Combining Old School and New School Marketing

Here is an excerpt from our e-book “Cold Calling for the Clueless“, which is available online or on Amazon, that talks about the integration of inbound marketing and business to business lead qualification.

There’s a lot of interest in content marketing these days and search engines really can make content marketing seem almost like magic. Put some content up on your website and—poof!—someone across the world finds it. But the magic still needs to be massaged. One of our clients was doing a great job with inbound marketing. Most of this company’s leads were generated by Web visitors who filled out a form to download a whitepaper. Then our client had us make the phone calls to qualify those leads and find out which ones were true prospects.

This company’s inbound marketing would certainly have produced some results by itself. Or if there had been nothing but an It’s Your Call telemarketing campaign, that would have brought in some leads. But the combination—well thought out, carefully timed, and repeatedly improved through trial and error—was much more effective. The normal response rate for telemarketing is 1% to 3%. The average click-through rate—the percentage of visitors to your website who actually click on a link to fill out a form or download a paper or buy something—is a mere 0.3%. But using these “old school” and “new school” methods together, we got a 5% overall positive response rate and scheduled 44 demo appointments.

The previous chapter—originally the last chapter of the book—ended with the words, “It’s that easy—really!” Okay, I’ll admit, it’s not quite as easy these days. But I’ll stand by my original sentiment. You have a few more things to think about now, but the new techniques are interesting and exciting and they can work together with telemarketing to give you great results. You can do it!