Lead them to me! – A leads collector example.

A lead is a potential sales contact.
Tools to collect people details that match their desire to be contacted about a product/service are critical into any business strategy.
The term “generation leads” is sometimes referred to a harsher approach where only a big incentive, a big reward is proposed to people in order to grab their details.
Today marketing strategies prefer to employ a more humane approach and use the term “permission marketing”. It means instead of interupting people, instead of spamming them, a company ought to ask the permission to people first. This permission is not granted forever.

This article show a student acquisition example. A targeted domain name is used by a marketing company to collect leads. We also explore the “journey of trust” associated to this process.

We start with two keywords: women and success.

Our first domains lead to domain parking pages.

Only WomenSuccess.net seems to be active and after a redirection leads to a student acquisition page. The exact link we see is:
http://www.classesandcareers.com/schooldegrees/openended.php?leadcat=unemp&CACP=RD_NM_UNEMP_womensuccess.net

The “lead” in this particular case doesn’t have to be the student him/herself. It can be a parent, a friend or a teacher who is doing the query for a student.
The little links at the top (home / contact us) , the links on the footer (Press / contact us / Online Education) and the copyright/owner sentence are extremely important to reassure the visitor.
The steps expected by the owner and the universities/advertisers are as follow:

Those steps are pretty straightforward for a visitor focused on looking for some informations about universities nearby. The questions are very specific for the target audience.
The ClassesAndCareers.com homepage display the same message as the landing page. Their objectives are the same. It’s a necessary step in our “trust journey”.

However if the informations provided “looks” serious and useful, one might ask him/herself:
- “What is this website? Who is running it?”
The footer explain to us ClassesAndCareers.com is operated by “One on one marketing, Inc.” But…

The link to find this company is not obvious. Let’s try Google.

For various very interesting reasons, the user do not click on the correct result. A second search is needed. This time it’s the BBB report, (whatever that is), which is choosed.

The BBB report give a critical information: a relationship between the name of the company and its website.

The homepage of One on one marketing, inc. really shows a coherence between its objectives and the website it operates which necessarily increase our trust in this company.

As we can see this lead collector system is not only a landing page. A larger context has been created around it.
It is necessary to create a comfort zone around the visitor mindset in order to gain a lead. In this case, the goal is a permission to send more information by various universities.

Back in 1955 and 1968, here how the advertisers in Popular Science were collecting leads:

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