Marketing Tip: Buying Leads And Lead Generation Is Tough

by Marty Bradfield

Internet Articles

Published on this site: November 15th, 2010 - See more articles from this month

There are a lot of industries where business people rely upon buying leads to drive new business for them... For example: colleges and other schools, insurance agents, real estate professionals, mortgage brokers, and network marketers are constantly buying leads to find new prospects...

Leads are nothing more than people who have already shown an interest in purchasing what you sell... Leads can be purchased for as little as one dollar each and as much as $100 each, depending on many factors, but more importantly on the industry for which the leads have been collected...

The factors that can influence the cost of a lead includes:

• Industry;
  
  
• Source of lead;
  
  
• Quality of lead;
  
  
• Age of lead; and
  
  
• Number of times that lead has been sold.

The first person to buy the lead will always pay the highest price for the lead...

I was reviewing one company that specialized in generating leads for the auto insurance industry... The first person to buy that lead was charged $25 for the lead... The person buying the lead was only guaranteed the first contact for a period of three days...

The second person to buy that same lead received no guarantee of second contact... The second through the eighth person to buy the lead paid approximately $12 for the lead... This set of business people were only assured that the lead was less than seven days old...

During the second week, after the lead was generated, the lead generation company would discount the lead by another 50% and offer it to another seven insurance agents for another week...

The dirty little secret of buying leads is that by the time you get those leads that cost under $10 to purchase, chances are very good that your lead has already made a purchase or a purchase decision...

If you count yourself lucky to have found leads for only a couple dollars each, be advised that those leads are likely at least 30 days old and the person has already been contacted dozens of times...

Quality Of Lead:

You will hear many people, who are in the business of buying leads, talk about the perceived quality of the leads they buy...

Business people are accustomed to being told no, but when it takes 20 or 30 phone calls to get a sale, the lead is perceived to be very low quality...

The age of a lead and the number of times that the lead has been sold will be a really good indicator of the quality of the lead that is being purchased... That should be pretty obvious to everyone involved...

But, there is another factor that should be measured into the quality of a lead that is far less understood...

How did the lead generation company acquire the lead?

These days, a lot of companies utilize the Internet to develop new leads that they can sell... Other companies use television advertising to generate the leads they sell...

If you watch any television at all, you will have seen the commercials for companies that develop leads to sell to other companies...

For example:

• There is the girl in her pajamas and fuzzy slippers, who talks about how she can go to college from the comfort of her home and in her pajamas... That advertisement is for a company that specializes in selling leads to various schools and colleges...
  
  
• Without giving free advertising to any specific company, there is another company that advertises the availability of work-at-home opportunities that promise people that they can work part-time at home and generate an income of $3-$5000 per month...

Now that you have read this article and seen these examples, the next time you see those commercials, your eyes will be opened...

Lead generation companies have a real challenge to overcome...

Not only do they need to reach the right people and to reach them in volume, they also have to target their lead generation precisely for a specific industry...

Real estate leads is perhaps one of the easiest ways to make this distinction... Say for example an individual indicates an interest to move from New York to Texas... Texas is an awful big state... If the prospect indicated an interest to move to Corsicana Texas, connecting that person to a real estate agent in Dallas Texas is probably a bad idea... Sure, it is only an hours' drive away, but if you have ever been there, the two locations are as different as night and day...

Corsicana Texas is a small town of approximately 25,000 residents, located 55 miles south of Dallas Texas on Interstate 45... It sits just outside of the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington Metropolitan Area, which has an estimated 6.5 million residents...

The average real estate agent in the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington Metropolitan Area will be unprepared to find homes and to show homes in the Corsicana Texas area...

The point is that the quality of the lead will often be determined by the precision used to define the lead...

Buying Leads Versus Lead Generation:

If you should choose to do your own lead generation, the quality of the leads that you generate will often be light years ahead of the quality of the leads that you can buy...

However, generating your own leads can be time-consuming and expensive... The problem most business people face when trying to generate their own leads is bringing enough traffic to a website to justify the cost of doing so...

Depending on the industry and the lifetime value of a customer, your capacity to generate leads may not require a lot of volume...

If you are able to develop an effective lead generation system for your business, you may only need to generate an additional 5 to 10 leads per month in order to keep your business profitable...

If you choose to go the route of developing your own lead generation website and system, it would serve you well to learn the traffic generation techniques that professional online marketers use everyday...

Marty Bradfield teaches the Basics of online marketing and Cutting Edge Techniques used by online marketers, to develop lead generation systems for new businesses. He recommends the 80-page report that outlines 35 Proven Traffic Generation Techniques used by professional marketers to build their online businesses:
http://thephantomwriters.com/ebooks/multiple-traffic-streams.html.