Study: Company Blogs Lead Social Media Options

Blogs and social media, however, made up 10% of spending on lead-generation efforts, suggesting a lower return on investment than SEO — which was 12% of spending but led to 16% of leads, and email campaigns, which produced 14% of leads while accounting for 10% of marketing budgets.

Among other key findings, The HubSpot study also found that "inbound" marketing efforts — including blogging, social media, SEO and pay-per-click — had lower costs per-sales than "outbound" channels such as direct mail, telemarketing and trade shows.