Advertisers are always looking for ways to spend dollars in a way that guarantees their return on investment.
Vantage Media, a high-tech lead generation company, which charges a fixed price per lead it produces, offers clients just that.
Vantage Media, based in El Segundo, functions more like a marketing agency than a lead generation company. It runs online ad campaigns for companies from bidding for key words on search engines to building the advertiser’s branded Web site that readers arrive at when they click on the ad.
But unlike a marketing agency, it charges the advertiser only for every potential customer it produces.
“If you want to grow your business, I want access to new prospective customers,” said Steve Jillings, Vantage’s chief executive. “What you really want is not a $500,000 print campaign, but 10,000 new prospects. That’s really the big difference. We allow clients to buy prospects at a fixed price.”
The company calls this method “performance-based search marketing” and it’s working quite well for the six-year-old firm. Revenues doubled to $70 million in 2007 from the previous year. This year, Vantage Media expects to bring in $100 million.
This puts the company among the top players in the $1 billion lead generation industry, said analyst Jordan Rohan of Clearmeadow Partners.
“Vantage has done this by creating a no-hassle, one-stop shop for companies with highly visible brands.”
Brands such as Allied Van Lines, eHarmony and HeathNet are among 600 the company represents.
The Web sites Vantage Media builds for these enterprises look just like company homepages. But they are designed to collect basic information about people who request cost estimates. Once potential customers input their contact information, Vantage Media routes it to a company’s call center and they most often get a call in a matter of seconds.
“They handle everything from when the customer sees the ad to when the lead is delivered to us,” said Mason Hewitt, manager of Web marketing at Allied Van Lines. “Most other agencies try to drive traffic to whatever Web site we already have. Vantage Media has built an entirely new landing page for us.”
Allied Van Lines’ corporate site Allied.com required three pages of information including three phone numbers and the amount of furniture that a person wants moved before providing a quote. It was generating only about 1,000 leads a month.
Two months ago, Allied signed on with Vantage. The company’s proprietary technology, which automatically makes key-word bids on major search engines, routes users to a simpler site, AlliedVanLines.com. Potential customers can get a quote by providing only the most essential information, such as departure site and destination, pickup and delivery dates, an e-mail address and one phone number. The new site generated 2,000 leads the first month Vantage took over.
Boom times
Vantage Media’s recent growth spurt began when Jillings took over the company in February 2007 after raising $70 million in funding in a matter of hours.
“It took a few phone calls,” he said.
At the time, the company had 35 employees. Today, there are 130.
Last fall, Vantage Media left its cramped quarters in Venice, where employees and clients had to park on the street, and moved to a 30,000-square-foot headquarters in El Segundo.
Jillings describes himself as a professional CEO, and Vantage Media is his seventh venture. His previous startup, FrontBridge Technologies, based in Marina del Rey, was sold to Microsoft in 2005. He stayed with Microsoft for a year, before finding Vantage.
What attracted Jillings to Vantage Media then a modest startup was mostly its robust technology. The company operates a proprietary platform that manages 50 million keywords on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft search engines, analyzes the results and tests them automatically.
Under the previous management, the company relied exclusively on education clients, such as University of Phoenix. Now, Vantage Media targets moving companies, finance and insurance firms, and consumer brands.
But it doesn’t have any clients in the mortgage industry, a popular sector among lead generation businesses. That sector has been blamed for luring customers into the subprime mess.
“The implosion of the mortgage lead generation space has sullied the reputation of the entire industry,” Rohan said. “Executives at companies like Vantage Media have to wake up every day and remind everyone they’re different.”
But the real estate downturn and the looming recession are precisely why new clients have turned to Vantage Media, Jillings said.
In tougher times advertisers will have to choose the best use of their dollars.
“When the economic climate is uncertain, you want to spend money in an area where you know exactly what kind of return you’re going to get,” Jillings said.
