Simple Steps for Lead Generation on a Shoestring

Not all companies are blessed with mega bucks to market their products.  In fact many companies don’t have a marketing budget at all. But whatever your organisations size or budget there are some simple, purse-friendly activities you can do to generate quality leads.

 

Are you making the most of Social Media?

Some companies are still dithering about on the edge afraid to dip their toes in.  What are you afraid of?  Jump right in! Those companies that are making moves to social media based engagement activities are those who are getting people to engage with their brand and according to a study carried out by LinkedIn, 82% of SMBs find social media an effective activity for generating leads. It’s cheap, if not free, you can reach hundreds if not thousands of potential customers and if you’re generating timely, interesting content you’ll get regular followers. Timely is the key here – don’t fall into the trap of bombarding people or they’ll easily switch off, no matter how compelling the subject. Likewise, don’t post for the sake of it and always make sure that any questions or feedback received through social media are responded to professionally and in a timely manner.  Today, social media should be a part of every company’s marketing strategy as a key part of client engagement, no matter what their industry or product.

 

Capture data… and then actually use it!

Capturing data when an enquirer first engages with your company is an extremely simple and effective way to build a first class database of contacts.  At every point of engagement make sure there’s some form of data capture, for example a clearly marked ‘contact me’ form on your website, logging details when someone calls and not forgetting all those contacts from your recent trade show.  So simple and yet so many company’s still don’t put in place steps to gather and record this information.  However, as more people become internet savvy don’t forget to ensure you have a simple, robust and easily accessible privacy policy in place, as, according to a recent report by Ipsos Mori , of those using the internet a massive 89% said they would avoid a company they considered would be unable to protect the privacy of their information. (Ed: Don’t worry, at First Directory we use banking level encryption to protect user information).

 

Ditch the ‘one size fits all’ approach

You may already have an ongoing marketing plan in place, but is it suitable for a new product? Don’t spend time, effort and money blanket marketing.  Really use the data you’ve captured to fine tune your marketing campaigns and use the information to establish the best targets for your new product.  Analyse existing customers’ previous purchases to see who the most likely purchasers are.

 

Once you’ve got them, don’t lose them!

Gaining a tight control over your client journey and ensuring every touch point is fine tuned is a fabulous way to ensure you are retaining as many customers to purchase as possible.  This is a bit of a spring cleaning activity to assess every aspect of the journey – where are people coming to your website from? What pages of your site are they visiting? How long are they spending on each page? Are they repeat visitors? How are your incoming calls answered?  How quickly are the calls answered? Bear in mind, the more touch points you have, the more likely you are to lose people in the funnel so try and keep the journey as simple as possible.

Companies with sizeable budgets can implement software to track the customer journey right from initial engagement through to final purchase and everything in between, allowing them to generate an accurate diagram of how ‘leaky’ their journey is and allowing them to pro-actively address areas of concern.  For smaller organisations, simply combining the implementation of some kind of data capture with subscription to a service such as Google Analytics will provide a great insight into how people navigate your site and at what point they’re dropping out of the funnel.

 

Don’t knock a gift horse in the mouth

When you’ve captured data, please use it!  So many companies go to the effort of capturing data, and then don’t use that information at a later date [sound of head hitting a brick wall]. These are THE best leads you can generate.  These people have specifically shown an interest in your product or service… are you crazy! Change your thoughts of ‘I don’t have time to do anything with the data’ to ‘I can’t afford NOT to do anything with it’.