Friday, February 26, 2010

Leads for Less with Social Media

The below article from eMarketer reports on HubSpot's most recent research report that finds social media, blogs and search engine optimization more cost-effective for lead gen. Interesting is that this is one of the first studies that show that "for business-to-business firms, LinkedIn was most effective for customer acquisition."

Here is the article release earlier this week...

Pull marketing tactics such as search, blog and social media generate cheaper leads than more traditional outbound efforts, according to data from inbound online marketing platform HubSpot.

The “2010 State of Inbound Marketing” report indicates that spending on lead generation is 60% less among companies that devote at least one-half of their budget to inbound marketing, compared with companies spending at least one-half of lead generation dollars on outbound tactics. The average cost per lead from inbound marketing was also significantly less.

Unsurprisingly, for business-to-business firms, LinkedIn was most effective for customer acquisition. Business-to-consumer companies did better on each of the other sites, with the best results coming from Facebook, where nearly seven in 10 had found a new customer.

Read the full article out at: http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007534
Source: emarketer.com