teams flaunt in the blogs to build brand value.
Yet our research from 2005 indicated that very few techies read blogs actively. Blog readers tend to be other blog writers, members of the press, and general business executives (in other words. everyone except for those in the IT and engineering departments).
2) Be wary of relying entirely on free trials.
It must be emphasized that while free trials can work exceptionally well as lead generators, only prospects in the tail end of the sales cycle will generally respond to this offer. They are much closer to buying than other prospects, so your sales force will be very happy.
On the other hand, if you focus on free trial accepters to the exclusion of other lead sources, you may slice the pipeline too thin and not generate sufficient volume. You’ll also miss out on prospects who were scooped up earlier in the cycle by your competitors who’ve been nurturing the relationship ever since. Remember, the lowest-hanging fruit is not the only fruit on the tree.
3) Low-ball offers generate low-quality leads.
Why are sweepstakes rated so low on this scale? (Only 6% of hardware merchants, 2% of software/ASP firms, and 1% of service providers rated them very effective.) After all, sweeps and freebie offers such as T-shirts and iPods tend to get very high response rates.
Well, we asked respondents to rate the value of the effort—meaning the quality of the leads—rather than merely the quantity of leads. Dumping a mountain of extremely low-quality leads into your sales team’s inboxes will only earn you their wrath and distrust. And adding $5-$20 or more per lead for initial telephone qualification and scoring can bust your marketing budget.
4) Your best offer is multiple offers.
My biggest advice from the above findings: Don’t ever rely on one single lead-generation offer alone. Add a combination of offers on a permanent position on the persistent navigation throughout your Website, on employee e-mail signatures, on e-mail newsletter templates, and on other marketing communications materials routinely viewed by prospects.
The best offers—as indicated above—are high in perceived educational value. Content rules. In fact, if your marketing budget were to expand by $60,000 this year, I’d suggest that instead of investing in an ad campaign, a trade show booth, a marketing mailing, or more paid search clicks, you hire another writer for your staff.
Get someone who can kick out content: must-read white papers, keyword-heavy blog entries, compelling PowerPoint presentations, e-mail newsletter articles… Content is your best marketing investment for 2006 and beyond.
Anne Holland is president of MarketingSherpa, a research firm publishing case studies and benchmark data for its 237,000 marketing executive subscribers. For a copy of MarketingSherpa’s new Business Technology Marketing Benchmark Guide, go to www.sherpastore.com/Technology-Marketing.html?8966
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