We are exciting to be heading to Las Vegas later today for the king of all lead generation trade shows, LeadsCon (www.leadscon.com). It will be great to connect with customers, prospects, partners and friends in the industry. Huge hats off to Jay Weintraub for organizing what is always a great two day conference.
We are exhibiting this year. Come find the Sparkroom team at booth 213 at the Mirage.
I spent last Tuesday at BMO’s Marketing and Advertising Thought Leaders conference. Thanks to Pete Stack and Jeff Silber from BMO Capital Markets for the invitation to attend and sit on the EDU panel. Anna Maria Virzi from ClickZ covered the day here.
I shared the stage on the EDU marketing panel with some of the smartest folks in EDU lead gen. The panel was moderated by Jeff Silber and included Michael Platt from Plattform, Doug Brown from All-Star, Greg O’Brien from CollegeBound, and Steve Isaac from Education Dynamics. My notes from the panel:
* for-profit education is counter-cyclical as all of the companies on the panel talked about growing budgets
* there will be a flight to quality as schools increasingly choose the larger, better converting lead providers. Sparkroom tends to agree with this conclusion and hopes that Lead IQ is part of every school’s plan to get smarter about marketing and enrollment
* the not-for-profit universities are going to start marketing more like the career colleges over the next decade; I am not sure about this one — someone on the panel mentioned that Penn State, UMass and University of Maryland have all built large and successful online education divisions — I think it is going to take more than 10 years for a marketing and customer acquisition ethos to permeate the culture of the not-for-profit university
* all the panelists talked about regulation risk — particularly as it relates to the Department of Education regulating marketing education to potential students. One of the panelists did the quick math – $40B in for-profit EDU revenue, 25% of revenue spend on sales & marketing and 80% of the revenue comes from Title IV funding. Ergo, the Department of Education is spending $8B every year (through career colleges) marketing education.
I learned a ton over the course of the day and met some great digital marketing companies. Thanks again BMO for the invite.
Earlier this year, we launched Lead IQ for the education vertical. Yesterday, we announced a milestone relationship for our company with U.S. Education, which operates its schools under the Apollo College and Western Career College brands and is a division of DeVry Inc. We met Jason and Andy earlier this year and were immediately impressed by them as smart direct marketers and business people. The good news for us is they liked what Lead IQ could do for them. Andy said it best in the press release: “By implementing the Lead IQ platform, we expect to make better business decisions and drive increased operational efficiency, ultimately allowing us to scale our business more quickly.”
We look forward to a long and fruitful partnership with US Ed.
Sparkroom is doing our first webinar in the higher education space. Get details and register here. The date is Groundhog Day – February 2, 2009 at 2 PM EST. Looking forward to sharing our EDU platform with you then.
UPDATE: Thank you to those who attended the webinar. For those who missed the live event, simply email events@sparkroom.com for a link to a recording of the webinar.
Nine months ago, we announced the release of Sparkroom Lead IQ 1.0, a lead performance optimization platform customized to the needs of marketers and lead buyers in the mortgage industry. Today, we launched Sparkroom Lead IQ 2.0, a lead optimization platform for the higher education industry. Read the full release here. It has always been part of our vision to extend our platform across multiple lead generation categories and today we make that vision reality.
Schools like University of Phoenix, Capella University and Career Education pioneered online direct response marketing and continue to be among the largest buyers of online media. To market efficiently and effectively, schools need sophisticated software platforms to manage and measure their lead sources. Sparkroom Lead IQ delivers that platform. As we have been out visiting with schools over the past month to share our progress and get feedback on the platform, the feedback has been unanimous the product is “ground-breaking”, “generations ahead of existing solutions”, and my favorite, “thank you.”
We look forward to talking more about our work with schools in the coming months.
ps more blogging is a New Year’s resolution that we plan on keeping!
Today we announced the launch of Sparkroom Lead Market Analytics. Read the full release here. We believe that this new product is important. Why? Because it begins to deliver transparency to an opaque and confusing market. Information is power. Transparency is inevitable in an online world where there is lots and lots of data. What Lead Market Analytics does is simple. It provides lead buyers with the tools and data to benchmark their performance vs. an aggregated industry data set. This is important because it helps buyers figure out what they are good at — where their competitive advantage lies.
A couple of key points to make:
Lead Critic covers it here.
Let us know what you think. We are at the LendingTree Summit in Charlotte this week and the Targus Online Lead Quality Summit in Vegas next week.
At Sparkroom, we spend a lot of time working with our lead provider partners. At the end of last month, we spent a few days visiting with some of the lead providers in Los Angeles and the Bay Area. After the series of meetings, we started trying to recognize the patterns that differentiate the lead providers. On the buy side, lead provider differentiation is driven by a pretty simple equation. Lead provider value = volume x quality x consistency x price. But this got us to thinking, what assets are important to be a great lead provider. How do they create value? What are the core assets of a lead provider?
Lead provider core skills = customer acquisition + monetization
Customer acquisition is pretty simple. How does a lead provider generate leads? An incomplete list of lead gen methods would include search engine optimization, search engine marketing (PPC), brand (see LendingTree), domain names (www.mortages.com), online display ads, affiliate marketing, and email lists.
Monetization is also pretty simple. For the small guys, they can monetize through an exchange like Leadpoint. This is a good news/bad news story. The good news is that you don’t have the cost of developing a sales force. The bad news is that you give up some of your economics in exchange for not having a sales force. For everyone but the small guys, there is the cost of a direct sales force and an account team. But monetization is about more than having a customer list, it is also about lead distribution. You want your leads to go to buyers who will convert them. Why? Those buyers will pay more for your leads. So what you see is that the top providers have reasonably complex algorithms that deliver the leads to the buyer based on volume needed, price per lead and ability to convert.
This boils the lead provider business down to pretty simple terms. Why isn’t everyone doing it? Mostly because doing it well and doing it at scale is very difficult. And it requires a deep expertise in technology. LendingTree is the only provider that successfully scaled without great technology; they did it with brand and a differentiated lead. LowerMyBills, NexTag, QuinStreet, and Adchemy all have technology expertise at the core of their business.
Why does Sparkroom care? No, we don’t want to be a lead provider. But we do think it is really important to understand the business of your partners.
We announced on Tuesday at Finovate in San Francisco that we shipped Sparkroom Lead IQ. Read the release here. Our platform has been in the hands of our customers for a few months now and our team of rock star developers has been busy adding functionality, stability and scalability. Lead IQ is ready for prime-time now.
Like any announcement, there needs to be an appropriate Oscar speech. We want to say a big thank you to all of our customers who have provided invaluable feedback and direction on how we can make the product better. And we wouldn’t be where we are today without the hard work, dedication and creativity of the best development team I have ever worked with building product. Keep up the amazing work folks!
Why is Sparkroom Lead IQ important? It provides transparency into the performance of their leads so that lenders can know that they are making the right optimization decisions. It is a very simple and powerful concept.
Some Insider posted the last entry in his opus on the “ever-elusive ROI” on LeadCritic last night. Read the full post here. He has this to say about Sparkroom:
“If you are not good with data, or don’t have the time to do the mining yourself, LeadCritic did a write-up on new company, Sparkroom, that can actually do this for you (this is an unsolicited endorsement, for the record. I have clients that are currently using the product and so far I have liked what I have seen). Not only can their product mine the lead data and bridge the gap between costs and income, but they make that data actionable and tell you what to do with it via a consultative approach. Now, it still remains to be seen if their advice will be good, but I certainly am in favor of the concept.”
First of all, thanks to Some Insider for the unsolicited endorsement. Our only bone of contention with the endorsement is the qualification that “if you are not good with data”, use Sparkroom. While we do have clients who ask us to do everything for them, we also work with highly quantitative customers who really get data and the power of quantitative decision making. Those customers understand the power of having end-to-end reporting on the entire lead lifecycle and optimizing against the metric that matters. These customers also have amazing feedback on how to make Sparkroom Lead IQ better as well as the account management service that supports it.
One of the key themes for us coming out of LeadsCon is that what we do is hard. Doing hard things is a good thing — in business and in life. Some Insider talks about the difficulty that the Lead Management Systems have in delivering income data back to their customers, but it is also hard to accurately track cost data and to assign it to the right lead and the right filter. Add in the challenges around LendingTree CLO fees and it is no wonder that lenders don’t do a great job of accurately tracking cost or income.
The final problem is that once you have an accurate end-to-end view on cost and income of your lead buying program, you have to figure out what to do. This is hard too. More good news.
Ed Powell, Sparkroom’s VP Sales, and I spoke with Owen Raun from RMC Vanguard last week about Sparkroom. Owen is not only one of the most progressive and innovative buyers in the mortgage lead generation space but he also hosts the industry’s leading podcast and writes a great blog (http://www.mortgageonlineblog.com). Read the post or click here to listen.
Sorry our posts have been light since LeadsCon but we have been swamped. Lots to talk about coming out of the conference. Huge thanks to Jay Weintraub for putting the show together.