Capturing contact information is one of the most important activities companies that sell high end services and products can do. Selling high-end expensive services or products are not items people click a few buttons to purchase. They require conversation and persuasion from the service provider/seller. People don't click a button to purchase a house or an advertising campaign from an advertising company.
On the internet, most search engine optimization experts are familiar with the term "linkbait" which helps get links pointing to a website. Blog content is a good source of linkbait as are useful web applications. This however isn't necessarily capturing that all important contact information.
Get this, this tweet on twitter caught my eye:
Check out the Blogging ROI Toolkit from Compendium Blogware. It's a search marketer's quick guide to business blogging. <url deleted>
I was interested in the whole ROI (return on investment toolkit). I thought WOW a toolkit that might help define return on investment information for me while talking to clients about search marketing. So I went over there and signed up despite the request for information about budgeting and call for a demo checkboxes. Those checkboxes should have been my first clue. It didn't really deliver on the whole ROI Toolkit idea but the idea was good.
Here's what they did right and what they did wrong:
First of all, the title "Blogging ROI Toolkit" was a bit skewed. It did capture my attention. I did want to get a tool that helped determine Return On Investment for blogging. The target "search marketer's quick guide" seemed like it might target a web development company and web marketing company. While I did go ahead and submit my data, the return wasn't what I expected.
Rule 1: Deliver what you promise.
While this may seem easy, it can depend on how you say something. The word "toolkit" implied that there would be a group of tools that delivered a ROI. A simple checklist while useful, doesn't really deliver a "toolkit". A better wording would have been "Business Blogging Success Checklist" . It's just as important to be specific about what you're delivering as it is to deliver it. The last part about "quick guide to blogging" in the second sentence would have been more appropriate because a checklist could be a quick guide.
Rule 2: Target the right market.
In this case, the target market seemed like "search marketers" which based on the fact that these people are selling a marketing service isn't really a good target. A more appropriate target market would be "corporate guide to blogging". This is a little less targeted towards "search marketers". The checkboxes would have somewhat thinned the crowd of actual competitor submissions during the initial qualifying submissions.
So those are the first 2 rules about developing Contact-CaptureBait. I'm sure others will be able to add to this list.