MarketingProfs, a leading online marketing research organization, conducted a survey with over 5000 professionals regarding the usage of Social Media by B2B and B2C companies. The State of Social Media Survey results seems to show that the social media is beneficial to marketers and will help silence the skeptics.

Here is the summary of the survey results:

• 81% of businesses surveyed gained positive exposure
• 61% increased their online traffic or subscribers
• 56% created new business partnerships
• 52% boosted search rankings

This is a comprehensive report with over 240 pages containing detailed charts and statistics. Note that this is a paid report, but may be worth the money for those who are into social media as a marketing platform. If you are a lead generation /distribution agency or demand generation consulting service provider, the report contents would be a great addition to your knowledge base.

We have touched upon the importance of lead quality in lead generation (or internet demand generation) in earlier posts. This post summarizes 10 ways to improve the lead quality in your lead generation campaigns. These principles can be used for both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) lead generation and distribution strategies.

1. Gather only the minimum information required on the landing page forms. Adding more (optional) fields will result in junk data and reduce the lead quality.
2. Validate required fields as well as optional fields for format and content. Email address and numeric data should be 100% validated. Even text fields should be validated for length and patterns.
3. Validate phone number and Area code (using a reference database). There is no meaning in validating these fields after getting the leads. The validation should be performed in the front end.
4. Validate geographic information such as country, state, county, and zip codes. Make sure that the validations are appropriate. If you are collecting Mortgage leads or Insurance leads, there is no meaning in providing a country drop down with 150 countries of the world! Provide a drop down with State names for US only. If you are collecting Business Opportunity (Biz Op) leads in US and Canada, let the state drop down display both US and Canadian states.
5. Validate the city against IP address of the user. Please note that this not a foolproof method and hence this could be used to score the quality of the lead.
6. Validate physical address, if collected in the sign-up form. Again, online validation is preferred.
7. Distribute leads based on suitable filters. If you are distributing leads to multiple lead buyers, multiple filter sets can be used to deliver required leads depending on the customer requirements.
8. Choose one or more suitable lead delivery methods. While email is the most widely used delivery method, there are other reliable methods for lead delivery and distribution. Email, API, Direct Application Access and Fax methods can be used in combination based on the client’s business.
9. Employ right lead generation methods. Avoiding methods such as forced pop-ups, providing incentives to the user, etc. can greatly improve the lead quality.
10. De-dupe leads after capture in the lead distribution system. Since users may be submitting the registration forms from more than one site on the internet, de-duping the leads will help improve the client satisfaction. If you are using affiliates and multiple sources, this is an important step prior to lead distribution.

Even if you are outsourcing lead generation and landing page design to third party service providers, make sure that these principles are adhered to. Employing simple, template based landing pages may not address these requirements.