LeadsCon, a lead-generation conference, wrapped up its West Coast show in Las Vegas last week. On the first day of the event, March 18, the Buyers Summit was held. This summit offered 11 presentations and talks for those in the business of buying and closing leads.
The panel discussion of the day was titled, “What’s in a Name: Is ‘Lead’ a Bad Word?” Keith Moore, President and COO of AcademixDirect, moderated the following panelists:
- Antonio Franzese, CEO and co-founder of Precise Leads
- Paul Rhyu, managing director of Rooster Media Services
- Joeri Weyenberg, vice president of marketing for Kaplan University
Here are the highlights from the panel discussion:
EDU
Education companies are looking to steer away from lead generators because of risks to brand reputation and fixed costs, according to Weyenberg. He added that the word “lead” is being banned and replaced in the education industry.
“It’s not that there’s a choice,” Weyenberg said. “At the end of the day, there’s diminishing returns in the lead-gen space.”
Weyenberg added that leads are records and that you can only ask a person so many times if they want to go back to school, a statement that got some laughs in the room. He said the world of selling “merely records” to customers is gone.
“As more schools do their own media buying, affiliates have to step up,” Rhyu said. Later on, he added, “The stuff that the big schools do on their own is much more compliant than a lot of the other stuff.”
Quality of the user experience
Rhyu noted that if a conversion rate falls below a certain mark, “I don’t care how cheap it is