The 7 REASONS Why Internet Lead Generation For Small Business FAILS

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1 Inside this booklet you ll discover... The 7 REASONS Why Internet Lead Generation For Small Business FAILS ( and how to fix it!) Presented By: Emily Cressey

2 The 7 REASONS Why Internet Lead Generation For Small Business FAILS Brought to you by: Emily Cressey, Member The River Rock Group, LLC An important note to all business owners... The Internet is a powerful marketing tool. We're going to cover some of the most important aspects of marketing your business online in this report but you must keep in mind that there is no guarantee of your success in these pages. While this report will give you invaluable information regarding how you should be marketing your business, there are far too many factors at play to make any such guarantee. This document is copyrighted and protected by all applicable laws. Reproduction of this document is strictly forbidden unless permission is given by the author prior to reproduction The River Rock Group, LLC

3 Lead Generation Failure: Reason #1 No Clear Lead Generation Strategy... Do you have a website? What is it doing for you right now? Many business websites serve as a brochure showcasing staff or products, but fail when it comes to turning browsers into buyers. Having a website doesn t mean customers will come knocking at your door. In fact, visitors may not even find your site when they search for your product or service online. And if they do come to your site, how many visitors ultimately decide to do business with you? A successful website needs both traffic and conversion. Website visitors x Conversion Rate = New Leads The good news is, we can tell in advance whether people are looking for your business online. Chances are good that they are! Take a look at these statistics: Internet Users Are Shopping Online and Buying Locally! 97% of American internet users use the internet to shop. 57% of those say they browse online and then purchase offline. (NPD) 90% of online commercial searches result in offline purchases. (proprietary research / comscore) 82% of local searchers follow up offline via an in-store visit, phone call or purchase (TMP / comscore) 80% of spending budgets are spent within 50 miles of the home (DMA / proprietary) 74% of internet users perform local searches (Kelsey Group) 73% of online activity is related to local content (Google) 66% of Americans use online local search, like Google local search 61% of local searches result in purchases (TMP / comscore) 54% of Americans have substituted the internet and local search for phone books (comscore networks) 35% of all searches are local (DM News) 25% of internet searches have a purely local, commercial

4 focus (Kelsey-Bizrate) Do you know how many search queries Google handles in a month? July 2010: 10,461,000,000 August 2009: 9,088,414,036 August 2008: 6,620,663,191 The statistics for local search is even more impressive. Locally-targeted searches grew by 58% in 2008 with more than 15.7 billion local searches for the year. This will be the trend for the foreseeable future as people are turning to search engines to find local products and services. More and more people are using search engines like Google to find local services and products. When last did you look through the Yellow Pages for a commercial cleaning company, wedding venue, Lasik eye surgery clinic or hydroponic garden systems in your local area? Local search is the fastest growing element of Internet search as more and more people are turning to Google to find instant answers. How often do you hear, I just Googled it? Online shoppers type phrases that are considered local search terms like these: Seattle driving schools Miami homes for sale Sydney boat hire Boston wedding venues Manchester widget makers Are you getting your share of these leads in your market? Are you currently paying for advertising in local directories, Yellow Pages and Google Adwords? Do you track how many direct leads you ve gotten through this type of marketing? Do you know what your Return On Investment (ROI) is for the marketing you currently do? These are all strategic marketing questions you should be asking yourself. Why do you have a website in the first place? I guess it is because you want more sales leads. Does your existing site

5 bring in more leads than you can handle? Do you have an Internet marketing strategy that tracks your results and is improved upon regularly? Do you know what search phrases or keywords attract them to your site? Lead generation websites should laser focused with VERY CLEAR CALLS TO ACTION. The number one failure many businesses make online is the failure to turn browsers into buyers. The first step is attracting traffic. The second step is to capture the person s contact information, turning them into a lead you can follow up with. Buyers need an average of 7 points of contact with your business before they make a purchasing decision. If they visit your website and then leave, you ll never have a chance to follow up with them. If they give you some information while they re at your site, such as their name and address, a phone number, or even an address, you can follow up with a proven marketing system that will convert those prospects into customers. The following 6 reasons for Lead Generation Failure will provide some pointers on developing an effective Online Lead Generation Strategy that will deliver customers who waiting for your phone call, right to you inbox.

6 Lead Generation Failure: Reason #2 Not Using Free Market Research Tools To Figure Out What Prospects Want Did you know that Google will tell you exactly what your customers are looking for? It will tell you the exact phrases Internet users type into the Google search engine, and how many times each phrase is searched for each month. (Just type in to try this free tool for yourself.) Let s look at an example. As you can see, we re researching the phrase Fitness Trainer New York and Google s free tool provides us with some pretty useful numbers. For just this simple phrase and a few variations, Google shows there are approximately 3,560 searches per month. If you were a fitness trainer in New York city, all of those folks would be

7 potential prospects. Could you handle 70 new prospects per month if you just got 2% of those (which is quite achievable)? What does this look like for YOUR business? (By the way, we used a phrase match rather than a broad match to get more accurate results, but more on that when we meet.) Try It Yourself To See How Your Prospects Are Looking For You! In general, a good keyword phrase is a term that s more than three words long. Examples would be... Orlando plumbing specialists Family doctor in Chicago Remodeling companies near Houston If you run a local business, focus on keywords that use your city s name. This way you're guaranteed to find people who are in your area looking for your services. Use this tool to look for keywords that have a good number of searches every month. If you spot anything with more than 300 searches per month, you'd better be creating a traffic-generation strategy to bring those searchers to your website. Then, using the idea from Tip #1, converting those visitors into leads you can follow up with. You want them to send you their names and phone numbers and be expecting your call.

8 Lead Generation Failure: Reason #3 Failing To Create Laser-Focused Lead Generation Campaigns This reason for failure is closely associated with the previous two points. It s important to match what your visitors are looking for online, with what you re offering them on your website. That s the best way to convert browsers into buyers, by offering them precisely the information they re looking for. You can t just use a shotgun approach to Internet-based marketing. There are too many keywords and too many options. The people you want to attract to your site are those who are specifically shopping for what you have to offer. Which of the following people would you want to leave their name, and phone number and be waiting for you to call them? Which search term do you think has a better-targeted customer behind it? If you were a personal trainer in NYC, which search terms do you think more highly-qualified prospects would be using? Fitness Or Fitness Trainer New York If you were a grand hotel in Boston, which search term would be a better fit for you to sell more conference rooms? Wedding Or Wedding venues in Boston These are simple examples but you can see how the idea could

9 apply to YOUR business. More examples see if you can pick out which keyword phrases have better commercial intent: How to throw a party vs. Party Planners Seattle Kids birthday party ideas vs. Kids birthday party venues Wedding picture ideas vs. Wedding photographer reviews Types of microscopes vs. Microscopes for sale In both instances, it is the difference between someone looking for information and someone shopping for a solution. It is important to understand why local keywords are different from normal keywords and how to find the right keywords to your business. Stop wasting precious marketing dollars on broad marketing and advertising campaigns with no defined or measurable ROI. Invest in a targeted lead-generation campaign that focuses on attracting customers that needs your product or service and are looking for the best place to source it from. Special Bonus: Do you know what keywords your competitors are using? Do you want to find out? Our Lead Generation Assessment includes a review of all the competitors bidding in your niche, what they bid on and typically what they pay at no cost to you.

10 Lead Generation Failure: Reason #4 Using Your Own Website For Lead Generation Business websites are generally information-packed sites with an overview of your products and services, your facilities, lists of existing customers, and details on how to get in touch you. They are, in most instances, an electronic brochure and they are designed to invite people to navigate through the site and learn more about what you have to offer. Chances are, if you ve been in business for a while, you have a nice-looking site like this and you probably paid several thousand dollars to have it designed. However, it probably has one major short coming: It s likely not optimized to generate new leads for your business. It doesn t ask the right questions. It doesn t get visitors to take action. It just gives them more reasons to look around and compare you to the competition. Specially-designed Lead Generation Websites are highly targeted to the demographics of the buyers searching for your site described in section #3 above. We know from the Google Keyword Research Tool (in section #2) exactly what they are searching for and you should give them exactly that and then get them to take action, without providing a lot of other options. When this type of visitor visits your online site, you don t want to impress him with photos of your staff or let him be distracted surfing around the site. We just want to capture his information so we can follow up with him and get him into the sales funnel. We call this the Call To Action or the Single Sales Objective. The only purpose of the site is to capture the lead s contact information. Match Your Call To Action To The Visitor s Search To take it one step further, let s say you were a caterer, and you found people looking for terms like these online:

11 Bar Mitzvah caterer Seattle Business Lunch Meeting Food Wedding caterer Seattle Christmas party caterer Seattle Those might all be potential clients for you. However, rather than sending them all to the same home page on your website, you could direct this traffic toward specifically targeted lead-capture pages, designed to educate each prospect differently, and entice them to give you their contact information then and there. That is the main reason why company websites are not ideal vehicles for lead generation for your business. There are too many options and it is easy to surf around. Professional Tip: We use small but highly-targeted lead generation websites to attract the exact customers that we identified in sections #2 and #3 and convert them into leads who give us their phone numbers and addresses. We get them to agree to and expect your phone call. That s what we call a qualified lead or prospect. Don t you agree? Can we show you an example? Give me a call at

12 Lead Generation Failure: Reason #5 Not Measuring and Optimizing Their Lead Generation You should be paying for marketing that works. That s obvious. But most small businesses have no idea whether the marketing and advertising they pay for is generating strong results. Small businesses don t have the large marketing budgets that the big corporations do and it s crucial that you get the most bang for your buck. Why is it, then, that small businesses generally have fewer marketing controls in place to ensure that they get a good Return On Investment from their marketing? The reason is, small business either don t know how to track their marketing, or don t think they have the resources to be able to implement a good tracking system. Small business can learn from large corporations. Big companies test everything! More specifically they split test or A/B test all their marketing efforts. That means they create two variations of all their advertising, test them against each other and then keep the best performing ads and discard the losers. But is doesn t stop there. Next, they create another new ad and test that against the winner to see if outperforms. And so, by doing this again and again, they optimize their advertising. Once they have ads that drive the right customers to them at an affordable rate, they scale up distribution of the ads. The return from typical advertising is hard to track for small business. Do you have a tracking mechanism to test the conversion of your advertising expenditures? Or are you aiming in a general direction, hoping someone will see your ad and be inspired to call you. When they do call, you don t know how they found you, but you re sure glad they did. A well-designed Online Lead Generation campaign will give you the ability to test on a small scale to see what works in your market. Once you hit the target consistently you can scale up to drive all the business you can handle.

13 Lead Generation Failure: Reason #6 Not Starting Lead Generation Campaigns Because It Is Too Hard or Expensive I often hear small business owners say that this Internet Stuff is too hard to do and will cost a fortune. But nothing could be further from the truth. It is not that complex and you can tightly control how much you spend on acquiring new leads. You fit Internet lead generation into your current budget and do more of it once it starts paying for itself. You can get started for around $10 or $20 per day and test your market for a few days. And it doesn t take long to see the results. You can generate new leads in a matter of days with online lead generation. Setting up lead generation sites are not complex. It just requires a little thinking and some very specific content that will appeal to your market. Professional Tip: Ask your current customers and prospects what keywords they would use to look for your product or service on the Internet. Then let us help you refine their ideas to get your first highly targeted qualified prospects expecting your phone call. Your current customers are the best ones to describe what they are looking for and what you provide. See, it is easy.

14 Lead Generation Failure: Reason #7 Not Renting A Site From Local Lead Generation Expert Hiring a lead generation website that is specifically suited to your target market is ideal to test (see Section #5 on testing) how effective Internet Lead Generation can be for your target market (see Section #2 on targeting your market) without the high cost of setting up a dedicated site (see Section #6 on ease of implementation). Renting a site from a local lead generation expert means that you will be up and running in a matter of days. How many customers are you losing per month (see Section #2 to determine search volume) while you wait for your website to turn into a lead generation site (which is not recommended Section #4). As you can see, there are plenty of reasons to start generating leads online by renting a lead-generating website from us today. Let us help you with our 6 Step Lead Generation Plan on one of our specialist websites. By The Way: We also provide a lead-generation service where you pay only for performance. That is, you pay for leads, not for promises. All the risk of building a site, attracting visitors, and converting them into leads falls on us, not you. We will you the leads as soon as the visitor submits his information to our site, and you are free to follow up however you like. They ll be waiting for your call. Give us a call at if this is more suited to your requirements.

15 Next Steps: Thank you for taking the time to read through this short report. Your next step is to call or me in order to set up a website strategy consultation. It s free and there s no obligation. We will sit down and review your current marketing strategy to determine whether there is any way we can improve it by using the power of the Internet. It's possible that by starting with a small lead generation campaign, you could see huge results. So please, give me a call at and we can set up a time to meet. Thank you again for reading this report. Yours in business, Emily Cressey