There’s more than one way to achieve the elusive goal of sustained sales success. The entire practice of lead gen has suffered from a lack of clarity for decades. But it doesn’t have to be that way anymore.
Every player in the lead gen ecosystem can – and should – make a difference in overall transparency and trust. Consider the science of ad tech, much more closely related to the latest developments in lead gen than you might realize.
Programmatic advertising is booming. A recent report from AdExchanger finds that marketers plan to boost programmatic digital budgets by at least 40 percent by next year. Attribution, the science of slicing and dicing data points to determine which online impressions actually propel a customer to make a purchase, is a hot ticket these days. AOL recently purchased attribution shop Convertro for $101 million, and Google just snapped up online attribution firm Adometry.
Some marketers are even talking about combining online and offline impressions. It’s not too far of a leap to imagine that a data collecting smartphone could track a consumer’s view of an ad at a baseball stadium, and that information could then be combined with online knowledge to achieve an ever richer and more accurate picture of conversion behavior.
Consumer intent is one of the biggest drivers in ad tech, and it’s also an essential differentiator in the lead space, if you know how to harness the data collected around the lead event. The technology exists today to glean far more information from consumer behavior, from the moment a person submits a lead form and even before, if the tracking technology is in place to capture this valuable data.
Envision a future in which marketers combine ad tech data and lead insights to obtain a multidimensional and highly detailed real time picture of consumer intent. Imagine the clarity, and then imagine the accompanying actionability.
Ultimately, it’s the accumulated volume of information that makes swift work of data-based marketing decisions. Marketers who are collecting and auditing lead data right now have the upper hand in the race to understand every aspect of the consumer journey, so when the time comes to blend all these data points into an image with razor sharp accuracy, those who have prepared by collecting data early and often will be way ahead of the game.
