You open the email entitled “marketing report” and glance over some of the figures.
You see that the cost of advertising is high but there is no mention of how many leads or sales your marketing has produced this month.
You search further to see any kind of positivity or sign that your marketing is working. You glance at the online part of your report; online is supposed to show you ROI.
This section of the report only tells you that your search rankings for some keywords have went up a little.
Your traffic has increased, but leads and sales look much the same.
With businesses only converting 2% of their leads you need to find a better, more effective online lead generation strategy.
You are so glad that you have worked really hard and built up a great network over the years as this networking is your main source of generating leads.
You know that this way of selling is not scale-able and it won’t get your business where it wants to be.
So you arrange a meeting to talk about why your marketing is not working anymore and discuss what you can do.
Stop panning for gold
The problem is a lot of businesses are in the same boat as you. They scourge the internet, reading all the marketing advice possible, looking for that one golden nugget solution that will transform their marketing. This is similar to panning for gold.
Sound familiar?
I’m sorry to be the one to break it to you but this golden nugget doesn’t exist. In order for your marketing to be successful you have to do a lot of different things correctly.
But don’t worry.
There is good news.
In this post we will discuss some solid lead generation ideas that will get rid of your lead generation problems once and for all.
So you can concentrate on doing what you do best.
Ingredients of great lead generation
To generate great relevant leads you will need a lot more than traffic; traffic does not equal leads so please don’t focus on generating more traffic on a monthly basis.
When you attract the right kind of people to your website your traffic may actually go down temporarily.
Inbound marketing is what you need to rid yourself of this problem and it can help you to grow your business 10-50% in a year if done correctly.
There are a few things you will need before you begin:
- A stand out product or service
- Great customer services
- A business blog
- At least 2 buyer personas, for more information on buyer personas read our B2B guide to inbound marketing
- Social media profiles on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and any others your buyer personas use
- Relevant regular content your customers are drawn to, usually problem based.
- Some landing pages and calls-to-actions
- Some offers that will entice your visitors to become a lead: whitepapers, ebooks or guides
- Marketing software, take a look at our big marketing automation comparison for some ideas
- A lead nurturing programme to nurture your leads into customers. Did you know 80% of sales are made on the 5th contact?
- One closed loop marketing process that takes your visitors right through to becoming customers. This may involve free trials , quotes etc
- An Inbound marketing agency
- 10 hours a month at least to work with your agency
- £2,000- £6,000 a month marketing budget
I could go on and talk about how you actually put all these things into place but I’m guessing you don’t have time for all of that, you are more interested in the benefits.
So for a marketing investment of around £2,000 a month you can see your business grow by 15- 20% in one year. This is the reality.
Conclusion
You now look forward to your marketing reports as each one shows how many leads and customers you acquired this month.
You can see in one easy to understand graph where your marketing leads are coming from and you can see that over time your leads and customers are steadily growing.
You can relax knowing that how to generate leads is one less thing that will keep you up at night.
Now it’s your turn
What marketing challenges keep you up at night? Share your thoughts in the comments below.