Whoever Has the Leads Has the Money

In business, I was always taught, "Whoever has the leads has the money." It is interesting to think about digital marketing versus traditional marketing. Before electronic devices, people basically had to yell to the crowd that they had a great business. "Extra! Extra! Read all about it!" I guess if you didn't have a loud voice, does that mean your marketing didn't work?

Because of electronics, we now have opportunities to market and tell the world about ourselves in ways that we have never had before. This can be a good thing for businesses, but it can also be a hindrance if you aren't familiar with or technology savvy. The digital era has taken our world by storm, and it seems like no one does anything without their phone.

According to the textbook, "Digital Marketing can be defined as using any digital technology to facilitate the marketing process, with the end goal of customer interaction, engagement, and measurement" (Zahay et al., 2024, p. 3). It seems like with so many opportunities to create marketing digitally, there is unlimited opportunity. However, if it is not done correctly, you are basically just wasting your time. The textbook supports this idea by stating, "It is difficult to do successful internet marketing without understanding the basics of direct marketing" (Zahay et al., 2024, p. 5).

When you think about why digital marketing means different things to different people, you can take me for instance. I am a real estate agent, so I am constantly studying digital marketing. Then you have someone like my parents, who call Facebook "Face Space." They don't really care about digital marketing, even though they are still being marketed to digitally every day.

There are so many reasons why digital marketing is important in business. As a real estate agent, there is a constant fight over who gets the lead first. Third-party real estate sites such as Zillow have figured out how to turn a consumer's information into money. A person may think they are simply browsing houses online, but once they provide their name, phone number, and email address, they can become a lead. Muurinen (2025) explains, "Zillow keeps access free for consumers and charges agents, landlords, and lenders for leads, ads, and software." The same lead may be sold to multiple real estate agents who are paying for advertising and leads through Zillow. So, while you may think you are simply shopping for a house, you have actually become part of the product.

The textbook identifies "the four types of direct marketing strategies, which are acquisition, conversion, retention, and value growth" (Zahay et al., 2024, p. 5). This was probably my biggest "aha" moment from the reading. Instead of asking how I can get more leads from third-party companies, I should be asking, how can I create digital marketing that attracts the consumer before Zillow does? If I can learn how to acquire, convert, and retain my own audience, I can create more value within my own business instead of paying another company that has already figured out how to do it.

The textbook states, "Businesses must maintain an innovation culture that has customer centricity at its heart and is guided by sound vision and strategy. No firm can practice business as usual" (Zahay et al., 2024, p. 7). When I first started in real estate 10 years ago, digital marketing was completely different for agents than it is now. This quote from the book really stood out to me because I agree that if I had not kept up with digital marketing and technology, I could have been left behind very quickly, even within a year. In my experience, you can't get comfortable with digital marketing because as soon as you think you have figured it out, something changes.