Been on a news website lately? Of course you have. If you’re not inundated with ads and popups to subscribe, follow, and be followed by the news site, then your reading experience is crowded with banner ads, suggested content, and Read This Next boxes. In the crowded world of tech news, the space your content shares with other sources may not be fully under your control.
Even worse, if you trust your content syndication to a sketchy telemarketing brand, you risk your content becoming associated with spam calls, outreach to private cell numbers, and other shady practices that destroy prospect trust from the first touch.
A crowded neighborhood doesn’t have to be an unsafe one.
A crowded neighborhood doesn’t have to be an unsafe one. Just because your content dwells alongside other news and informational pieces doesn’t mean your content has to suffer with the dreaded scourge of the software market: loss of trust.
Demand generation and lead generation for the tech market requires you to partner with other data sources. Content syndication teams, lead sources, content writers, and behavioral data sources all work together to help you find the right customers for your product. And trusting those partners with your data means that they become gatekeepers of your brand. How those partners gather data, interact with individual buyers, and promote your content contribute to the lead’s understanding of your brand.
Protect your brand and your name by investigating who your marketing partners work with, how they handle customer data, and how they secure their infrastructure.
Ask these five questions of your lead gen partner
Who’s in your marketing neighborhood?
Your mom was right: who you hang out with defines who you are. Ask a lead gen partner about audience targeting and how they match content to audiences. While the partner may not be able to tell you the names of other vendors that your content and brand will appear alongside, they should be able to tell you what sorts of audiences their content syndication tools target.
Is your software white paper going to be promoted along with other high tech content, or will you accompany the latest weight loss solution? Does your syndication neighborhood include reputable brands with high-value products, or will you be shown alongside celebrity gossip and another “You’ll Never Guess How…” pseudo-medical blog post?
How do they deliver leads?
You have to be extra careful with the security of the data you store on customers, as your internal security is also part of your external image. Should you really be working with a marketing partner that still delivers their leads in a plain text email?
Ask your lead gen partner whether they employ user permissions, API transfers, and encrypted documents. Even better, ask if they are GDPR compliant. These regulations provide assurances of data safety and consumer protection that are important for all consumers, not just those in the EU.
What is their database security?
Business marketing data may not have much in the way of personal identifying information (PII), but it’s still valuable. Ask if your lead gen partner’s database has ever been breached. What was their response, and what measures have they taken to prevent future breaches? Ask about data storage, encryption at rest and in transit, and what security measures the partner has in place to protect data as they collect it.
Your business-focused content needs a business audience.
What are their calling practices?
Work with a data brand who is transparent about their calling practices, and only work with the vendors that call contacts according to the Golden Rule of telemarketing: call others as you would like to be called. No home phone numbers — your business-focused content needs a business audience. Calling practices can vary widely from company to company, so ask about caller scripting, contact management, and how they manage privacy requests.
What is the lead experience?
Did you know you can ask for call recordings to see how each call works? Call recordings and sample emails give you a chance to experience the lead gen partner’s outreach before you put your brand in their hands. You have the right to know how their telemarketers will speak with your leads, what the emails look like, and the overall experience of their lead generation services.
Choose a vendor that knows your audience
At the time of publication, over 2 million emails are sent every second, and about 67 percent of those emails are spam. How do you ensure that your content gets past spam filters and reaches an interested audience? By working with a reputable syndication partner, you have a better chance of targeting the audience that truly needs your marketing assets and your software product.
TechnologyAdvice uses
highly-targeted, dynamic scripting to ensure that our contacts receive only relevant content. Through a combination of consumer-driven email and telemarketing, we help IT security marketers find the right audiences, the best leads, and the perfect customers. Let’s talk about how our lead generation services can help you.
Contact us today.
