The EASIEST Way to Get More Leads

• By keeninvestment
• Posted in business solution, retail business
• On June 4, 2013
• 26 Comments.

The EASIEST Way to Get More Leads

By Dave Lavinsky

Typically when I ask entrepreneurs and business owners what their number one challenge is, they reply that it’s getting new customers.

And one specific question I often get is which are the best ways to generate new leads and customers? Certainly there are many tactics to choose from: direct mail, radio advertising, referral programs, and so on.

Particularly over the past decade, smart businesses have learned that one of the easiest and most cost effective ways to generate new leads is going online.

Two of the benefits of online lead generation are that it’s quick and inexpensive. As you can imagine, it could take a month or more and several thousands of dollars to produce and run a radio, TV or print advertisement. Conversely, you can literally start generating leads online within an hour and with a budget of less than $100.

However, in my opinion, the real beauty of online lead generation is the metrics: you can track everything extremely closely to tell precisely how much money you spent, and calculate your return on investment.

On the other hand, traditional advertising like television, print and radio are much harder to track. For example, it’s very hard to accurately tell if a new customer came to you from a print ad or a television ad, and it’s even harder to tell which ad they responded to (e.g., the ad from newspaper A or the ad in newspaper B).

So, let me give you some tips and steps for creating an effective online lead generation campaign.

The first step is to determine what a lead is worth to you. For example, is a lead (for now, let’s define a “lead” as someone who visits your website) worth 10 cents to you? 25 cents? 5 dollars?

Clearly, you need to understand what leads are worth to you, so you can generate leads at a lower cost than that amount.

So, how do you determine the value of your leads? The answer is to know, track and constantly improve your conversion rates. Conversion rates refer to the percentage of website visitors who take the actions you desire.

For example, let’s say that for every 100 visitors that come to your website:

• 3 buy one of your products or services from your website
• 4 fill out your contact form
• 2 email you
• 6 call you

In this example, 15 visitors took a desired action; or you had a 15% overall conversion rate. And your conversion rate on buying online was 3%, on filling out the contact form 4%, and so on.

The next step is to determine how much each of these conversions is worth to you. For example, let’s say:

• Your average product or service sale on your website generates $50 of gross profit
• 25% of people completing your contact form eventually buy from you at an average gross profit of $100 each
• 50% of people who email you eventually buy from you at an average gross profit of $75 each
• 33% of people who call you eventually buy from you at an average gross profit of $150 each

In this example, for every 100 visitors, you would generate $625 in gross profit as follows:

• $150 in gross profit from online sales
• $100 in gross profit from contact form conversions
• $75 in gross profit from email conversions
• $300 in gross profit from telephone conversions

Which means that every visitor to your website is worth $6.25.  And as long as you can drive visitors to your website at less than this amount, you will generate profits.

Importantly, as mentioned above, not only must you know your conversion rates, but it is critical for you to continue to test and track to improve your conversion rates. For example, by changing the layout of certain pages of your website, you could boost overall conversions by perhaps 25%. This would mean that the average value per visitor to your website would jump from $6.25 to $7.81.

Not only would this jump allow you to boost profits, but it would enable you to outspend your competitors and advertise in places where they can’t (since they perhaps generate only $5 per visitor). This is how you can truly dominate your market.

So, let’s discuss where you can generate leads online. Here are my five favorites:

1. Search Engine Pay Per Click Advertising: Via pay per click advertising networks Google AdWords and Bing Ads (which covers ads on Yahoo and MSN), you can reach millions of web surfers. While many advertisers lose money with this method, if you know your metrics and improve them, you can make a killing here.
2. Social Media Marketing: You can drive lots of traffic to your website using social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and/or LinkedIn.
3. Social Media Advertising: Some social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and more recently Twitter have specific advertising programs to allow you to attract their members and drive them to your website.
4. Online Media Buying: Online media buying is purchasing ad space on desired websites. Unlike pay per click advertising where you pay each time someone clicks on your advertisement, media buying is typically charged on a CPM or cost per thousand basis. That is, you pay every time a visitor sees your ad, regardless of whether or not they click on it. The key is to find the sites on which your target customers are spending time.
5. Search Engine Optimization: Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of getting your website to be listed at the top of the search engine results for your most desired keywords and keyword phrases. Gaining top positions on certain keywords can drive hundreds, thousands, and even hundreds of thousands of leads to your site each week. However, SEO results do not happen overnight; you need to have a strategy in place and invest in this lead generation technique.

I want to mention a key point here. You are more likely to be successful if you focus on doing an excellent job executing on just ONE of these five tactics, rather than doing an average job executing on ALL five tactics. So, my recommendation for you is to start with just one tactic above and gain success. Then you can start to add the other tactics.

And finally, when marketing online, it’s important that you have a lead nurturing process in place. Specifically, not every visitor who comes to your website is ready to buy right away. So, make sure you have processes in place to capture those leads (perhaps by offering a free report or video in exchange for their email address), and then send emails to them to nurture and maintain your relationship with them over time. Because when you nurture them, when they are ready to buy, they will most likely buy from you as they know and trust you more than the competition.