If you run a lead generation business, you will live on an emotional roller coaster. Maybe you are an SEO expert and your website traffic lives and dies by the whims of Google. Maybe you are a PPC specialist having great success with long tail keywords until the point that it stopped working. Maybe a new affiliate was generating a bunch of great home improvement leads for you but then suddenly disappeared. The ebb and flow of the lead industry provides countless challenges and can make it hard to focus on staying above board in lead generation.
These ups and downs are described quite perfectly in Dr. Seuss’s Oh, The Places You’ll Go! If you do not already own the book, I highly recommend it. The whole book is filled with quotable verses but let me just grab one.
We see an entire spectrum of compliance in the lead industry. There are quite a few boberdoo clients with in-house lawyers that constantly review their marketing practices, creative wording, terms and ever changing laws. They are doing their best to make sure they are following all of the rules. There are also lead generation companies at the opposite end of that compliance spectrum. To put it bluntly, they just do not care. If somebody else is “doing it” and it works, then they are going to copy it and do the same. In their mind the worst case scenario is shutting down the current lead company and starting a new one tomorrow.
Right now, as we speak, Hillary Clinton’s campaign has come up with a way to circumvent the TCPA laws. This was done by basically copying what a company named Hustle has done. I am not a lawyer, but in a nutshell TCPA focuses on automated systems that send out SMS messages or initiate phone calls to cell phones. By the term 'automated', the TCPA refers to a system that requires no human interaction to send an SMS or start a call. Once a human performs an action to send each individual SMS, it seemingly falls out of the TCPA’s umbrella. Can you picture it? I mean literally can you picture the office where this is going on for the Clinton campaign? I guarantee it looks like some mid-1980’s kids playing a video game where they have to sit there and hit the A button as fast as they can in order to power up their character. With each click on that A button, the campaign volunteer fires off an SMS. This is not a political judgement one way or another and the Trump campaign may be doing the same thing, but this recent article specifically focuses on the Clinton campaign.
Things like this are really frustrating for marketing companies that do their best to not only follow the letter of the law but also the spirit of the law. It seems the Clinton campaign is running more along the lines of 'do as I say', not 'do as I do'. Being that this is possibly the future President of the United States, the frustration is amplified tenfold.
When your lead flow suddenly does a Crazy Ivan, blood pressure rises, frustration mounts, and you start looking around for answers. Sometimes when you look around you see what your competitors are doing and your moral compass starts to spin. I strongly encourage you to stay strong and resist the temptation. Maybe your competitor is currently getting away with something immoral, illegal or otherwise just plain wrong. That does not mean they will get away with it forever or that it will continue to work without some sort of penalty. It's even possible that you could get caught and they never do. Lead generation companies should be focusing on finding ways to help consumers. You can make money and help consumers at the same time. Getting on the government’s radar because you may have found a loophole or because the other guy is doing it is NOT what you want. Focus on the positive. Grind it out. Things will turn around.
-Brad Seiler, owner of boberdoo.com
boberdoo.com is a SaaS provider for the lead generation industry. Since 2001, boberdoo has been helping lead companies automate and optimize their entire lead businesses. We have seen trends come and go, regulations expand and many shifts in lead generation businesses as a result. As a leader in the industry, we continue to advocate for complete compliance and best practices for lead companies. We also provide many solutions for helping lead companies remain compliant. To stay up to date on updates from boberdoo and the latest lead industry news, subscribe to our newsletter above.