Some people find the transition from tradition to technological lead generation pretty difficult. Who can blame them, really? Technology is hard to get the hang of. The way it’s evolving, however, means that you undeniably need to be able to use it to generate leads. Is there even room for tradition anymore?

What’s the difference between traditional and technological lead generation?

Traditional marketing is basically anything that’s not online. This includes strategies such as billboards, television ads, fliers, and calling up your client on the phone. Technological marketing is basically the internet. PPC campaigns (Pay Per Click), emails, social media marketing, and SEO.

At first glance, this makes lead generation software seem a bit restrictive in being limited to one medium of exposure. When you consider, though, that approximately 40% of the world has access to and makes use of the internet – whilst fliers and billboards can only be seen by a limited number of people a day – technology already had the upper hand over the traditional approach.

Generate leads traditionally

Pros

What can be said for tradition is this – it works. The younger generations may have grown up surrounded by wifi and easy access to computers, but the world is largely made up of an aging population – especially in America and the UK. An older audience generally prefers the traditional methods of marketing – and if they make up the majority of your audience, it’s something to keep in mind.

Additionally, what non-computer-savvy leads value is a personalised, individual form of marketing. Whether you want to admit it or not, meeting face-to-face at an event or speaking over the phone is ten times as personal as an email that could, in fact, have been sent to one hundred other people.

Cons

The problem with most forms of traditional marketing is that the audience is very limited. As a lot of its methods involve a personal approach, this means that there needs to be a preceding relationship between client and company. This makes it more effective for lead nurturing rather than lead generation.

With billboards, fliers, and letters, the amount of contact received can often be very low. The attention spent on these forms of marketing is small and often momentary, and so getting a number of contacts from these kinds of campaigns is less than likely.

Generate leads with technology

Pros

Even a banner ad at the side of an unrelated article can bring contacts to the table, and that just highlights one of the biggest plus points of technology: a lot of people will see your campaigns. Not only that but with lead generation software you can see exactly who all those engaged people are and get into contact with them as soon as you feel it’s necessary.

Using technology to generate leads can be made personal, although it often starts off impersonal. Tradition, however, relies on being personal and if this is simply impossible – for example, trying to reach out to a stranger with a leaflet you don’t know they’ll be interested in – its effectiveness is damaged.

Cons

There are problems with every kind of marketing, and one of the problems we’ve covered with technology is that it can be impersonal. There are additional issues, though. For one, there is a lot of competition with online marketing, and whilst it is effective there is the constant possibility that your client has already been contacted by someone with a similar product to you. Lead generation software can be expensive, so it’s important to make sure that you’ve gotten the best product.

Overall there are pros and cons of both types of marketing in terms of lead generation. It just depends on what your audience is. Using both forms in conjunction with one another will make your campaigns stronger than choosing to use one solely and not the other. That’s the point we want you to remember.