A few years ago, an online American company learned this lesson in the hardest way possible. It was a marketer of wedding invitations called OurBeginning.com. Logic dictates that its typical target audience should be young women in their 20s and 30s who are getting engaged and planning weddings. Bridal magazines would seem like the reasonable choice for it to spend its advertising dollars.
Yet for some reason, it decided to buy a television spot in the most expensive time slot on US television, the Super Bowl football finals match. Of which the overwhelming majority of viewers are male. Predictably, the campaign bombed spectacularly.
It spent an exorbitant amount of money to broadcast a message to an audience of millions when only a fraction of them would have any interest in the product. These days, when you type in OurBeginnings.com, you land on the website for a day-care centre in Seattle.
It is time consuming to not only identify the specific audience, but to then also come up with the best strategy for enticing consumers into looking at your product rather than what the competition has to offer. Yet such lead generation is crucial if you want the correct buyers to become aware of your product/service and turn it into a successful sale.
It is even trickier, when one has different products or services to sell and one's market segment becomes divided and subdivided. To cite an easy example: a software company would be unwise to try and sell its photo editing and design suites to an accounting firm.
While there might be one avid amateur photographer among the pool of accountants who could be an easy sell, it would be a waste of time and resources to market one product to all the others who aren't interested in anything other than number crunching software.
A good lead generation strategy can help one move one's products through less channels, thereby saving time and money and that this under-used marketing initiative offers an extremely high return on investment. In addition, where other initiatives, such as advertising provide branding only, lead generation guarantees a sales pipeline.
The solution is to outsource that part of the process to a reputable lead generation firm that will proactively seek out and identify your prospective buyers and start the dialogue. All that one's sales team will then have to do is to engage with them and close the deal.
Hiring a lead generation firm will cost money, but it is still more cost effective than marketing and advertising. Also, if one goes with a reputable, experienced firm, one is guaranteed of receiving legitimate leads of consumers that are interested in one's product or service and have given permission to be contacted by a sales rep.
Some lead generation firms even help their clients to come up with effective strategies for marketing their products. In that way, a lead generation firm can become an extension of one's business.
