Perfecting your telecom marketing mix…

One of the crimes against telecom marketing humanity all too often committed by marketers bears examination. It’s this: the failure to understand that telco lead generation involves not isolated campaigns but, rather, leveraging multiple elements of a campaign mix.

Here’s what happens. Marketers leverage a lot of sources to generate telecom leads. These range from the cheap-to-execute (for instance, blind e-mail campaigns targeted at large databases) to the hugely expensive (e.g. webinars with recognised media partners). And at times that’s it. A campaign. It works or it doesn’t work. End of story. With virtual events or webinars, this means an enormous investment of both budget and time stands or falls by the event registration and perhaps a couple of follow-up e-mails. It’s not very sensible.

A rough example to step this through. A webinar with a media partner is likely to cost in the region of $10,000 +/-. A significant marketing investment by anyone’s budget. Roughly speaking the result for an average vendor might be to attract 125 registrants (note: this is a very general number culled from years of experience) where 40-50 might then show up to the live event and if you are lucky a similar number will listen on-demand. All 125, including the complete “no shows” will get a follow-up mailing or two after the webinar and their names will be passed on to sales and /or entered into the marketing database. At which point marketing and sales will move on, after the standard debate over whether or not actual, qualified leads have been delivered and maybe a group nod to “awareness” or “brand building”.

It’s not very sensible…

It may be somewhat ironic that the more invested into a marketing effort, the more it follows that further belt and braces investment will be required if a payoff is to be achieved. If you’ve spent $10,000 to identify 125 prospects, where’s the sense in failing to qualify their interest further?

This activity falls under the most important but often most overlooked component in the marketing mix of all: nurturing.

In our many years of experience, a personalised and clearly articulated telemarketing campaign nurtures and has few rivals when it comes to capitalising on the telecom webinar investment and nurturing names (which in the greater scheme of things are relatively useless) into actual, qualified telecom leads. Adding nurturing to your mix may add costs to your campaign, but the corollary benefit is that cost per qualified lead (which is what marketers really want) will go down.

Telecom marketers broadly tend to do good marketing activities. Their programmes generate telecom leads and contacts. Sales sell well when they receive a qualified lead. The breakdown in the mix all too often lies in nurturing the raw material of sales (unqualified leads) into becoming the raw material of viable deals. A webinar registration isn’t a lead; it’s an expression of interest. Telemarketing is what turns it into an actual, qualified sales lead.

Watch your digital ROI multiply – add Telemarketing to the mix. Now, this makes sense!