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Key findings from a recent January 09,  HubSpot survey on Inbound Marketing found Small businesses are most aggressively allocating lead generation budgets to blogging, social media and search engine optimization.

“Realizing that inbound marketing techniques ‘level the playing field’ with the bigger budgets of larger competitors, small businesses are spending a 180% greater portion of their budgets on blogging/social media and 36% greater portion of their budgets on search engine optimization than businesses with 50 employees or more.”

SMB Lead Generation Budget Spend

Online techniques allow for cost efficiencies to compete against much larger marketing budgets. But why?

“Outbound marketing customer acquisition depends largely on the size of a company’s budget, whereas inbound marketing more heavily slants towards those businesses with the best products and services and ability to create great content.”

In the HubSpot survey they found, small businesses reported spending nearly 3X higher percentage of their lead generation budget on blogs and social media than medium-to-large businesses (14% and 5%, respectively).

On the lead generation side, small businesses spending more than 50% on inbound marketing reported a lower cost per lead, compared with medium and larger business.

What does this tell us?

If you haven’t already allocated budgets to online lead generation campaigns it is not too late to take advantage.

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When preparing your new promotion or email creative a good way to achieve success is to run several rounds of tests. Running tests before picking the winner can have a profound impact on your bottom line. In the coming weeks we will discuss more about the concepts of A/B split tests, and how to measure their results.

In the following two examples you can see two variations of the same advertisement concept for a hair coloring product. Which one would you have picked to run with?

Example 1: Model is looking at the reader

Example 2: Model is looking at the product

Example imagery from Bunnyfoot

Focus group’s findings:
“Changing where the model looks changes consumer behavior. In the advert where the model looked at the product (instead of out of the page) consumers spent a proportionately longer time looking at the product name than the strap line. For this ‘cued’ advert subsequent recall tests showed that the product name was also more frequently remembered.”

What does this tell us?

There is an old cliché that says “looks can be deceiving”, but in the above two examples the advertisement looks almost the same with a slight variation on the direction in which the model is looking. But based on the heat map visualization it is very apparent (indicated by the red color concentration) how the focus group participants eyes looked at that ad. Concentrating on the product shot in that ad would have caused more people to notice the product, instead of the pretty face in the background.

A lot of marketers would not have spent the time to consider the differences in these two examples and would have picked one over the other subjectively. However this example does emphasize the importance of testing and not merely relying on instinct.

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