Fishing for leads

I was recently asked a great question at a business networking event: When planning your marketing efforts, should you cast a wide net to find lots of leads, or a narrow net to find highly qualified leads?

Oddly enough, I was (and the operative word is ‘was’) a huge proponent of “spray and pray” marketing. This strategy called for casting as wide a net as possible to catch many fish and then sift thru the fish throwing away most of the trash until you find the “good” lead. The strategy has played out well for the past 20 years – though the method by which we caught fish has certainly evolved.

At the beginning of my career, we used cold calling for almost all marketing initiatives. Sprinkled in were direct mail pieces (anyone remember those) that helped pave the way for cold callers to follow up with the targeted lists. Tradeshows and specifically niche tradeshows help narrow the audience somewhat. Emailing marketing and PPC campaigns again called for broad coverage of the marketing message to drive respondents to web landing pages and then sorted by quality of lead passing only the warm leads over the sales team.

The issue of course is that in 2008 no one returns calls from people they don’t know. No one reads direct mail. Customers hardly attend tradeshows. Spam filters and junk mail boxes store all the email marketing campaigns. Even PPC campaigns have gotten out of control. VOIP has a PPC cost on Google of $4.71. The cost then based on a 3% conversion of Google would be $157 for a qualified lead. With a 1% conversion (more likely) the cost is $471. It is easy to see how $20 billion is being spent on online marketing.

Let’s take a lesson from an unlikely teacher – cyber criminals. Botnets were originally cast among millions of users. The results were excellent at first causing electronic catastrophes such as Michelangelo and the I Love You virus. But no one other than the virus companies really benefited from these wide botnets. In recent years however, the cyber criminals have turned their attention to targeted attacks. Rather than a wide net they are sending hundreds of emails to a specific target in the hopes of a few emails getting thru and converting to a botnet. These localized botnets are extremely valuable and the spammers are generating huge revenues in these attacks from identity theft, corporate espionage and spam networks.

Using this as an example the ideal way to execute your marketing program would be to (a) get extremely detailed and specific exactly who and what is your target (b) what your ideal success would look like in terms of a deal (c) what you are willing to spend to generate that lead and (d) how many of those qualified leads are you looking to generate. The cyber criminals are successful and will continue to be successful not only because they are diligent in targeting their prey but moreover they are constantly trying out new ways to drive the success rates of their campaigns.

Recruiters tend to use a similar targeting approach when searching for a specific candidate. They get extremely detailed on the characteristics of the ideal candidate, the background, experience, accomplishments and of course compensation. They then target those individuals in their network that meet those criteria. Professional networks have now added a layer to recruiters providing them a more automated way to get the word out about the job opportunity as they seek not only the candidate but anyone who might know a potential candidate. I certainly wouldn’t appreciate a recruiter who asked me if I would be interested in a position that is clear not for me.

Marketers should take the same thoroughness in mapping out who their target prospect should be and utilize the tools available to seek out those individuals.

The tools that I would recommend are;

1. PPC optimization tools such as clickable (www.clickable.com) to get the most out of your PPC campaigns.
2. Professional network tools such as LinkedIn to help search for the "right" person in your network.
3. Pay per post blogging sites like payperpost.com to drive specific "buzz" to your targeted audience.
4. Professional niche networks such as Biznik and Fastpitch that make it easy to post promotions on your company to targeted folks
5. Business networking marketplace such as Salesconx (www.salesconx.com) - sorry for the self promotion.