If you're a business owner, self-employed professional or salesperson, you know that having plenty of qualified sales leads means a steady stream of new sales and customers. Sales are the lifeblood of any business and leads are the lifeblood of sales. You also know that you can generate leads online instead of more traditional means such as cold calling, but are you generating as many qualified leads as you could be?
The answer is most likely no. Despite the fact that the web has been with us for roughly 17 years now, generating leads online efficiently and profitably continues to be a mystery to most.
Successfully generating leads online boils down to three simple steps that you can apply to any marketing campaign. Matter of fact, what follows works equally well offline as well. (Have you heard direct mail is making a comeback? But that's a topic for another time.)
The first step in any campaign is to know the market you wish to sell to. The more specific you can be about your market, the better. A rookie mistake is assuming everyone's a prospect.
Today, as an advertiser, you have so many ways of targeting specific groups and types of people that you need to be very precise about who you want to reach. The more precise your targeting and the more your message matches up to the needs, wants and desires of a precise audience, the more leads you'll generate.
If you have an established business, analyze your customer list using the 80/20 rule: find the 20% of your customers who generate 80% of your revenue and create a campaign to attract more people just like them.
When you're crafting online ads, whether it is text, image, animation or even video, you need to speak the same language as your customers and clients. Focus on their problems, their concerns, their emotions, and show them how what you have to offer solves those problems and mitigates those concerns. Part of knowing your market is to know the words they use to describe your products and services. Use those words and phrases in your advertising, even if it is different from what's commonly accepted or considered a best practice in your industry. You need to speak the customer's language to connect with them.
It still amazes me at the amount of advertising we're all exposed to each day that breaks the rules above. Advertisers continue to focus on promoting their company name and phone number instead of talking about the problems their prospects have and the solutions they can offer. Talk about your prospect's wants and needs and show how your product satisfies those.
With the information collected in step 1, you now know a great deal about your best customers. You've given thought to the problem your products and services solve and you're now ready to create an ad that uses language your prospects are comfortable with.
To create a compelling lead-generation ad, here are three things to keep in mind:
a) Don't try to sell … yet
A lead-generation ad's purpose is to produce leads for you, not to do the heavy lifting of selling.
This is especially true with online ads where space is often extremely limited. Google Adwords ads and Facebook ads are, for the most part, tiny compared with the space afforded by traditional newspaper ads, television or direct mail.
Your online ad's sole purpose is to get potential prospects to click on it so they can visit a page on your website. That's it. Expecting your ad to do the entire sales job is asking far too much.
Once your ad has been clicked, the next step is making sure that you send your visitors to a well-crafted, lead-generation-focused landing page. A rookie mistake at this stage is running ads that send people to your home page or a page that asks them to call a sales rep.
Your landing page's job is to further persuade people to take the next step with you by requesting more information. It needs to continue building upon the message presented in the ad your prospect clicked on. This is a crucial point, as most online advertisers still display their ads, get clicks, but then see 75-95% of those visitors abandon their site. Most of those visitors leave because the page they've been sent to does not appear to be in line with the ad they just clicked on.
b) Focus on the problem you solve and present a solution
Let's say you own a real-estate investment firm. Your message could be the problem of low returns and high risk that investors face in the stock market, and how they can protect and grow their money in real estate instead.
In point form, the structure of your ad would be something like this:
- Problem: high risk and loss of capital when investing in the stock market
- Solution: free report shows how real estate value never goes to zero and provides positive cash flow, appreciation, and mortgage paydown over time.
If you're not keen to focus on the problem and insist on talking about the product, you still need to focus your copy on what your prospective customers and clients will receive as a result of taking the next step with you. What's the benefit to them?
c) Ask for action by offering something of value
It's now time to implement a classic offline lead-generation tactic on your website: offer free, valuable information that shows your prospects how to solve their problems, satisfy their needs, and fulfill their most important desires. Get them to request the information from you now, so that you can follow up with them. The catch is that they need to provide their contact information by signing up via your website in return for the free information. By offering information, you give your prospects an easy, low-risk step that moves them further down the path towards completing a sale.
A critical point to understand is that the power of lead-generation marketing is in the follow-up stage. During the follow-up stage you can further educate your prospects, build trust, start forming a relationship and then begin a sales and conversion process.
The great thing about lead-generation marketing is that the leads you produce can be followed up for a long, long time. This means that with the right process in place, even if some of your leads choose not to buy right away, in six months from now the timing might be better. This means that over time you can convert a high percentage of your leads into customers even if they don't buy in the first week or two after they signed up.
A good starting point for most lead-generation websites is to be converting between 5-15% of total visitors into leads. The number of leads you convert into customers during the follow-up stage will vary greatly depending on how long you follow up, the number of steps in your sequence and other factors. (In a future article we'll look more closely at how this is done.)
You succeed at lead generation when you offer your prospects information that they can't wait to get their hands on. That information has to show them how they can satisfy their needs and wants or solve their most pressing problems. You ultimately succeed when your follow-up process converts a percentage of your leads into customers.
Adam Killam is a Vancouver-based Internet marketing consultant and a regular conference speaker and blogger on the topic. Visit adamkillam.com
