B2B event lead generation is an essential component of event marketing. Many event business leaders and marketers allow their campaigns to be killed too early or dismiss future ones outright simply because “the leads the campaign is generating are crap”.

The goal here is to explain that on any normal lead generation campaign, around 66% of the leads  generated will not be good or even relevant at all. So if only 33% of the total leads generated are good then you're not doing bad at all -  you are well within the benchmark.

So what is deemed as a good or bad response from a lead generation campaign?

Here are the top take aways from the video with some good examples:

1. When you look at your website visits and the number of new contacts generated, you are looking at a rate of 1%-3% conversion rate as a general benchmark 

2. Only 1/3 of the leads that you will generate on any campaign are relevant or "good"

3. 2/3 of the leads that you will generate are not relevant (or what someone would call "crap")

So if the majority of your leads are not great, it is not necessarily the fact that your campaign is failing. You could well be within the benchmark, and you need to ensure you factor this in.

4. Good leads will need to be split further once they are passed to your sales teams or your client

With this example we can clearly see that out of a lead generation campaign that ultimately aims to drive sales for your business or your sponsor, you will need to place a tremendous amount of outreach, marketing effort and money to drive good proper leads.

It's part and parcel of the state of lead generation at the moment.

5. Here are some lead generation stats from the web worth a closer eye.

Source: HubSpot

Source Kissmetrics

So what can we do with all this information?

If you know the benchmarks and expected results from your lead generation campaigns you will be in a very good place to assess:

• How long you need to run a lead generation campaign for
• What are the likely outcomes from your lead generation campaigns
• Set the right KPIs and work towards actual numbers - as they say begin with the end in mind
• Understand how much marketing effort and advertising spend you need
• If you will need some additional help, with sales follow up to enhance and validate the quality of the leads 

Bear in mind, the quality of the content and the type of content (top, middle or bottom of the funnel) will have an influence on the conversion rates too.

Content marketing is a marathon not a race, so you will need to run various lead generation campaigns before you make a quick judgement on whether your campaigns work or not, or indeed whether your marketing partner works or not.