A new category of LeadGen Tools materializes

In our research on LeadGen Tools, collaborative and dialog marketing tools made a prominent showing with email marketing, blogging and web conferencing tools leading the way.

Although our research was not scientific in a statistical sense, it does illustrate a trend of B2B marketers to deploy more ‘engaging’ tools. In a consumer-driven world, this only makes sense.

I suspect that these tools, as well as the Web 2.0 tools (e.g. blogging, wikis and social networking) will coalesce to form a new category of tools available to the B2B marketer. Let’s call these tools, LeadCom Tools, a name appropriate given the tools’ positioning between MarCom and Direct Marketing.

Unlike traditional direct marketing such as direct mail or telesales, the linkage to revenue is not as strong for LeadCom tools. And unlike mass media or MarCom options, LeadCom Tools do not amplify the message to the same extent as traditional MarCom but share some of the broadcast quality but to a narrower audience.

Taking the best from both ends of the spectrum, LeadCom tools are measurable, by level of engagement and scalable to niche audiences.

One of the most promising segments for LeadCom are nurture leads who expect a higher level of engagement with more relevant content balanced by a low-cost content delivery model.

As adoption of Web 2.0 tools increase, the use of these tools for LeadCom will be a very encouraging development.