The Science of Marketing: When to Tweet, What to Post, How to Blog, and Other Proven Strategies

Chapter 9

Lead Generation

I’ve spent the past four years working at a business-to-business (B2B) software company. Our marketing team’s bottom line is the number of leads and subsequently sales we drive. Naturally, one of the largest chunks of research I’ve done is into the science of lead generation—how to get more people to fill out more lead forms. If you’re a B2B marketer reading this chapter, awesome; I’ve got some data that I hope will make your job easier.

But, if you’re not focused on lead generation, perhaps you work for an e-commerce site or a subscription-based magazine; this chapter will still have some useful jewels for you. We all want more e-mail subscribers, and an e-mail subscription form is essentially a very short lead form. This chapter will help you convert more viewers into subscribers. You’ll also read data about optimizing buttons (like your checkout button) to make them more clickable.

I know the phrase lead generation can make some eyes gloss over, but stick with this chapter for a while and I think you’ll be surprised.

At HubSpot, many of our customers are focused on lead generation, which means that I get access to all sorts of data about lead generation that is nearly impossible to get from any other source. When I started digging into the mountains of information, the first thing I looked at was the performance, based on visit-to-lead conversion rates, of traffic coming from various sources to our customers’ websites.

At first, the data in Figure 9.1 ...