COMMENTS
Thanks for the statistics! For some reason I would expect paid versus organic leads to convert at a higher rate. After talking with many clients and colleagues it seems most everyone I talk to click the ppc when ready to buy. I'm liking the social media conv rates. I would love to know what percentage is B2B vs B2C of the companies you researched. Thank you again HubSpot for the great info!! I am a partner of HubSpot and appreciate all the great info. Check us out
www.artificialmarketing.com.
It shouldn't come as a big suprise that social marketig would out perform SEO or referral traffic. Social targeting is extremely granular and can be highly targeted to the users intent in interest. Combine that with the naturally credible community and you have a winning combo for high intent traffic.
The Bigger question is what were the overall conversion rates and did anyone test the landing or was this all a cross your fingers thing.
Just guessing I thought that social media would perform better than organic seo traffic and direct navigation. This is interesting.
As a build on the B2B vs B2C comments, I'd also be interested in the composition of social media leads by channel.
I personally like social and viral marketing better than SEO and PPC.
I think you get results faster this way as opposed to the other methods, plus you save time and money.
I think it really depends on the case to case bases.
Social Media and E-mail Marketing are too general terms to be used in such a benchmarking. One could have extremely targeted mailing list for a certain product and off course, CR will be high. In another situation, one would have 10 times bigger mailing list with less targeted users and have lower CR but still earn much more money in the bottom line.
I must agree that the idea that social would perform better than organic is not surprising to me. Like Larry, I am more interested in the quality of the landing pages used. Was it social media's targeting or landing page optimization that caused social to convert better?
Great statistics ! It would be nice to know, of these same customers, what percentage of their budget is spent on each method -- where the budget percentage includes the cost of employees engaged in Social Media, email, etc. The problem with the stats is that we don't know whether 80% of their budget was spent on paid advertising, so we can't determine which method is the most cost effective.
I’m not sure that a silo view of lead generation..paid, e-mail, social, mobile … is the only approach. I’m working with advanced/emerging platforms that weave these approaches together in a combined approach to drive conversion rate. Here is the logic.
• E-mail is the logical starting point to engage
• E-mail with an interactive component is the logical starting point to venture into a collaborative (social-like) dialog
• E-mail is the delivery protocol to opt-in and deliver connection solutions (i.e browser extensions, mobile downloads)
Think of it as a "suspension bridge" approach to carrying lead generation from e-mail to mobile and t o establish a marketing campaigns in context … using context aware platforms
For e-mail marketing companies that are struggling with social this is the ideal approach to evolve
another great way to look at this is analyzing backlinks of blogs and social profiles of competitors that are converting their users to leads. This helps you understand where they're getting their traffic and why they are converting. I did a little post on how to set up a custom google search so anyone can do this http://www.elliottlemenager.com/2010/10/06/detecting-influencers-backlinks-and-how-to-leverage-them-through-social-media/ love to get your thoughts on this.
Elliott