Why I don't buy and sell leads?

I line up my business bit by bit - Information Technology Center. CIT, in fact, can be called a lead generation platform for marketing agencies. Companies mainly from small and medium businesses can come to CIT and select an available agency or consultant, contact them for their services.

Recently, I very often come across services of services that sell leads.

It is worth emphasizing that the lead selling industry makes a lot of money. Many companies generate leads from various sources, mostly their own sites, and then try to sell them to others. They also provide iron arguments, for example, “we will replace you with any lead that you could not contact,” which means that you will not receive a refund in principle.

For my company, I give up the idea of ​​following this path, even if it means a steady income growth. That's why I don't buy leads, and why I build my company in this way.

Before I answer the question “Why?”, Let me explain what the Information Technology Center is. When a small business owner comes to us with his problem from the realm of marketing, not IT, he can do one of several things:

Contact several professionals directly to discuss your project with them.

Leave a request and then a few marketing specialists will contact the potential client.

CIT is completely transparent to business in what happens when sending information and it is never resold to other platforms.

Own, not rent.

I recently read a blog article titled “What rich people do, unlike the poor” or something like that. This article, like many others I have read, talks about asset ownership, rather than renting it. Although not everyone can own their own home or business, people who are more inclined to both of these things have other income-generating assets.

I think that buying leads in this way is similar to building your business only on buying incoming traffic. Although it may be useful to test various things, in the end, you did not create your marketing campaign and when you stop paying, you stop making money.

You are in this situation dependent on others.

Instead, I believe that you must create brand and traffic on your platform. Although this means that a company may grow more slowly at the same time, it will exist much longer and require less cost.

These transactions cannot be closed.

Lida who sell these "marketing agencies" do not close in real deals. This is basically the name and email address that was transferred somewhere on the network (it is not known where) and is now sold to someone, while the owner of the email address may never intended to use it.

This is not entirely fair, because of this situation, we came to the conclusion that many people do not want to give out their email address, because they do not know whose hands it will fall into. Too often they end up in the hands of spammers.

I refuse in any way to connect all this with my business. And I refuse to send to my clients something that they won’t be interested in or helpful to.

Again, my business may grow more slowly in the short term, but at the same time, growth will be long-term.

The cost of acquiring leads is cheaper in the case of incoming traffic.

Just take a look at these prices for the B2B segment:

$ 20 for one lead when buying 100-200 leads.

That is, the minimum amount of expenses is 2 thousand dollars and we will receive 100 email addresses that have been sold are not known how many times. The best thing I can do with this list is to upload to Facebook and try to convert them from there. In practice, with my conversion rate, I would convert 3 leads. Thus, it is almost $ 700 to convert the lead into a potential client and I do not directly monetize each of them.

This is crazy. $ 700 to generate one lead?

Instead, I can spend time creating my own traffic that will convert customers at the same level.

And what is the main advantage?

I get this traffic forever.

These are one-time expenses (mostly temporary and partly financial) for creating content and building up the link mass, as well as marketing, which takes my business to this level and beyond.

When you depreciate expenses over time, transaction costs suddenly begin to decline. And I have assets that I continue to own and use.

Are you basically against buying leads?

This is exactly the question that I get asked when I talk about buying leads in my case, so I decided to raise this question here.

I am not against buying leads by other organizations. In his speech, one of the marketers at the forum said that buying leads was like gasoline.

When you pour gasoline into a fire that is already burning, your fire becomes hotter and more. When you pour it on the embers, you just waste your fuel.

In fact, I recently set up a campaign in Adwords for CIT. Still, I am a marketer, and in this sense, I limit myself, without using paid leads attraction sites to test new hypotheses.

I also ran campaigns on Facebook and VKontakte with varying degrees of success. I continue to study these platforms, but in the foreseeable future they will not take a significant cash investment for me.

That is why I do not buy or sell leads that I generated myself. This is short term thinking. This is bad for customers. And it harms your reputation.