Guaranteed leads. Publishers should try harder...

So here’s me think­ing that pub­lish­ers have really missed an oppor­tu­nity when it comes to pro­vid­ing guar­an­teed leads from their web properties.

Admit­tedly, whitepa­per pro­grammes work well when you’re try­ing to gen­er­ate a list of names. But, some­times that’s all they are – a list of names who are often unre­cep­tive when followed-up by tele­mar­ket­ing. Surely all of these “names” are active on the publisher’s web­site – they’ve been vis­it­ing, review­ing con­tent, con­tribut­ing in forums, etc. But all of this infor­ma­tion isn’t cap­tured when they fill-in a form and the data is passed on to the client.

Surely pub­lish­ers should be able to pro­vide some­thing that looks more like a lead than a name. Yes, they’ve reg­is­tered for a piece of high value con­tent, but there’s also so much more infor­ma­tion that can be appended to their pro­file e.g. how many times they’ve been on the web­site, areas of inter­est, lev­els of inter­ac­tion and con­tri­bu­tion, etc.

So, give me a score for each per­son that shows a com­bi­na­tion of “Pro­file Fit” and “Interest/Activity Fit”. And, as time is of the essence when hand­ing over leads (think of it as an atomic half-life of oppor­tu­nity), don’t give me a list of names once a week. Find out how to auto­mat­i­cally pass leads to our CRM sys­tem in near real-time. That’s why open APIs were invented.

In my hum­ble opin­ion, if pub­lish­ers can’t pro­vide this speed of ser­vice and level of infor­ma­tion, then guar­an­teed lead pro­grammes will become obsolete.