By Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content, MECLABS, and Brad Bortone, Senior Research Editor, MECLABS

Over the years, the MarketingSherpa Chart of the Week has served as a way to share interesting, revealing, and often surprising marketing industry data with our audience. However, as we work to optimize and improve our offerings, we realize our analysis was missing one key element -- the insights of the very marketers we aim to serve with our research.

Moving forward, the Chart of the Week will still provide the same quality data marketers rely on to make informed decisions. Only now, we want to hear your interpretation of our findings.

Share your top tips, tactics and advice based upon this marketing industry data on the MarketingSherpa LinkedIn discussion board, for a chance to be featured in a future blog post. Include your feedback as either a comment or a link to a blog post where you offer advice based on this data.

Here’s a direct look at the data in the chart, followed by a few questions I think you should consider based on analysis of the raw data by Bob Kemper, Director of Sciences, MECLABS.

If you’d like to share your answers to these questions based on your marketing experience, please use the link to our discussion board above.

Chart: Use of lead generation tactics

Q. Which of the following lead generation tactics does your organization currently use?

Click here to see a larger, printable version of this chart

Points to consider

All numbers tell a story. So, as you review the above information, keep these questions in mind as you seek to use this data to improve your own marketing campaigns.

Is website optimization a channel or a tactic?

In the design of this survey, we handled "Website optimization, management or design" as a parallel channel to email marketing and search engine optimization.

When deciding where to invest your lead generation budget, do you view website optimization as a channel-based tactic, or more of a marketing practice similar to personalization or usability? And how does this distinction affect how you allocate your budget and resources?

Has social media arrived as an effective, established tactic?

"In particular, that 18% more respondents and fully 24% more respondents report that they are employing social media than are using the time-honored content marketing and paid search (PPC) channels, respectively, seems remarkable to me," said Bob Kemper, Director of Sciences, MECLABS.

In the 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, the allocation of budgets for social media was squarely in the middle of the pack (and for the manufactured and packaged goods industry, toward the bottom).

Has social media grown in the seven quickly evolving months between when we fielded these two surveys? Or, is the presence of consumer marketers who practice lead generation impacting the higher placement of social media on this chart?

Should mass media be on this chart?

In conducting any research, there are necessary choices to be made to focus the research and not overwhelm the subjects of the research. What is left off the data is almost as important as what is included.

In this case, we did not include broadcast and other mass media (for example television, radio, billboards). Were we right in omitting mass media? Or, do you frequently use mass media for lead generation?

What are your thoughts on these questions? What are we overlooking in the data? Share your own analysis for a change to be published in a future blog post.

And, for more information about lead generation tactics, be sure to download the free excerpt from the 2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report.

Useful links related to this research

B2B Lead Generation: 6 social media tactics from 7 experts

Local Business Marketing: Social media is the new bare minimum to sell to Generation Y

Social Media Platform Selection: Keep your eye on the bigger picture