As a local marketing manager for Comcast, Anthony Paluzzi discovered that he had a knack for lead acquisition. Fresh out of college, Comcast had hired him to expand the company’s reach by knocking on doors, but Paluzzi quickly realized that he could scale his efforts online to reach more potential customers in a week than he would in a lifetime of canvassing neighborhoods. This pivotal moment led him to start PALO Media Group, and for more than a decade since then he’s been building the company into a leader in the performance marketing space.
“I started PALO in 2010 as an affiliate marketer focused solely on driving calls. Since then, we've grown into a 12-person team, but our main goal is still to drive inbound phone calls and support the customer acquisition efforts of our clients.” PALO serves quite a few different industries, but the insurance and legal spaces are the company’s two specialties, and it employs all kinds of methods to drive phone calls, including generating lead traffic in house.
The Advantage of Agility
PALO’s journey hasn’t always been easy, and the constantly changing advertising landscape makes it necessary for Paluzzi to connect with new partners and lead marketplaces constantly. After a decade trying seemingly every lead distribution platform available, he was frustrated and felt like there was plenty of room for improvement. “I had used a bunch of different distribution platforms before Lead Prosper with mixed results. I’m not a developer, I’m a marketer, but I still want to be able to use a platform. A lot of the other options I saw were just so loaded up with features or you needed a technical background to use them—and some were just plain ugly. When I found Lead Prosper, I was able to set up my first campaign that night without even booking a demo call. And when I got an error, I could understand what was going on and fix it because the platform held my hand through the process.”
Armed with the ability to set up campaigns in minutes, no tech team required, PALO has been off to the races. The team has been setting up lead campaigns that push into their call center faster than ever before, and that speed has translated directly to measurable, profitable results. “Since using Lead Prosper, we’ve been able to grow our lead program by 10x simply because we have a system that’s easy to manage. That usability has allowed us to drive a 10x growth in calls, too, so it’s helped us to scale our lead program profitably and efficiently while partnering with more buyers.”
A New Age of Ads
As the advertising industry continues to evolve, Paluzzi sees a future that’s more focused on the consumer than ever before. “Where ad platforms today might be more focused on generating revenue, I think tomorrow they’ll be more focused on generating value for their users. We all have the ability to pick and choose where we spend our time online, and we as consumers certainly don’t pick services because they have great ad-serving benefits. Over the next few years, it’s going to be all about delivering real value.”
PALO is ready to embrace the trend with quality content and user-focused ad strategies, but it’s also taking things a step further. “In order to deliver value, in my opinion, you have to own some of the process. If I'm a lead generator for an insurance company and I'm just handing them that lead, there are very few ways for me to deliver value—I'm just not interacting with that consumer enough. To bridge that disconnect, we're beginning to position ourselves more as an end buyer in the industries we work in, which means we’re doing lead generation for ourselves. That approach allows us to deliver value to the consumer, because it's our consumer. It's not a lead we've generated for someone else.” As PALO begins to expand it’s own offering of products and services, there’s little doubt consumers will be in good hands.
The future is already bright for PALO, but Paluzzi has no intention of letting off the gas: “Our goal is to continue pioneering the media buying landscape, and we aim to accomplish it in two steps. First, we want to ensure that what we do best in terms of media buying feeds the other companies we decide to start, and second, we want to be a home for media partners like lead suppliers or pay per call publishers who know that we have their best interests at heart and not just our own bottom line.” So far, the approach has paid dividends, but Paluzzi is also kind enough to credit Lead Prosper with some of his company’s success. According to him, “It’s helped tremendously. With Lead Prosper, we’ve been able to manage and onboard more partners while gaining valuable insights into key metrics. With other platforms, it was more difficult to see how things looked at both a micro and a macro scale. Plain and simple, Lead Prosper has simplified the process without sacrificing any value.”
We’re humbled by the impact we’ve been able to have on an already-thriving business, and we’re looking forward to working with Paluzzi and PALO as they continue to shape the industry and help write the next chapter of lead generation and advertising.