Multi-channel marketers have many channels to reach potential customers — but few have the budget to use all of them for every message.  So what’s the single best source of qualified leads?  According to a survey from Hearst Business Media Electronics Group and Goldstein Group Communications, it’s search engine marketing.  You can see the complete survey here, but we’ve excerpted one table below. 

With the company’s website and search engines as the two primary sources of qualified leads, the message for marketers is clear:  focus on the essentials of search engine marketing.  And that means measuring, monitoring, and understanding how prospective customers interact with your brand and your company online.  Marketing managers know what the numbers look like – and which ones they’re supposed to track.  But making sense of the numbers is harder than it seems.

What’s the value of a click? Why does time of day matter in email and social media marketing? How do I know what platform my website visitors are using (mobile, which browser, etc.)? How can I create landing pages and microsites that help with conversions? How do I know the source of website visits – and how to improve conversion from blog and social media traffic? How do I take the data that I have access to and turn it into actionable information that matters — to me as a marketer and to top management?

If you’re among the marketers struggling with questions like these, we have a webinar just for you.  Mastering the multi-channel maze:  How Google Analytics and real-time marketing metrics can optimize multi-channel marketing.  The webinar, on Wednesday, October 26 at 11 a.m. Central (Noon Eastern, 9 a.m. Pacific), features Deb McAlister-Holland, editor of the Distributed Marketing Blog and a 25-year veteran of mult-channel marketing and Tyson Kirksey, director of analytics & search marketing at Vertical Nerve.   You can download the complete presentation for the webinar and view the recorded webinar by clicking here.