Where Do Sales Leads Come From?

Whether you’re a front-line Internet marketer or just a fan of the movie, Glengarry, Glenn Ross, you know the value of good sales leads.
Even if you live and die by them, most of us have only a vague idea about where good sales leads come from. That’s why the data revealed in a recent Hubspot blog by Sara Davidson titled, Where Do Marketers Get Their Leads?, should be very interesting to casino affiliates.
Davidson’s findings compare a number of data points, including comparisons between B2B and B2C companies, and even includes some good news affiliates who wonder whether SEO is really all that.
Her findings were pulled from the 2013 State of Inbound Marketing Report and contain a treasure trove of marketing gold. Here are some highlights from her findings.
SEO Works
The most pertinent takeaway for casino affiliates from this data is that SEO techniques are pretty effective whether you’re marketing towards businesses or consumers. According to Davidson, SEO yields around 14% of leads for B2B companies and around 16% of the leads for B2C.
In the B2B sector, SEO is the top source of leads and is followed closely by e-mail marketing (13%) and social media site like Facebook and Twitter (12%).  For consumer oriented businesses, social media actually pulls in more leads at 17% and e-mail is a close third at 15%.
Not that it matters all that much for to the gambling industry, but PPC was the second worst source for in both business sectors bringing in just 6% of leads. Telemarketing was the worst for B2C with 3% while traditional advertising (presumably print ads) was the worst for B2B at 3%.
Though Davidson’s findings didn’t break out by geographic location, she did include one or two nuggets that should be particularly interesting to affiliates in the US and abroad.
According to the article, American businesses are now getting around 13% of all their business leads from SEO. SEO, as it turns out, is also a pretty good investment because those same companies are only spending around 10% of their marketing budgets on SEO.
There’s no word on how much countries outside the US are spending on SEO, but Davidson did find that they spend 9% of their budgets on PPC campaigns that only yield around 6% of their leads.
Of course getting good leads is only part of the battle. Once you know who your potential customers are, you’ll find that converting them is where the heavy lifting takes place.
Where do you get most of your leads from or, better yet, where do you get most of your good leads from? Share your tips in the comments section below.