The online space continues to provide businesses a needed boost as we slog through this economy. Of course, in case you didn't know, the recession ended last year. I don't know about you but I missed that event. At any rate, businesses must continue to work through this and in the B2C space online lead generation has been key. Whether you are on the client (corporate), agency or publisher side of this valuable business activity this is a critical component for overall business success.
Econsultancy and Clash Media have released a report that shows just how that impact has happened. The chart below suggests that publishers are seeing success.
As with any online lead generation (or just lead generation in general) what is most important is the conversion. One surprising chart I pulled from the report shows that while online lead generation is important it may be understood a little better than just a few years back thus making expectations a little more in line with reality. This comes from the agency side.
From 2007-2010 the intentionality of the offline conversion of these leads has actually decreased a bit. Of course, this is from the agency side of the ledger so the polly-annish projections of several years ago are now being pushed more in line with reality. Agencies over-estimating success? I would have never guessed .
To back that up a bit the optimism remains when talking about corporate groups doing their own online lead gen. They just see it without "agency colored glasses".
Some other key findings include:
- The number of companies who say that online lead generation budgets have gone up in the last year has increased from 59% last year to 65% this year. This compares to 31% of respondents who say that offline lead generation budgets have increased.
- More than a third (38%) of companies surveyed are now spending at least £100,000 annually on online lead generation. Last year, only 21% of companies surveyed said they were spending this amount or more.
- The overwhelming majority of responding companies (86%) expect online lead generation (OLG) to become "more important" for their companies over the next 12 months. None of the advertisers surveyed say it will become "less important".
There is a lot more to this report which I don't have the space to cover but suffice it say that online lead generation from the corporate (client side), agency and publisher viewpoints is poised for even more growth for the foreseeable future.