If you’re marketing a technology product or service, MarketingSherpa just released a report that can help you generate more leads.

Sherpa researchers asked 1,900 business technology marketers about their offers, marketing budgets, sales process and promotional tactics.  They also asked 633 business execs about their technology buying decisions and their recommendations for reaching them effectively.

This graph shows the results from one of their questions.  They asked marketers to identify the most effective lead generation offers, then broke out their responses by product type.  Here’s what they found:

Service companies: Most effective lead generation techniques

1.  Blog
TIE   Webcast / webinar
3.  White paper

Software & ASPs: Most effective techniques

1.  Free trial / demo
2.  Webcast / webinar
3.  White paper
TIE   Blog

Hardware companies: Most effective techniques

1.  White paper
2.  Webcast / webinar
3.  Free trial / demo

In her summary, Sherpa president Anne Holland points out the growing popularity of blogs but warns marketers to consider their customers carefully.  At this time, blogs are most popular with other writers, the media and general business executives, not the IT or engineering department.

Unfortunately the article summary page is showing a database error message as I write this post.  They offer a PDF summary here, and you can purchase the full report here.

They’re also offering a free teleseminar to go over this report on Thursday August 10 – here’s the signup form.