Guest post by Ashley Verrill
Earlier this month, we posted a portion of the results of a recent Software Advice report regarding trends in business-to-business demand generation programs.
Today, we’d like to delve into a few of the other key takeaways from the B2B Demand Generation Benchmark Survey. One of the important findings in the report was identifying the demand generation channels with the lowest cost per lead.
This chart shows social media (not ads) receiving the most votes for being low cost, with about 81 percent of the sample describing the channel this way. This was followed closely by email marketing to a house list, which about 78 percent of the sample calling it low cost per lead .(These percentages only reflect answers from marketers that said they use each channel.)
This channels identified as having the lowest cost were also among the most popular. The chart below ranks each channel from most popular to least popular. Email marketing to a house list, for example, was the most popular with about 98 percent of the group reportedly using that leads conduit. This was followed by SEO, which was ranked as the third lowest cost in the previous chart. About 94 percent of the sample uses SEO, while 88 percent uses the third most-popular social media (not ads).
The survey also asked marketers about their opinions regarding the quantity of leads from each channel. Several of the channels listed as “high quantity” correlated with the most popular channels – email marketing to a house list (third highest-quantity channel) and trade shows (fourth highest-quantity), for example. However, search engine advertising and third-party originators outranked both of those popular channels. This is likely due to cost. Both received a considerable amount of votes for being high cost.
Software Advice asked similar questions for content and offers used for demand generation. The following two charts show which content and offers marketers view as producing the highest quantity of leads, and which are better for producing quality leads.
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Marketers don’t seem to prioritize content and offers according to their success rates for producing high quantities of leads, or lead quality. “Learn more / contact us” for example was the most popular offer with 99 percent of the sample using it. However, this method didn’t score particularly high on the quality or quantity scale. Likewise, videos were the second most popular with about 91 percent producing this kind of content, despite low marks for lead volume and quality.
How do these results compare to your own demand generation strategy? Weigh in with a comment here.
