Top Marketing Tools
When asked, “Which offers are ‘very effective’ for generating high-quality leads?” marketers in all three areas studied - technology services firms, and business software and hardware - put Blog and the Podcast in the top five.
Top 5 Tools For Generating Sales Leads
1. Free Trials — Business software marketers ranked free trials extremely highly, with 54% calling trials very effective.
2. Webcast — At 41% this was another favorite for software marketers, however technology services and related hardware firms also ranked webinars at 33% and 31% respectively.
3. White paper — All business technology marketers rated white papers fairly evenly, giving white paper offers ratings ranging from 31-36% ‘very effective.’
4. Blog – 35% of software and ASP marketers rated their blog as very effective, as did 33% of technology services firms. However, just 19% of hardware companies felt that a corporate blog was effective. This may be because general business executives are more likely to read a blog, while IT staffers may not.
5. Podcast — Last year the concept of a podcast was barely on the technology marketing map. By June 2006, 22% of software marketers who’d given a podcast called them ‘very effective’ lead generation tools. Perhaps IT professionals are more likely to be in an early adopter community that might listen to a podcast.