A small business guide to online lead generation
When I started my website management business a little over 2 months ago, I expected my clients would want me to spend most of my time handling website updates. I was wrong. To date I’ve landed 3 clients, and they all want the same thing: more sales leads and more phones ringing. Of course I still need to update their websites and add content to make all this happen, but lead generation has become the primary goal.
So I thought I’d go out on a limb and write a short series of articles on how I’m approaching online lead generation.
Not surprisingly, none of my clients are too keen on me publishing what I’ve done for them. So I thought I’d use myself as a case study. I’ve been trying to find the time to do some decent marketing since kicking off the service, and I can think of 4 good reasons why using my own business as an example is a good idea:
- I don’t have to ask anyone for permission to publish data. If I give away too much information about my own business, nobody suffers except me.
- I only started offering a website management plan 2 months ago, so there’s still a lot of growth needed.
- My lead generation budget is ridiculously small. Sound familiar?
- I don’t have an in-house customer database to work from. We’re starting from scratch here.
As with the 3 companies I’m already working with, I’ll be trying to answer the following questions:
- What are my lead generation goals, my target market and my budget?
- What’s the best way to get you to visit my website?
- How am going to get your permission to let me market my services to you?
- What am I going to do when you decide you’re interested in what I have to offer?
- How am I going to check that we’re compatible?
- How am I going to move you to the next level if you’re not ready to buy yet?
- What metrics should I put in place to measure my performance and my expenses?
Every business owner needs a source of sales leads, even when they’ve got enough work. Putting a well planned, automated (as far as possible) online lead generation plan in place helps keep the phones ringing even when you’re not thinking about marketing.
Article 1 will be published on Monday. Why don’t you play along?
Hi Dave,
Your story sounds very familiar. Here at Max-e-Biz Ltd. we create bespoke campaigns to generate sales leads for our clients from http://www.getsalesleads.co.uk. I have recently been searching for blogs on the subject that are UK based and I found yours.
The points you make are valid and fairly obvious but still seem to elude many comapanies when it comes to finding new sales leads. With the advent of the Internet and in particular Pay Per Click advertising, we now have a simple way to test marketing inititiatives to generate sales leads. The beauty of this is that we can now measure everything. No longer does the “only 50% of my advertising work but I don’t know which 50% apply”. We can now measure exactly what works, so much so that we can see the early signs of Pay Per Sale rather than Pay Per Lead.
Carry on the blog it will be a useful resource to share ideas.
Hi AJM. There’s no doubt that Pay-per-click advertising is a cost effective and measurable way to generate leads.
My biggest concern is not using Google’s tools to direct people to my sites. To me it’s more important to convert those PPC clicks to enquiries. That’s the tricky bit.
Keep watching. Maybe you could offer some suggestions to help me through this series.