It should come as no surprise that lead generation has become an important force within B2B marketing. In fact, there is a good chance that lead generation efforts are one of the predominant elements within your own marketing plan.
But, what is lead generation really? Frankly, I have become increasingly concerned by some of what I see going on in the pharmaceutical b2b marketing/media space.
Effective and ethical lead generation programs require an offer—some in the digital marketing world call the offer a Unique Value Proposition. In order to capture a prospect’s contact information, you have to give them something. Examples of things you can give include: access to piece of high-level content (white paper, webinar, podcast, etc), a free product sample, a discount, a free consultation session. Your offer is solely limited by your creativity, but the value of your offer needs to be in line with the information you are asking for.
People guard their e-mail addresses and phone numbers carefully and justifiably so. Requiring full contact information to download a product brochure is not an equitable exchange. However, requiring full contact information to access a white paper, a non-commercial webcast - a piece of content that educates and helps someone solve a problem, is an equitable exchange.
I believe lead generation should be transparent. By this, I mean that it should be clear to the user that they are giving X company their contact information in exchange for access to Y deliverable. Enabling registration forms with cookies is great so that repeat visitors do not have to enter their information every time they want to download a piece of your content. But, a cookied registration form still makes it obvious to the visitor that they are offering their contact information.
I am not a tremendous fan of registration-based B2B industry websites as most of these sites do not require registration for a specific download. When registered users select a piece of content to download, they do not have to submit a registration form because the site knows who they are. Although these sites may not violate acceptable privacy policies, I believe that they count on visitors clicking away not realizing that they are providing a company a lead for every piece of content they access.
These sites are sometimes able to give large quantities of “leads” to their advertisers and the advertisers are generally unaware of the very passive action the visitor took to provide the “lead.” Although, I generally do not like a site registration approach to lead generation for industry sites, I would be comfortable with this approach for a specific company’s site if done in a thoughtful manner.
The big disagreement, no make that a huge disagreement, I have with many publishers right now is that many are giving “clicks as leads” and an increasing number of publishing companies are giving “looks as leads.” The analytics and behavior of specific visitors/audience members is quite detailed for e-newsletter subscribers and registered website users. For instance, I can access the specific individuals and their full contact information for anyone who clicks on any link (ad or editorial) within any of our e-newsletters. The same holds true for registered members of our websites. And our analytics technology allows us to identify specific individuals just looking (not even clicking) on specific content areas via “hot spot” technology.
However, I firmly believe that it is a form of identity theft to give this information to our advertisers. I do not and will not do this to our readers. Many of our readers are very loyal and without an audience we don't have much of a business...why would I steal from the very people who allow our business to prosper? And I will not fill our clients’ CRM systems with ill-gotten data.
We all have different views on business ethics and this is my line in the sand on this issue. Serving contextual ads or ads based on past behavior can be of tremendous value to the reader and is a tactic I support and utilize. Giving individuals' contact information without it being transparent to the reader that they are giving their contact information is a tactic I do not support and do not utilize. Period.
A “click” is not a lead and a “look” certainly is not a lead. Eventually, I think there could be federal regulation to keep publishers from doing this kind of thing. However for now, I wonder if we can keep the Feds out of this issue and just do the right thing? Can we apply the Golden Rule to our B2B marketing strategies and tactics? Most of us do not want our identities stolen. Why, then, would we do this to our customers and prospects?
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