Online Lead Gen Statistics
Lead generation helps your business to attract the interest of your target audience in your product or service. Lead generation is a key goal for many marketers and with the constant evolution of digital marketing, it is becoming increasingly difficult for businesses to generate high quality leads. Content production, newsletters, social media and other marketing channels are the key ways to capture the attention of prospective customers, so it’s important to keep up to date with the latest facts and statistics on lead generation.
How will marketers generate leads in 2023?
In this article, we’ll look at the latest lead generation statistics and benchmarks to help you stay ahead of the competition in generating leads and converting them into customers. These statistics show where lead generation is at, how it’s changing and highlight some new trends we need to be aware of.
Lead gen statistics
- Companies with a deliberate lead generation strategy achieved 174% better results against their plan than those without (Intellistart,2021)
- 61% of marketers see lead generation as the number one challenge in 2023 (HubSpot)
- 85% of B2B companies say lead generation is the top marketing goal in 2023 (Content Marketing Institute)
- 80% of marketers believe marketing automation will generate more leads (APSIS)
- 53% of marketers spend at least half of their budget on lead generation (Authority Website Income)
- 43% of B2B marketers strongly agree that digital marketing’s share of the marketing budget will continue to grow. In addition, 51% strongly agree that they will focus on lead quality rather than quantity (Activate, 2021).
- Outsourcing lead generation yields 43% better results than managing it in-house (Fearless Competitor)
- According to statistics published by APSIS, around 78% of businesses use email marketing as their first choice when it comes to lead generation.
- The majority of medium and large businesses generate less than 5,000 qualified leads per month (Hubspot)
- On average, companies generate 1,877 leads per month.
- Leads are 9x more likely to convert if we respond to inbound inquiries within 5 minutes – we contact our prospective customer in some way.
- 44% of salespeople are too busy to contact leads in a timely manner.
- 97% of people ignore cold calls.
- According to HubSpot’s State of Marketing report, only 18% of marketers felt that outbound (TV, Radio, Print Ads) lead generation methods provide valuable leads.
- According to APSIS, using marketing automation software can increase the number of qualified leads you generate by up to 451%.
- According to Marketing Insider Group, the average cost of a B2B sales lead is between $31 and $60. The amount per lead depends on the industry your business is in. For example, technology businesses may pay less for leads, while healthcare businesses can pay up to $60 per lead.
- Almost 60% of B2B businesses said SEO has the biggest impact on lead generation (Marketing Charts)
- 68% of B2B businesses have strategic landing pages specifically for lead generation. Good lead generation landing pages rank high on Google and are optimised for conversion (Startup Bonsai)
- According to Marketing Sherpa, only 56% of B2B businesses check leads before handing them over to the sales team.
- 56% of marketers say the key to B2B email success is persuasive content at every stage of the buying process (Authority Website Income)
- 49% of marketers say offering downloadable content in lead generation emails is an effective tactic (Authority Website Income)
Lead generation with social media
Today, the number of social media platforms is growing at a rapid pace. With 4.65 billion active social media users worldwide, marketers are increasingly relying on social media for lead generation. A few years ago, it was enough to focus on Facebook and YouTube, but nowadays, for some brands, Tweets or Instagram are unmissable. In this abundance, which online marketing channel should we choose?
- Monthly Google searches for “social media marketing” have increased by 92% in the last 5 years.
- Social Media Examiner’s 2022 report is based on a survey of more than 2,000 social media marketers.
- When asked what they would most like to learn about, 25% of social media marketers answered “lead generation”. The only area of learning that came ahead of lead generation was “increasing sales”.
- Facebook has over 2.89 billion monthly active users, while YouTube has 2.29 billion (Data Reportal, 2021).
- 66% of marketers generate leads from social media after spending just six hours a week on social marketing (Social Media Examiner)
- LinkedIn is the most effective social media channel for B2B lead generation
- 80% of B2B leads come from LinkedIn (Oktopost)
- 97% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for content marketing (Everyonesocial, 2021)
- 68% of marketers say social media marketing has helped them generate more leads.
- TikTok has conquered the social world at lightning speed, while only 18% of marketers are still using TikTok.
- Overall brand interaction on TikTok has increased from 15% to 25% since 2020 (Martech Series, 2021)
- 45% of Gen Zs said they are most likely to interact or follow brands on TikTok. This figure was 33% in 2020. (Martech Series, 2021)
- Google searches for “tikTok ads” have increased by 9,200% in the last 5 years.
- 74% of social media users want to see 1-2 posts per day from brands they follow (Sprout Social).
- According to Marketing Charts, 21% of businesses said social media has the biggest impact on their lead generation efforts.
Lead generation with content marketing
The goal of content marketing is to drive as much traffic to the top of your sales funnel as possible. This is one of the most important new “inbound marketing channels”. Here are some interesting statistics on how content marketing is successfully used in lead generation.
- Content marketing generates 3x as many leads as “outbound marketing” (TV, Radio, Print ads), while costing 62% less. (Demand Metric)
- 91% of B2B marketers and 86% of B2C marketers use content marketing to reach potential customers. (Writer’s Block Live, 2021)
- Those who also use blogs to generate leads are 13 times more likely to generate a positive ROI. (Source: Hubspot)
- Effective blog titles generate 500% more traffic. (Source: Wired)
- 36% of the 1,500 content marketers surveyed in Semrush’s 2022 State of Content Marketing report cited lead generation as their main marketing goal. Ahead of lead generation was increasing brand awareness (45%) and increasing website traffic. (37%).
- Getting quality leads is the biggest challenge for content marketers. (Semrush)
- 54% of content marketers believe that content designed to generate awareness and interest early in the buyer journey provides the greatest overall value. (CMI)
- Podcasts, blog posts and videos are the top three content types for generating awareness and demand.(CMI).
- According to Marketo, companies with their own blog generate 67% more leads than those without a blog.
- 69% of consumers choose the video format to find out what a brand has to offer. (Wyzowl, 2021)
- 94% of marketers agree that video has helped customers understand their product or service. (Hubspot, 2021)
Lead Nurturing and conversion statistics
Getting and qualifying leads is one of the most important goals of marketing. But this is only the first part of the job. Hard-to-get leads need to be nurtured continuously to move them from ‘interest’ to ‘purchase’. Let’s see the statistics on this.
- 84% of marketers use forms to convert. (Ruler Analytics).
- Just over half (50.3%) of marketers use phone calls to convert and just under a third (33.2%) use live chat.
- 41% of companies struggle to quickly contact leads = follow up, especially when leads come in after normal business hours. (Verse)
- Automated lead management solutions are readily available, but only 25% of sales teams use them.
- Poor lead quality is the main complaint among sales teams managing inbound leads. (Verse)
- 44% of sales reps complain about lead quality, 39% complain about the willingness to buy and 37% complain about the inability to contact leads. (Verse)
Our own experience with lead generating websites
- More than 40% of marketers believe that the biggest barrier to lead generation is a lack of resources, budget and expertise, which is why they contacted us.
At least ¼ of WebMa’s new partners struggle to calculate conversion rates.
Conversion rates are often elusive, especially when running multi-channel lead generation campaigns. It’s not always easy to calculate exactly where the leads are coming from and which leads will become the final customers.
Determining accurate conversion rates requires a lot of analysis and data, and WebMa uses a variety of marketing analytics and automation tools to do this. This way, we can provide our clients with accurate reports on the success of their campaigns. - More than half of the B2B businesses that contacted us had not properly defined their sales funnel, not knowing exactly what path their customers had taken to the final purchase. In our strategic partnerships, we focus on understanding this customer journey and creating the most optimal mix of lead generation tools available to us.
To conclude
Whether B2B or B2C, the key to growth and success for any business is generating new leads. This is a challenge for any marketer and an essential part of any marketing strategy. You need to know your customers, their buying journey and their sales funnel in order to make the best use of the lead generation tools at your disposal. We also need to have a sound strategy and the professional partners to achieve our goals if we do not have the resources in-house.
If you feel that you need professional help to plan your online lead generation process, you are struggling to get the right quantity and quality of enquiries, you want to have your lead generation website or landing page audited, you need a specialist to design and implement your digital lead generation campaigns, you can turn to the WebMa team with confidence.
If you need professional support for your digital marketing activities, do not hesitate to contact us!
Sources:
- Content Marketing Institute
- Demand Metric
- Marketo
- Marketing Charts
- Marketing Insider Group
- Marketing Sherpa
- Oktopost
- Social Media Examiner
- Startup Bonsai
- Hubspot
- Everyonesocial
- Influitive
- Litmus
- Wyzowl