The very life blood of almost any business is the ability to generate leads. The only reason for your SEO, social media, and other online marketing is to drive traffic and secure those leads needed to make sales. Without an aggressive online lead generation program your company just won’t survive. The major challenge is, of course, too many small companies making the same mistakes over and over again. If your online lead generation has been crashing and burning of late, you may want to review these common blunders and prepare for a possible re-do.
- The first mistake that gets made is that you’re not aware of your customer’s buying cycles or with the overall sales cycle itself. These are important cogs in the lead generation machine and need to be paid attention to. Too many small businesses and solopreneurs are ignoring the beginnings of a buying cycle. They just jump in when a particular customer or client is ready to buy. Too many think engaging a potential sale earlier in the cycle is a waste of time. The problem is when they are ready to buy, they may have already migrated to your competitors because they engaged with them earlier in their sales cycle.
- Too many also don’t realize that it is all about your sales funnel. It must be a well oiled lead generation and conversion machine. If you are running ads and working your SEO and social media marketing without a proper sales funnel system, you will crash and burn fairly quickly. You must examine and re-examine every single step in your sales funnel. If your funnel isn’t working properly, you are just wasting time, energy and money.
- So how’s your unique selling position lately? If you don’t have one, you will never develop any hot leads, drive traffic or make any sales. If you can’t show potential customers and clients why you are the perfect answer for them they will simply ignore you and venture over to your rivals. Finally, the reason your online lead generation is crashing is because you are sending your resources all over the place. You are marketing where there is no one who would possibly need you. An example would be if what you sell appeals to men and you have been wasting money and time out at Instagram which has an almost exclusively female audience. Without initial systems in place to turn your leads into sales, you will continue to spin your wheels until you are, finally, stuck in the mud with no way out.
-Written by Kevin Sawyer