When was the last time you completely believed what a marketer told you on mass media platforms like the television, radio, newspaper, or even an email? And if you did believe, did you not spend time researching on the internet for reviews or asking your acquaintances for their opinions before you made any decision to purchase?
Mass media is a relic of the industrial era when companies used largely generic advertising strategies that they hoped would reach their target customers. They had no means of driving their marketing methods to specifically reach their intended targets, so they spread their nets over as wide a market as they could.
Finding qualified sales leads using mass media marketing nowadays is an almost futile effort. Not only is the method of measuring the reach of your marketing strategies extremely difficult and complicated, but the cost of marketing to thousands of people in various places just to reach a handful of potential leads is extremely expensive. Furthermore, those potential leads are not even all verified quality sales leads. So, of the 100 potential leads you get from mass marketing to 100,000 people, you'd be lucky to get 5 qualified sales leads. And because you need more than 5 qualified leads to make your business profitable, you have to spend millions of dollars just so you can market to a hundred thousand more people.
Mass media marketing is a very expensive and inefficient method of finding sales leads. It represents a time of random hard selling and a time when customers blindly followed what was popular among their peers.
This mass advertising is no longer applicable to this generation of clients and consumers who are more knowledgeable, inquisitive, doubtful, and outspoken. With a vast amount of resources at their disposal and easily within their reach, they are no longer susceptible to marketing pitches that are aimed at everyone and no one in particular. Unless you personalize your marketing pitch, your sales leads will not believe that you provide the best solution to their problem when they have hundreds---if not thousands---of other options. The quest for qualified sales leads is further complicated by the emerging desire to become as unique as possible and yet still remain a part of the norm. This has lead to lesser belief in companies marketing to everyone but a distinct distrust of businesses introducing radical new solutions, or rather, the need to verify first from trusted sources any new solution.
Though this poses a unique challenge to marketers, one thing is certain, mass media advertising is slowly losing ground in the business world. Thankfully, the arrival of this technological era has provided marketers with various means of reaching out to their specific target sales leads and enabled them to improve their business relationship on a more personal level. Though most marketing methods are largely met with skepticism, a well-targeted and thoroughly researched marketing plan can become an effective means of lead generation. Even existing (and almost archaic) marketing methods such as email marketing and telemarketing can be repurposed and made to deliver qualified sales and business leads.
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