Enjoyed this post from Clement. Nailed something I’ve been harping on about for the past few years – no one lead gen model is right. Test rigorously and correlate to revenue. Different businesses perform differently.
What is crucial in assessing marketing performance – and I’d argue this could be true for nearly any industry – not just tech and SaaS – is that Organic direct matters most. Put all the effort into making that work first. As Clement points out, the reason is simple – the best performing brands put viral and word of mouth to work in driving extraordinary performance from Organic direct.
“When you look at the 3 profiles above you notice that the channel from where most of the leads seems to come is the “organic — direct” channel…. The reason is that most of the fastest growing SaaS interviewed had a viral coefficient k well above 0.”
The great marketers I’m seeing embrace efficiency as a cornerstone marketing metric. They are focused on building a marketing platform – or loop – by which scale and speed are accelerated by the market independent of and at a multiple of spend. Rather than a myopic focus on marketing attribution in one channel or part of the business, they are focused on the total performance and efficiency of the platform. They are building Growth Loops!
So, lead generation models important subsets of the marketing model in total. Focus not just on organic generation (you’d better be great at it though) but also on creating a marketing platform that fuels and fires on its own.
