Photo by dwz
So I’ve given myself the task of finding 20 new clients using online lead generation (If you haven’t yet read my introduction to small business lead generation, I’d suggest you do so before going any further).
But before I jump headfirst into my campaign, I need to answer 4 important questions:
- Who is my target market?
- How long will my campaign last?
- What goals do I want to achieve?
- Can I afford to buy sales leads?
Step 1 – Identifying my target market.
While you can, and should be running lead generation campaigns for each of your markets, I’m limiting myself to just one at the moment. It’s important not to try targeting everyone at once, because it won’t work. For my campaign, my target customer has the following attributes:
- A small business,
- in the UK,
- selling industrial equipment to other businesses,
- with an existing website,
- that the company wants to improve.
Step 2 – What is the duration of my lead generation campaign?
To avoid a lead generation campaign becoming a money-swallowing black hole, it’s important to set a start and end date. It’s also going to be necessary to evaluate and make adjustments to the campaign periodically.
Based on the current volume of traffic to my website, my pathetic advertising budget and the amount of competition in the market, I’m going to give myself 6 long months to achieve my goals. And because my budget is precious, I’m going to evaluate & modify my approach at the end of each month.
At the end of the campaign, I’ll measure my goals and budget against my new clients and income and decide whether this type of campaign has a worthwhile return on investment. If it does, I’ll try it again. If not, I’ll get a job at McDonalds.
Step 3 – Outlining my lead generation goals
Now that I know who I’m targeting, I need to focus on exactly what I want my lead generation campaign to deliver. To do that, I like to work backwards.
I know that I need to find 20 new clients this year to support my growth plans. So that’s my end point. Using this figure, I can determine how many people I need to get clicking through to my website management sales page each month.
The following figures are partly based on lead generation campaigns I’ve done in the past, and partly on assumption.
I’m going to start off by assuming that 20% of people who are qualified leads will decide to hire me. So, for every 5 people who want to hire me, 1 person will. I therefore need to get 100 interested people onto that page.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that not everyone who visits my site will actually want to hire a website manager. Some people will just be fishing for information, and others may decide that my service doesn’t suit their business objectives or budget. I’ll therefore assume that only 1 in 10 people visiting my website management sales page is qualified; meaning my required number of leads has just jumped to 1000.
Seen as I’m giving myself 6 months to achieve my goals, I therefore need to find a way to attract 167 people to my sales page each month.
Step 4 – Can I afford to buy my leads?
While 167 responses each month doesn’t sound excessively difficult, it’s still outside my advertising budget. A quick look at my Google Adwords account tells me that I can expect to pay anything up to £1.50 per click Google sends my way. At 1000 required clicks, I’m going to be spending £75 to acquire each new client (assuming each client pays me £200 a month).
I’m not really willing to spend more than 4% of my sales turnover on lead generation. So if I assume that I attract 20 new clients each paying me £200 a month, my turnover for 6 months will be £24000. With a 4% advertising spend, my budget is £960, so I’m going to have to come up with a couple of very cheap (or free) methods to supplement my online advertising.
And that’s what I’ll be doing in the next part of this series, so stay tuned.
