Where Should You Spend Your Lead Generation Budget in 2012?

Where to spend your marketing dollars is becoming more and more confusing for many businesses. Traditional channels like advertising, cold calling and direct mail are yielding fewer quality leads, which means the cost per lead is increasing. With new marketing opportunities opening up with the internet and social media, the confusion on where to spend marketing budgets increases.

The fact is you can't avoid the statistics that surround internet and social media usage.

One third of the worlds population is on the internet.
4 billion searches per day
800+ million users on Facebook
8 new people come onto the internet every day
Social media usage continues to increase with every age group
150 million are registered on LinkedIn

I recently read a blog article from MarketingSherpa where they asked nearly 2,000 marketing professionals where they were planning to spend their lead generation funds in 2012.

According to the study, the tactics that will receive the greatest increases in budget for 2012 include: website optimisation, social media and SEO. And the tactics receiving the lowest increases are all outbound marketing including; print advertising, tradeshows and direct mail.

This is no surprise to someone who has been sounding the Inbound Marketing trumpet for years now - but it's certainly comforting to hear that other marketers are seeing the results themselves and obviously planning on increasing budgets in areas they have seen results.

lead generation budgets

Click here to read MarketingSherpa's article on their research.

Helping companies to leverage inbound marketing tactics like: website optimisation, search and social media to increase leads and customers is what we do. It's more than just taking your old marketing message across to the new channels, to be successful you really need to be consumer focused. Companies that make the switch to consumer centric, permission based marketing aka Inbound Marketing are seeing outstanding results.

This research highlights the growing trend where marketers, your competition, are spending their lead generation budgets this year. If you would like to learn how to get started with an inbound marketing plan that will help you achieve your revenue goals this year book in a free marketing assessment.