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One of the bigger topics taking place in lead gen is the idea of moving beyond the lead. As we wrote about in our “What Is Lead Gen” piece, it’s all too easy to confuse lead gen with a form. It’s not about a form. It’s about intent. The nature of the web made the form a useful mechanism for intent, collecting actionable information and helping both marketing services firms and end clients determine whether a potential customer was a fit. The form certainly won’t go away, but it does have limitations. One is time based. Even if the form is submitted in real-time to a client, there is a delay. And, that delay is the equivalent, in terms of contactability, of what happens to a new car that gets driven off the lot. Just as the car depreciates almost the second it leaves, the chances of contacting that user drop significantly even if the phone rings seconds later.
Another disadvantage to the form besides the drop in contactability has to do with security, but not security in a privacy sense. It has to do with data integrity, knowing not just that the data looks correct but that the person whose information the form contains actually hit submit. To get a feel for the problem, just look in your spam folder. Without a doubt one will talk about data entry jobs. This isn’t the early days of digital where humans were needed to convert printed text and digitize the mass amounts of documents created before today’s cloud based living. These data entry jobs aren’t quite data. It’s more like enter this data into this field. Or, it might be a quality assurance position where you enter information into different fields then pretend to be interested in the service.
Lastly, users have definitely shown some fatigue with the form. It’s more a feeling than anything quantifiable, but there is certainly a sense that people realize they might get called and don’t want to put in their information. We’ve reached a turning point of sorts in the world of the form, and while that might at first sound like bad news for lead gen, it really isn’t. If it were called form gen, perhaps, but it’s not. So, in a slightly unexpected twist, one of the oldest technologies is leading the way within the world of lead generation – telephony. It’s not about what phone is used but how people can connect, how marketers can track, and how those on the other end can have a much richer view than ever before.
Telephony is also one of those things that can be much more confusing than you might think, because the phone itself has been around so long. It’s easy to think of it in very analog ways when it really was just a phone line, not part of the connected web. A look through the LeadsCon presenters shows the breadth. Take the market leader in telephony, Twilio. They are so simple it’s almost hard to understand. But with Twilio, you can create the ability to provision a number, have it ready to use, the calls and data tracked, all with a few lines of code. Want to start a pay per call business? No problem, all you have to do is create numbers for each client, then bill based off certain minutes being hit. No need to see logs from the buyer; no need to argue over time; and, all of it could be implemented in the time it took to read this paragraph.
The companies doing amazing things in telephony are unbelievable – from Datalot, CallerReady, FastCustomer, Ring Revenue, Double Positive, ThinkingVoice, Click2Call Network, and that’s just in the 45 minutes of session times at LeadsCon. The real beauty of the innovation is that it creates a real win for all parties. Users are choosing when and how to engage. They feel in control of their phone. End clients have increased efficiency, less time spent trying to get someone on the phone, more time helping them. Marketers still do well and don’t have to give up much in the way of tracking. They also have access to more media types because the phone is universal. You can’t fill out a form on a billboard, and people are less likely to do it on mobile sites. With so much talk focused on some of the negatives of the call, it’s great to see an equal if not greater amount of reinventing the call.
