Five Reasons Lead Generation Is On Its Last Legs

A quick definition. Lead generation, for purposes of this post, is collecting registration information for content, in order to build a marketing database or deliver leads to telemarketing and then on to sales.

Delivering leads for sales drives today’s B2B marketing organization. According to a study from Fusion B2B on 2011 B2B marketing priorities, lead generation is the single top priority of B2B marketers, at 26%. By comparison, awareness only captures 7%, near the end of the list. B2B marketing is all about lead generation.

But lead generation is breaking, and if your marketing relies heavily on lead generation, it will slowly break too. Here are the five things breaking lead generation today.

Online is 77% Less Impactful than Newspaper

This could be called a rant. And it briefly draws on basic economic theory. So unless you like rants based on forgotten college coursework, use the navigation or category links above to find another post. Otherwise, read on, and please share your thoughts below or with me on Twitter.

According to eMarketer’s Ad Dollars Still Not Following Online and Mobile Usage, on hour spent online drives 77% fewer advertising dollars than an hour spent with newspapers. Digital media proponents have been misled, believing somehow that time spent and budget should equalize. In reality, time and spend should never have been compared. Saying Online is 77% Less Impactful than Newspaper (like in this title) is just as accurate, and despite how ludicrous that statement may seem, is likely even more accurate than comparing time and budget.

Three Ways Click Rates Are Killing Your Brand

Despite numerous calls for the demise of the click rate, it lives on as a standard fixture in nearly every benchmark and performance report. It lives on, its very existence reducing the effectiveness of your brand campaign.

Click rates live on for a simple reason. No other metric is (1) common across all advertisers and publishers and (2) accessible by publishers. Until an alternative performance metric can broadly be measured by those selling advertising space, click rates will remain a fixture.

The problem is, click rates hurt brand campaigns.

Why B2B Marketing Is Not Social: An Unexpected Insight from SiriusDecisions

The most important thing I learned at this week’s SiriusDecisions Roundtable in Portland was not something Jonathon Block or Jay Gaines shared, and it wasn’t from a conversation with another attendee. It was the silence of Twitter. 

Mind you, this was an event about social media and website optimization. Half of the content was focused on how to use social media throughout the sales cycle and the increase in demand this drives.

Twitter IS Social

This morning, eConsultancy posted Twitter isn’t very social: study, a review of recent research from Yahoo, taking the position that Twitter is not a social network. In fact, they question if Twitter is more of a broadcast medium than a social medium.

The statistic circulating through Twitter (by the way, being shared between connections on Twitter, but I won’t belabor the point) is that 50% of all content consumed on Twitter is generated by only 20,000 users. The elite, the top 0.05% of twitter users, create 50% of all content consumed on Twitter. Sound impressive? It’s not.

Part One: Marketing Measurement and Pissing People Off

You know the line “you manage what you measure”. So do you consider what matters but is not measured? As digital marketers, we tend to measure the positives. Even negative measurements are rarely negative, they are just small positive measurements — low response rates or conversion rates.

Over the last 10 to 12 years, a number of online tactics have come and gone. A few of these delivered great results on paper, blinding marketers to the negative impacts that were not measured. Here are three activities which such negative impact that people fought back, outright disabling marketing tactics.

Email List Rental: Approach with Caution

The email list rental business is suffering, and no wonder. EmailExpert posted “We WILL Share Your Email Address” a few weeks ago, after receiving an email from Kodak, modifying the original permission received and notifying recipients that Kodak will begin sharing email addresses with other Kodak companies.

I was floored when I first read this. Kodak had a complete disregard for its relationship with the customer. Unfortunately, I understood how they landed there. Email is probably one of the most cost-effective channels for Kodak, and this allowed Kodak to quickly expand its email marketing. While all major marketers should understand email today, email is Kodak’s marketing, not their core business.

A few days ago, I was shocked to find, in my spam folder, a similar email