Choosing the Best Lead Generation Technique

Telemarketing, direct mail or affiliate marketing? Email, print advertising or social media? This is basically one of the questions that all of the companies, business giants and small-scale, ask their sales and marketing people. Choosing the best lead generation tool is very critical in the success and future of any business entity. Committing mistakes in picking the wrong one leads to unexpected problems or, God forbid, to the demise of a business entity.

There are many options to choose from. At the top of the list is telemarketing. Through the telephone, many sales function can be done. Included in the list of telemarketing services are appointment setting, lead generation, client profiling, event telemarketing, telephone survey, etc. This method is the fastest, cheaper and the easiest of all the techniques.

A booming tool is affiliate marketing. This is done over the Internet wherein the affiliate or the site owner is paid by an advertiser (the seller) once a conversion of leads is made. This conversion is made by a file or software download, filling-up of forms for newsletters or membership sign-up and the likes. One of the most sought affiliate marketing program is pay per leads.

In terms of reach ratio, the methods with the highest ratio are email and direct mail. Though both proved to be an advantage in terms of reaching prospects, they are slouch in the response rate.

Another type of online lead generation tool is the social media. This takes many different forms like podcasts, video, social blogs, Internet forums, weblogs and so on. Other tools are events marketing (seminars, trainings etc.) and print advertising.

The success of a lead generation program does not depend on one tool alone. Companies ought to use a combination of two or more.