All About Leads, Part 2
This newsletter gives a very brief overview of all the various forms of marketing that can help generate leads.
One of my favorite sayings is that marketing is like a toolkit. You select the right tools for the particular job. No one tool is superior in and of itself.
Email Marketing
Pros: Relatively cheap, easy to create and distribute. Good means of tracking (open rates, clicks, conversions).
Cons: Heavily dependent on the quality of the email list. Creating an in-house list takes a lot of time and attention.
Pay Per Click
Pros: Strong reporting features, precise control over targeting, control over budget, pay only for action taken, relevant ads.
Cons: Growing competition means much more expensive prices for clicks, so easy to set up that many companies might blow through their entire budget without knowing it, no budget means no ads.
Display Advertising
Pros: Broad reach, different display ad exchanges or networks can reach different audiences, relatively cheap to start, creativity with the graphics of the banners.
Cons: Very low clickthrough rate, most web surfers are conditioned to ignore banner ads.
Social Media
Pros: Can be started with no marketing dollars, easy to set up and implement, more two-way interaction with prospects, fun!
Cons: Hard to tie social media into conversions or sales (social media has one of the lowest sales conversion rates), requires frequent attention, potential for negative feedback from prospects.
Search Engine Optimization
Pros: Organic search results have the highest clickthrough rates for Page 1 of Google and search engines, not dependent on available advertising budget.
Cons: Long lag time to implement and measure, can be expensive especially for competitive keywords, a bit of a gray science.
Public Relations
Pros: Lower costs than broad advertising, higher credibility than advertising, longer shelf life, media coverage can build on itself and lead to more media coverage.
Cons: Hard to directly measure benefits of PR to sales conversions,
depending on target media can require high budgets, placements aren’t guaranteed and are based on how good the PR agency is and the media.
Print Advertising
Pros: Long shelf life, many different sizes and colors, flexibility in the creative, can track with 1-800 number of unique URL.
Cons: Can be exceptionally expensive, print outlets are slowly going
out of business, most readers ignore print ads.
TV/Radio Advertising
Pros: Broad reach, visual or auditory ads are still quite powerful, can use 1-800, URLs or promo codes to try and track.
Cons: Can be highly expensive.
Direct Mail
Pros: Relatively affordable on a per-piece basis, well-suited to testing, high degree of creative control.
Cons: Heavily dependent on the quality and accuracy of the mailing list, junk mail gets tossed almost immediately.
Word of Mouth
Pros: One of the most effective forms of marketing, technically free to implement, powerful and viral.
Cons: Difficult to control, difficult to measure, can backfire in a
big way if you screw up.
Content Marketing
Pros: Engaging, long shelf life, can be highly viral, positions you as a thought leader, more compelling than advertising.
Cons: Less control over where prospects can access the content, hard
to directly tie it to sales conversions.
Craigslist:
Pros: Free to post, huge audience, easy to do.
Cons: Craigslist doesn’t allow duplicate ads. Thus if you want to post in 20 cities, you’ll need to write 20 different ads. Requires time to constantly delete and repost ads.
Hopefully this newsletter has given you a good overview of all the various types of marketing tools available to you. Maybe we’ve even
given you some new ideas.
The bottom line is to test, test, test. Test everything.
Keep what works. Throw out what doesn’t. Put your resources behind
the methods that do work. Scale up and watch your leads increase!
Contact Firecracker if you need help with your lead generation.