Lead Gen Gears Up: Chief Marketer Annual Survey

Every lead-gen channel will see increased use over last year, according to the 2011 survey response. But the largest growth will come among the web tools that marketers can deploy for themselves, including prospecting through social networks, online registrations, web ads and online directories. Smallest increases anticipated by respondents include use of third-party lists, telemarketing and direct mail.

Poll respondents showed a strong interest in finding new customers, as they did last year. But a majority of respondents, and especially mid-size marketers, said their focus would be to tend to current customers while, secondarily, lifting awareness among non-users. Large brands showed much more interest than small or mid-size brands in retention and reactivation of lapsed users.

That’s on par with the high regard responding marketers said they have for the lifetime value of the customer. Asked to express their strategy for finding new prospects, 69.7% said they aim to find customers who will prove profitable in the long run, against 32.1% who said they expect to turn a profit from prospects from the first transaction.

Online Interests

Tactically, marketers polled for this year’s survey said they were most likely to have used product discounts or samples to generate leads (44.6%) in 2010. But the next most frequently used offer was for informational content offered over the Internet (31.3%), which outpolled both enhanced services (26.2%) and contests or sweeps (22.1%) as a registration lure — suggesting that marketers are moving to prospecting with value-added content.

Once again, email led the array of channels most often used to find new prospects, the choice for lead generation by 80.2% of the survey respondents last year. Direct mail (54.2%) and trade shows and conferences (52.3%) were place and show among 2010 prospecting channels. But asked which platforms they would deploy this year to find new business, respondents expressed heightened interest in them all — but foresaw the biggest increases in the newer digital channels, including social networks (a hike of 15.6 percentage points), online registrations (7.6 points) and web advertising (7.1 points).

Also continuing a trend seen last year, the proportion of marketers getting all their prospects from third-party brokers or data compilers fell from 32.5% in 2009 to 20.1% in 2010. At the same time, the proportion of respondents getting almost none of their new leads from those outside sources inched upward to 26.3%. Most marketers used a blended approach, combining in-house prospecting with outside lists. But even then, the number of marketers who said they got at least half of their prospects on their own without third parties increased slightly, to 55.9% in 2010 from 50.4% in last year’s survey.

Email and Social Media

Almost three in five respondents (58%) reported they already use email as a tool for uncovering new customers, and another 18% said they were not currently using email for leads but would do so in 2011. Only about a quarter of those polled said they either had no plans to prospect via email or would cut back. Given a menu of reasons for not running lead-gen email programs, that group most often cited fears of looking spammy (to either prospects or ISPs), the greater appeal of other lead-gen channels, and the difficulty of getting found in cluttered mailboxes.

As for how they’re managing lead-gen within social media, the majority of respondents (43%) said they were taking the soft-sell approach, building up engagement relationships with prospects that they hope will turn transactional later. Only 22% said they were using posts in social media to point interested prospects to their websites. Relatively few are using social channels to encourage the viral spread of coupons or contest registrations.

Among those not using social media to generate leads (26% of those polled), the reason most often cited was internal resources, not the nature of the channel. Forty-three percent of respondents said their brands were not currently prospecting within social media because participating there used more human resources and required a more constant content flow than other lead-gen options.

EDITOR’S NOTE:

A fuller discussion of the data revealed by the survey, including tabs for business type, annual revenue and industry verticals, is available at: http://chiefmarketer.comresearch/cm-prospecting-survey-2011/.

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