Sales Lead Generation Can New Online Marketing Systems Deliver a Better ROI?

Cold Calling and Direct Mail are Dead:

If you have been using lists, direct mail or cold calling to for sales lead generation as part of your online sales camapigns, you will understand how difficult it is to get a decent return on investment by using these methods to generate new business.

The Yellow Pages vs Search Engines?

We had a recent Linkedin Discussion on local search titled:

“How Big a Threat is Google’s Local Search to the Yellow Pages?

Here were some of the comments we received:

“It seems that around here,Google, local and not-so-local, has replaced Yellow Pages unless one’s target market is senior citizens.”

“I’m just glad that I don’t won or have any stock in YP.”

“I was recently told by a former SVP of YellowPages.com & SuperPages.com that both company goals this year is to come in at a 45% loss! How would you like to have that as your company goal?”

“For most local businesses it’s relatively easy to get on Page 1 and even Number 1. That usually knocks out one of the directory places.”

“Yellow pages online still has an edge due to multiple listings and wide acceptance but of course yellow page advertising print or online is not cheap !

The thing that will tip in favour of Google local search will be the increasing number of people doing mobile searches for businesses.”

“Google’s Local Search is a large threat to the print yellowpages. The ability to access the web virtually anywhere/anytime makes the print publication obsolete. Not to mention that the books are only published once a year and businesses move, go out of business and so on during that time.”

Clearly Online search is fast becoming the predominant way to find local suppliers.

To gain advantage from this trend we need to understand how people are searching and what factors influence their actions in selecting potential suppliers over the internet.

Recognise How Online Buying Research Is Done Today:

The way people search on the internet usually follows the following pattern:

• Initially they browse to learn broadly about a typical subject or get answers to a question. If they are intending to buy something they wait until they have built up knowledge on:
  • Feature or benefit Comparisons
  • Price comparisons
  • Possible suppliers to buy from (online and offline). If offline 70% will be within 15 mile radius of their home or office location

• Fill out an online quotation request form or call (a telephone call or a visit). The majority of buyers prefer to fill out an online form rather than calling. There are a few reasons for this:
  • Businesses are not open 24 hours – the web is.
  • People often prefer to avoid talking to a sales person until they have the information they need to make an informed decision.
• Select a short list of 1 to 3 possible suppliers based on the trust and confidence built up from impressions gained from the website and experience with any other contact made.

Traditionally SME Websites Have Delivered Little New Business

Traditionally small businesses have set up a website for reasons such as:

• To have an online brochure or business card
• To keep up with industry competitors
• Because customers expect it
• To be credible with new business prospects
• To generate new business sales

In 2010 – more and more website owners  want to generating new business enquiries.

As the internet matures and generating new business online becomes the norm. business owners are beginning to ask questions such as:

• How can I find new business through my website?
• How can prospective customers find my website?
• How serious are they as potential buyers?
• How can I stand out from my competitors?

In response to this trend in online marketing, one question that I keep asking myself is:

“Should business owners continue with  traditional promotional methods or is there a better way to generate sales leads online at a better ROI for the business?”

I am not knocking the use of traditional methods online – many of these make lots of sense and should be employed. Techniques such as:

Online Advertising

This can include pay per click advertising and link purchasing from sites that attract traffic in your specific market niche. This can generate significant traffic and the ROI is easily and instantly measurable. As the internet matures the costs of advertising can become prohibitively expensive for many small businesses.

Online Demos:

The use of interactive demos or videos clearly make a lot of sense and should be employed as appropriate.

PR and Article Promotion

Again these can be used successfully in many cases but you should not expect a lot of traffic. However a benefit of placing articles in highly sites with a high authority can be of substantial benefit to your organic search optimisation efforts.

Organic SEO:

This take time and patience but in the long term can deliver better ROI that paid advertising.

The following benchmark by marketing Sherpa indicates that the quality of sales leads from organic search is over twice as good as from paid search ads.

Clearly any new lead generation system should compliment rather than replace the traditional methods summarised above.

Key Factors For Improving The ROI  of Online Lead Campaigns:

A recent commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Silverpop identifies the following 4 Key Performance Indicators (KPI) that contribute most to improving the ROI of a lead generation investment program.

These were identified as:

1. Profiling and targeting – To learn who your best potential customers are and how to attract them to your website. This involves identifying keywords to drive your lead generation process
2. Lead scoring – To model how lead quality (measured in the form of a score) changes in response to specific events or triggers
3. Content – To determine what buyers needed at different stages of the decision-making cycle
4. Nurture early-stage buyers – To engage potential buyers successfully

I believe that the above 4 principles should form the foundation of any online lead generation system that aims to generate a better ROI than traditional methods alone.

I would add a 5^th and additional KPI for any small business owner that has an existing website.

1. Website Benchmarking – to identify issues with the website content that need addressing to support future lead generation campaigns.

If you accept the logic as I have outlined above, then the next question is:

How can you build such a system to deliver more sales at a better ROI than traditional online marketing methods.

I will deal with that question and describe a specific system to achieve this goal in my next post.

If you enjoyed reading this you can get:

SEO Tips  by Email

SEO Tips by RSS

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.