Lead generation. Those two simple words can cause a marketer's heart to skip a beat. It's the simplest sounding part of the marketer's life, but arguably one of the toughest job for a marketer to accomplish. Many people will tell you that when you want new leads, "go to the lead store" and obtain them through some fee-based service like advertising or list brokers.
This next bit may seem disconnected, but I promise you that I will connect the dots here in a minute.
A couple of months ago, we did a webinar with Nick Kellet, CEO of List.ly, all about "Turning Lurkers Into Leads." It's worth watching the replay, even if you were with us live. Find it here. One of the key points in the webinar is that content can and should be re-purposed and distributed in a variety of ways - all to increase the likelihood that you will be found when people are searching for solutions to problems and answers to questions.
Participating in this webinar with Nick inspired us to create a number of channels in which we would distribute our content, and we re-invigorated, among other things, our iTunes channel. (There's a fun story about our iTunes channel that Kim has shared in a couple of our webinars, too, but I'll leave that for another time.)
So, here I am, tying it all together.
I had a meeting earlier with someone who is interested in using the Genoo platform to scale her organization's marketing efforts and take them to the next level. She set the appointment online, and came in as a brand new lead to our system.
Except she wasn't. At least, not really...
It's true that her name and email address were not in our system, so, yes, she was a brand new lead. But she's been interacting with our content for weeks.
Yes, you read that right - for weeks.
Come to find out, she found us on iTunes, and, during her one hour commute each way, she's been listening to all of our podcasts and learning all about how we talk about marketing, how we work with our customers, our ideas, suggestions, and recommendations about email marketing and marketing automation, and, in some fashion, about many of the capabilities of the Genoo platform.
What she heard caused her to go to our website and fill out a form, providing her name and email address, and giving us the opportunity to serve her.
Powerful, huh?
This isn't the first time this has happened, but this time, well, for some reason, this time it caused me to write this blog post to let you know - content distribution is worth it. Make your content work for you long after the content was created, maybe long after the content was even offered.
Look on the upper right hand side of this page, and you'll see that we've created a Content Distribution Quickstart Guide. Click that, get the guide, and start figuring out which bits you can use for yourself. It's working for us - driving new leads to our website every single day. Our cost per lead? Zero, except for a bit of time to get the content into formats that can be uploaded to the various channels we've chosen.
Fewer visits to the lead store is a win for everyone.
You will generate leads out of what seems like nothingness - and your heart will not skip beats any longer when you hear the words "lead generation."
