7 Success Factors for an Effective Online Lead Generation System By: Derrick Markotter IdealMedia Marketing IdealMedia.co.za
7 Success Factors for an Effective Online Lead Generation System Brought to you by: IdealMedia Marketing 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. 2013 IdealMedia Marketing 7 Success Factors for an Effective Online Lead Generation System Page 2
Lead Generation System Success Factor #1: Devise A Clear Lead Generation Strategy Do you have a website? What is it doing for you right now? Is it a catalogue of your products and services or is it a silent salesman that brings customers to your door? Having a website doesn t mean customers will come knocking at your door. What is certain is that they are knocking on someone s door. Just look at these statistics: 97% of Internet users use the Internet to shop and 57% of those users characterize their behavior as shop online, purchase offline (NPD Group) 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 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) 61% of local searches result in purchases (TMP / comscore) 54% of Internet Users have substituted the Internet and local search for phone books (comscore networks) 35% of all searches are local (DM News) 7 Success Factors for an Effective Online Lead Generation System Page 3
Did you know that Google handles more than a billion search queries every day? 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 system 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 and they use local search terms such as Pretoria driving schools, Durban boat hire, Cape Town wedding venues and Johannesburg cheese makers? Are getting your share of these leads in your market? Are you currently paying for advertising in local directories, Yellow Pages or Google Adwords? Do you know how many direct leads you got through this type of marketing? Do you know what your Return On Investment (ROI) is on this type of broad marketing? These are all strategic marketing questions you should be asking. Why do you have a website in the first place? I imagine it's because you want more sales leads. Does your existing site give them to you? Do you know what search phrases or keywords attract visitors to your site? Lead generation websites should be laser targeted with a very clear Call To Action. The following 6 elements of a successful Lead Generation System will provide some pointers on developing an effective online Lead Generation Strategy that will deliver customers waiting for you to phone them right to your email inbox. 7 Success Factors for an Effective Online Lead Generation System Page 4
Lead Generation System Success Factor #2: Use Free Market Research Tools To Find Keyword Phrases Did you know that Google will tell you exactly what customers are looking for? It will tell you the exact keyword phrases they type into Google search and how many times it's done per month. As you can see for kitchen cupboards johannesburg and similar phrases it provides us with some pretty useful numbers. A potential 310 prospects! What does this look like for YOUR business? A long tail keyword is a search term that's three or more words long. Examples would be... Sandton plumbing specialists Family doctor in Bloemfontein Remodeling companies near Springs Since you're probably a local business, focus on keywords that use your city or suburb name. This 7 Success Factors for an Effective Online Lead Generation System Page 5
way you're guaranteed to find people who are in your area looking for your services. Tip: The reason to use long-tail location-based keywords is simple most businesses don't. They still get a lot of traffic, but people just don't know any better. They are extremely easy to optimize for, and they are much cheaper than the shorter terms if you're using pay-per-click advertising. To use the Google Keyword Planner, you will need to have a free Google Adwords account, which you can create here: http://www.google.com/adwords/ If you spot anything with more than 400 searches per month, you'd better be bidding on that keyword and creating a lead generation campaign for it. You want them to send you their names and phone numbers and be expecting your call. 7 Success Factors for an Effective Online Lead Generation System Page 6
Lead Generation System Success Factor #3: Create Laser Targeted Lead Generation Campaigns This element is closely associated with the previous element. You can t just use a shotgun approach to Internet-based marketing. There are too many keywords and too many options. You need to make sure that you attract buyers and not browsers. You don t want people doing research on a specific topic. You want people with their credit cards or wallets in hand, ready to buy. Which of the following people would you want to leave their name, email and phone number and be waiting for you to call them? Would you rather have people searching for (as an example:) fitness or fitness trainer johannesburg or the difference between wedding and wedding venues in cape town These are simple examples but you can see how they apply to YOUR business. In both instances it's the difference between someone looking for information and someone looking for help. It is important to understand why local keywords are different from normal keywords and how to apply them to your business. Stop wasting precious marketing money on broad marketing and advertising campaigns with no defined or measurable ROI. Invest in a targeted lead generation campaign that focuses on customers who need your product or service and are looking for the best place to source it from. 7 Success Factors for an Effective Online Lead Generation System Page 7
Lead Generation System Success Factor #4: Create Specialised Landing Pages For Lead Generation A business website is generally an information site with an overview of your products and services, your facilities, your employees and details on where to get hold of you. It's usually an electronic brochure and it's designed to get people to navigate around it. It's probably more suited to people who are searching for general information in other words, doing research. It's not optimized for lead generation. It doesn t ask the right questions. It doesn t get them to take action. It just gives them more reasons to look around, even perhaps at your competitor s website. 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. Specialist Lead Generation websites are highly targeted to the demographics of the buyers described in reason #3 above. We know from the Google Keyword Planner exactly what they are searching for. A lead generation website should give them exactly that and then get them to take action. We call it the Call To Action or the Single Sales Objective. Tip: We use small but highly targeted lead generation websites to get the exact customer that we identified in reasons #2 and #3 to give us their phone numbers and email addresses. We get them to 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 on 011 478 0622 7 Success Factors for an Effective Online Lead Generation System Page 8
Lead Generation System Success Factor #5: Measure and Optimize Your Lead Generation You should be paying for marketing that works. That s obvious. But small businesses often have no idea if their marketing and advertising are living up to their expectations. Small businesses don t have the large marketing budgets that the big corporations do and it is crucial that you get the best 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 their marketing investment? Small business can learn from large corporations. They test. More specifically they split test or perform A/B testing. That means they create 2 variations of all their advertising, test them against each other and then keep the better performing and discard the poorer performing one. But is doesn t stop there. They create a new ad and test it against the winner to see if it becomes the new winner. And so they optimize their advertising. Once they have ads that drive the right customers to them, they scale up. It means they spend more on those winning ads to get more customers. They know they're not risking money because they tested. The return from typical advertising is hard to track for small business. Do you have a tracking mechanism to test the conversion rate of your advertising spend? Or are you aiming in a general direction, hoping it may hit some of the time? A well designed Online Lead Generation campaign will give you the ability to test on a small scale and split test what works in your market. Once you hit the target consistently you can scale up to drive all the business you can handle. 7 Success Factors for an Effective Online Lead Generation System Page 9
Lead Generation System Success Factor #6: Overcome Cost and Complexity 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's not that complex and you manage how much you spend on acquiring new leads. You fit it into your current budget and grow it as it starts paying for itself. You can get started for around R50 to R100 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 an online lead generation system. Setting up lead generation sites isn't complex. It just requires a little thinking and some very specific content that will appeal to your market. Tip: Ask your current customers and prospects what keywords they would use to look for your product or service on the Internet and let us help you refine them to get your first highlytargeted, qualified prospects expecting you to phone them. Your current customers are the best ones to describe what they are looking for and what you provide. See, it's easy. 7 Success Factors for an Effective Online Lead Generation System Page 10
Lead Generation System Success Factor #7: Lease A Site From Local Lead Generation Experts Leasing a lead generation website that is specifically suited to your target market is ideal to test how effective Internet lead generation can be for your target market without the cost of setting up a dedicated site. Leasing a site from a local lead generation expert means that you can be up and running in a matter of days. How many customers are you losing per month while you wait for your website to turn into a lead generation site? As you can see, there are enough reasons to start by leasing a lead generation website from us today. Let us help you with our Lead Generation Plan on one of our specialist websites. 7 Success Factors for an Effective Online Lead Generation System Page 11
Thank you for taking the time to read through this short report. I'd love to have a chance to talk with you for even just 15 minutes about your current marketing strategy to see if 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 011 478 0622 and we can set up a time to chat on Skype. Thank you again for reading this report. Yours in business, Derrick Markotter IdealMedia Marketing CC Tel: 011 478 0622 derrick@idealmedia.co.za LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/derrickmarkotter Skype: derrick.markotter 7 Success Factors for an Effective Online Lead Generation System Page 12