The 5 Layers of B2C Digital Marketing & Lead Generation Problems

What are the root causes and effects of poor performing digital marketing campaigns? In many cases you’ll think poor performance is caused by your creative, positioning, the messaging, the intended audience, etc. But, the real issues are often deeper and more fundamental.

When your business growth depends on digital bringing in new customers many executives focus on the symptoms of poor growth and not the root cause of the growth problem. Over time the numbers get worse and the exec team and board get bogged down in managing the unexpected legal costs, external counsel, non-performing digital marketing campaigns, and how to communicate the disappointing results to the shareholders.

Though these effects are important and need to be addressed, the real problem often is that the fundamental aren’t right. If the root cause of the problems aka the fundamentals aren’t right no marketing team, no matter how smart or dedicated, will be able to deliver the results the business is expecting.

However, when the fundamentals are right, it makes any marketing team deliver great results. That’s why companies should consider the 5 layers of digital marketing problems:

1. Buying inferior and cheap traffic quality. Low quality traffic without fraud detection to filter out the bad apples = no marketing optimization will ever lead to sustainable success.
2. If you attract poor quality traffic without 1st class fraud detection you’ll get an inflated picture of your audience. You think your ads had a great click-through-rate by your audience, and visitors generate leads or buy digital products. But, a chunk of your visitors were fraudsters presenting themselves as your perfect audience. These fraudulent visitors will cost you easily 20% - 25% of your digital spend. After removing fraud: Good traffic = you are in control of your true audience. Oxford Biochronometrics offers 1st class fraud detection.
3. Low quality leads will never convert to a sale, and are typically not generated by interested humans, but by fraudsters to attempt to skew conversion percentages of the traffic source directly or indirectly paying them. Without detecting fraud, filtering for known litigators, and documenting proof of consent, you might be contacting prospects without their express consent. In case you did document consent: It were fraudsters providing the consent, not the prospects. Contacting prospects without their consent, mostly victims of stolen PII data, allows them to sue you for violating the TCPA act and some will.
4. Marketing problems become business problems when your CAC:CLV ratio becomes lower than ~1:3. This implies the marketing efforts haven’t achieved their goals, and the business as a whole will suffer due to lack of growth. Marketing problems become a legal problem when your call center did contact prospects without their express consent. Fraudulent generated leads using stolen data is the main reason and primary source of this problem. So, brace yourself for a big wave of TCPA demand letters and the associated settlement costs. It might become worse when you get sued and a class action is started. At this point you’ll really need external counsel charging $2,100/hr. I'm sure that doesn’t help your business results.
5. The doom scenario unfolds when a class action lawsuit gets certified. In such a scenario a costly litigation process starts, which might end in a hefty multimillion settlement.

This all happens because of buying cheap traffic, not filtering out fraudulent generated leads, not validating against known litigators, and not documenting proof of consent, and thus not being compliant. Let that sink in.

You might think: We’ll just outsource layers 1 and 2 and only pay for generated leads in the form of affiliate fees (CPL / CPA) and we’ll use a call center. Good thought, but unfortunately you can’t outsource liability. The TCPA holds businesses accountable for the actions of those acting as their agents. This means you must exercise diligence in selecting and monitoring third-party entities engaged in telemarketing activities to prevent TCPA violations.

If the input (inferior traffic) isn’t good, how can the outcome (business growth) be great?

That’s why each layer in figure 1 requires its own checks and validations before the collected information is allowed to move to the next layer. These checks and validations act as a filter removing the bad apples. Fraud detection enables you to know the fraud status per generated lead in real-time before making the call, ActiveProspect's TrustedForm enables you to document proof of consent, Contact Center Compliance’s litigatorscrub enables you to scrub known litigators. If this works correctly you generally don’t need legal counsel. But, if you think these services are too expensive, Troutman Amin LLP will only be charging you $2,100/hr attempting solve your TCPA problems, though we all agree they are your best shot at winning and thus worth every penny.

Focus on fundamentals first

You simply need to focus on fundamentals first: By addressing root causes in lower layers problems in subsequent layers will be mitigated or completely disappear. Without these problems your digital marketing becomes successful and your business can build a solid foundation for growth.

#B2C #digitalmarketing #fraud #leadgeneration #tcpa