Panel: Don’t Give Up on Print

I just got through moderating this session at Real Estate Connect. (I actually have to finish my deck for another session at 11. But I’m a compulsive blogger, what can I say.)

8:30 a.m. to 9:45 a.m.
Top of the Funnel: Search Engine and Portal Marketing
The consumer mortgage shopping experience starts here. What do consumers want? How can lenders differentiate themselves? What are current price trends for advertising?

Dean DeBiase, Chairman & CEO, Fathom Online
Jamie Glenn, VP, Product Management, Trulia
Steve Horowitz, SVP, Product & Business Development, Bankrate.com
Sam Sebastian, Director, Classifieds & Local, Google

The session was very tactical: where to put your spend, should you bid on the head or the tail, verticals vs. search, how to calculate overall cost per lead, etc. But one of the things that was almost unanimous was the panel’s belief that marketers should not abandon print media entirely for online.

I led off with the question, “Should marketers abandon traditional media for online and search?” They all emphasized the importance of and complementary nature of both. And Sam Sebastian (of Google) made the point, which I’ve discussed in the past, about search also being a way to track the success of offline media as well as a way to do “A/B testing” before campaigns are rolled out more broadly.

Also interesting was a lender in the audience who made the statement that he’s experienced “lead fraud,” (not click fraud). He said that 25% of the email based leads he’s received (at up to $70 per lead) have been bad over the course of the last year. This is somewhat counterintuitive because I would have thought that “leads” (CPA) would be an antidote to bad clicks. But not so according to his experience.

I wonder how widespread it is.

Advertisement