Lead generation now top marketing goal

Publishing the results of market research is always good publicity and the latest survey from the engineering search engine, Globalspec is no exception. Two of the headline findings are that customer acquisition and lead generation have become the primary marketing goals and that 3 of the top marketing channels are now online channels. Those 3 incidentally were online directories/web sites, e-mail and search engine optimisation. Some 29% of businesses polled spend more than 50% of their marketing budget online and 48% advised they were intending to spend a bigger proportion of their marketing budget online. On the other hand only 11% cited brand awareness as their top marketing objective, down from 21% in 2008. Most concurred that they were seeking good quality sales leads.

There are a number of benefits that online marketing brings, in particular greater immediacy and measureability - plus customers are online. It again questions the future of the hard-to-measure display advertising business model in trade publications, which are often more about branding these days than lead generation. Typically published monthly, trade press display advertising is a slower response medium and requires expensive surveys to fully evaluate and measure. By contrast last week we put together an e-mail campaign designed to prompt sales of remaindered product which actually accounted for 25% of all traffic to the client web site that week and resulted in closure on sales that otherwise would have been stock write offs. In fact many traditional marketing channels should be revisited including trade shows and brochures, but all with a note of caution because a mix of marketing methods will still be more effective than over working a single channel. Too many e-mails and customers and prospects switch off. Better to make judicious use of multiple channels many of which can be online. Keep the web site current and here news is a great way to both achieve this and to keep customers interested and informed in a less pressured way. If you do not already have an online news service such as Virtual News Office then this could be a good way of channeling some of the online marketing investment.