Blogs, Webinar and Free: best rated tactics for quality demand creation

Generating buzz seems to be the holy grail quest for marketers nowadays. But when comes the time to report to your management “how did it go?”, we’re expected to show some business opportunities, leads, and influencers logged into our tracking systems The number of seminar attendees won’t make it anymore. ROI, dashboards and key success metrics have been populating our marketing plan increasingly over the last 5 years.
So, what would be the most effective lead generation offer you could leverage in High-Tech ? This should pop-up as an on-going question from your staff each time you plan for a new campaign. Here are some numbers coming from a MarketingSherpa survey, issued in June ’06 that I wanted to share with you (see chart).
Surprise, surprise, blogs have joined for the first year the top rated marketing tactics when it gets down to prospects entering their details in your database. At the same time, sweepstakes — the beloved T-shirt and iPods — are still getting high response rates but unfortunately doesn’t translate into quality demand creation. So your transformation rate, or to put it differently the effort to result ratio doesn’t look good for marketers in our industry using sweepstakes as the main tactic. Webinars, on the other hand, seems to get a good performance review which reinforce the on-line effectiveness of marketing compared to traditional tactics. Finally, especially of you’re selling software technologies, free trial demos is the #1 tactic for qualitative results.
All in all, these numbers, coming from our peers being surveyed, are supporting the major claims we’ve been expressing in Marketing 2.0: Free is a good offer and on-line customer co-marketing is the way to go.