Have you met any B2B marketer – or CEO or Owner/Operator, for that matter – who is not eager for more leads? So far I haven’t, and I doubt I ever will. While we don’t keep data on this per se, I’d venture that “more leads, please” ranks in the top two objectives of every client or prospective client we have talked with. Something on the order of 100% seems like a trend to me. Yet, therein lies the rub … and a serious rub at that.
When businesses are hungry for business, something akin to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs kicks in. The herd is looking for food, and will exhaust every known source of food – or methods to find those sources – that it can before moving on to other sources and methods. So it is with the use of social media and online marketing.
bandwagonIt was not that many years ago that direct mail marketing (oh, but for a return to those days! sighs the USPS), telemarketing, mass media marketing (print, display, TV) and cold calls (yes, a knock on an unknown door) were the main choices on the menu. They have rapidly evolved into their online descendants – Twitter, FB, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, email, websites, SEO, paid search, blogs and on and on. These are now, in their own right, very large bandwagons, with hundreds of thousands of marketers (a number that grows daily, by the way) holding on. While the marketing real estate in, say, the WSJ or television commercial time, limited how many could get on the bandwagon, with the pricing models in force today (most starting at $0) there is always room on the bandwagon for one more. Always!
As researcher IMN pointed out this week in its 2nd annual content marketing survey, now 44% of marketers see the goal of content marketing as creating leads. The proportion seeking leads in last year’s survey was a meager 16%. My bet: the 44% will balloon to over 60% by this time next year. This should come as no surprise. As CEOs and Owner/Operators look to breathe life into businesses stricken by a weak global economy – and likewise find they can actually measure the outputs that marketers achieve – they want more … faster, cheaper, better … surer, predictably, and with no excuses. There is one thing that matters: sales. If a marketer cannot directly bring in a sale, then the marketer must return the next best thing: a concrete lead.
The problem, however, is that there are more lead-generating engines and aggregate lead generation expectations than the market can bear. By a long shot! My guess – and this is all anecdotal, based on our knowledge of clients in particular markets – if you add up the $ lead opportunity expectations for all competitors in a given market, that aggregate number is on the order of 2X to as much as 5X of what any given market is likely to generate in new business in a given period of time.
Yet, the caravan rolls on. Some will remain on the bandwagon. Most will fall off. A few will win big. It is understanding what keeps those on the bandwagon in the first place that underscores the key questions that must be raised. The answers are there, but they are not easy to find.
In the meantime, marketers and executives will keep pushing on the envelope containing “hard results” until it splits. Not pushing at all is a poor recipe for growth: “Whatever you do, get me more leads.” It is akin to the the classic “Cowbell” sketch on SNL when Christopher Walken, playing a record producer during a studio recording, exhorts the band members, “I gotta fever … and the only prescription is more cowbell.”
My business is hurting; I need more leads.
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