'Lead generation' is a dirty word - we know that. We're also acutely aware that typical marketing companies illicit the same measure of trust as politicians and Indian call-centers. As a marketing company this damaged reputation is one that we've inherited by association, and it's one we've always struggled with,. However, there's also a perceived single attribute that overlaps in a significant with that of the finance industry - the one of trust (perhaps more prevalent now in a Royal Commission world). In a sense, this 'trust barrier' has actually strengthened the relationship between Belief and that of the finance trade.

An American baseball player once said that "Baseball is like church. Many attend - few understand", and the same can be said for Digital Marketing: very few understand. You're all involving yourself in the digital industry in one way or another (if only by way of a website and Facebook page) but few understand what is actually necessary to see real success (sadly, this lack of understanding applies to a large majority of marketing agencies). The nature of the industry, and the level of aggregated trust, is further degraded by way of the introduction of the 'Facebook marketer' into the trade which has seriously diluted the true effectiveness of digital systems, and we've made no secret of our professional feelings when it comes to those charlatans that use hype to elevate the value of their service at the expense of everything else on the periphery. This concern for the ubiquitous nature of poor digital representation is what led us to introduce our 'Rescue Package' and the Propel program for digital agencies.

Of course, any digital lead generation works... because virtually all paid promotion works - even if it's bad (this lowly approach is the model often relied upon by the Facebook Marketing crowd). The bottom-of-the-barrel experience that has been exposed to over the last five years or so is the 'pay-per-lead' service. That is, paying a business to deliver leads or blocks of leads without any real knowledge of how that lead was generated or where they originated. In every single case we've evaluated the advertising that took place and the methods used to return leads were non-compliant and represents industry worst-practice.

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Note: Part of the reason we recorded the audio above was to test various platforms for podcast hosting. We've liked Omny for a few years but have only just decided that it is most suitable service for integration into Yabber (podcast hosting is already available in Wistia - another service that is heavily integrated with Yabber ).

As we mention in the above podcast, we fully understand why businesses gravitate towards services that simply deliver high-priced paid leads. However, what we've advocating is that you introduce a broad digital footprint to your operation that introduces real value to your entire business, and we want the industry to migrate towards compliant and best-practice methods of generating their own business growth for a fraction of the cost. For the cost of paid leads you can introduce Yabber to your operation with enough of your marketing budget remaining to return a few thousand leads of your own.

If you're somebody that has introduced a Facebook lead generation company to build what they erroneously believe to be a marketing funnel (again, all products we've evaluated are extremely poor, and none of them came close to building an actual marketing funnel) you'll want to watch a video of my 6-year-old daughter building a powerful marketing funnel that returned $2 refinance leads by simply clicking a bunch of buttons. Certainly, if your digital representation has introduced any third-party product into your marketing toolkit - such as Kartra, Lead Pages, Click Funnels, or any other non-integrated service - they're objectively costing you a ton of business, they haven't introduced a marketing funnel, and they've potentially introduced non-compliance to your operation (we'd argue their actions amount to professional negligence).

Note: We once managed a 'Home Loans on Demand' system that was completely compliant in every respect because we were never represented in the advertising - it was always for one specific business, and promotion was fully integrated with a business website with full oversight. In fact, we provided the same framework that we introduce to brokers by way of Yabber (which included a website). Our former service was simply managed by us in every respect; once set up, we charged just 70 cents for any lead that was generated. We've seen brokers pay between $30 and $130 for something that would cost them less than a few dollars if managed themselves. As we describe in more detail in an article introducing Facebook Marketing (where most brokers gravitate), setting up ads is actually a super-simple process; the 'complexity' comes from building an integrated funnel, creating unique copy, and analysing and improving upon the results. Thankfully, Yabber makes full marketing management an extremely easy process.

Catch-all lead-generation services that advertise credit are in clear contravention of the National Consumer Credit Protection Act (2009). The details of specific finance advertising obligations are discussed in an article on Finance Advertising, and another article is intended to guide businesses into compliant Facebook marketing.

The reason we return better results for business is clear: we operate the only full-stack, full-compliant, and fully-integrated digital system in the industry. We'd argue that it objectively returns about 100-times more value than any competing product.

Used correctly, Yabber has the potential to transform and grow your business in amazing ways.