Interesting recent study from MarketingSherpa. 1900 marketing people from technology companies were surveyed in June 2006. One very interesting question that was asked was about effective methods of lead generation. And it wasn’t about sheer number of lead - it was stressing quality of leads.
It turned out that survey marketeers pointed to blogs as one of the top 5 ways to generate such high quality leads. It was especially popular for software vendors and ASPs. Other in top 5 included free trial demo (again for software), webcast/webinar, whitepaper and with lower scores - podcast.
Some surprises were also on the side of least effective methods - there were sweepstakes (where someone could win t-shirt or PDA) and viral marketing. These methods can be very good for creating even huge amount of leads. But these leads is often total crap.
You can see the executive summary and samples of the report here or purchase the whole report in SherpaStore.
There are some other very interesting ideas in this report so I’m sure I’ll revisit it in other posts as well.
