Sirius Decisions’ latest newsletter included some interesting stats re: perceived effectiveness of lead gen tactics.
I remember a Forrester paper ‘B2B marketing needs a makeover -now’ that reported on the popularity of live events in the B2B mix. This is the exec summary: “Business marketers cling to marketing tactics that they admit fail to work as well as they would like. It’s time to leave these outmoded methods behind, embrace interactive media, address prospects directly, and measure the impact of marketing on revenue and market share. By moving their marketing online, business-to-business (B2B) marketers will evolve from tactical demand generation to strategic ownership of the customer relationship, and they will regain their rightful place as the corporate head of customer experience, knowledge, and influence.”
Somewhere in that paper it was mentioned that one of the most popular B2B lead gen tactics still were live (read: offline) events. The paper was released in August 2006. The Sirius email landed in my inbox last week.
It seems that B2B marketers are picking up the thread!
However don’t get fooled by the tactical discussion about whether webcasts are replacing live events. That’s not my point. As you know we see a tactic (we call it mode) just as bait to enable a conversation with a targeted audience. Making that conversation happen in an online environment enables you to track all the relevant lead gen meta data. And that’s is what it is all about. A 5M optimized webcast is a great way to reach out to an unqualified audience. However, IMHO physical events have an important quality that can never be replaced by online events, and that’s the f2f (face to face) dimension. However f2f conversations don’t scale and are expensive. In other words it’s something that only should happen if you already have somehow qualified your contact….you don’t want to waste each other time and money…
Seems like that message is getting across…
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