Leveraging Your Web Leads
As a business owner, you want to acquire as many high-quality leads as you can. Once you have gathered those online leads, you need to figure out how to leverage them so that they give the most benefit to you.
The first thing that must happen once a lead comes to you is interaction. You need to respond to them and begin to build a relationship. The best way to lose business is to not respond to those people who have reached out to you. The web is all about instant response. If you aren’t prepared to do that, you have no business being connected online at all. So, how do you make sure to take full advantage of your leads? The following are some helpful tips that will enable you to make the most of your online leads:
- Analytics: Analytics are critical to your success because they will reveal to you the source of your online traffic as well as which keywords are bringing the most leads. You should use this information to figure out which sources supply you with the largest amount of converting traffic as well as helping you to do everything possible to build up that source.
- An attractive offer: A large part of your business’s appeal is the offer(s) that you are extending to your online connections. You need to make sure that your offers are tempting, relevant, and timely. If you notice that your leads are decreasing, you should look at what you are offering. Try to offer something different and then compare the results of that offer with the one before that. That should tell you a lot. The only way that you will be able to get any solid answers is by consistently testing so that you can determine exactly what your customers consider valuable.
- Lead forms: If you use a lead generation form that is web based, such as a form that your customers need to complete when asking about your products and/or services, you should ask yourself if it is effective. If you have a large number of questions on your form, you may be detracting from the power of the form. Remember that most people have no interest in sitting at a computer for hours and filling out a form. You should make the questions relevant and useful. If you find that they aren’t, you shouldn’t have them on your form.
- Be quicker: When it comes to successfully getting and converting leads, the more quickly you respond to them, the more successful you will be. It is a commitment that you will just have to make. If you receive a communication and don’t really have the time to fully respond to the question or comment that you have received, at the very least, you need to acknowledge the communication and let the person know that you will be back in touch with a proper response soon. Of course, it goes without saying that you must follow through with your commitment to respond in full soon. It is the least that you can do since the other person was nice enough to take the time to look at your presence and put some thought into interacting with you. If you are kind and fair with the people who want to interact with you online, you will reap wonderful benefits. They will regard you as a subject matter expert and you will be strengthening your business’s reputation.
- Distributing leads: If a lot of leads are coming to you (more than you can handle by yourself), you probably have others helping you. So, how do you make it work? Because of the fact that your online connections expect very quick responses, you can’t afford to let anything just sit. It is a really good idea to delegate the leads to the most appropriate people to handle them and to push them to respond as quickly as possible.
Conclusion
Your web leads are at the core of the business that you acquire from your online interactions. Lead generation is a powerful process that brings success to your business. You need to use it in the most effective way that you can. Successfully leveraging your leads is not a difficult process and you will see extremely positive results as a result of your efforts. If you can commit to always responding within a very short period of time and putting yourself in the shoes of the lead, you will undoubtedly succeed.
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Via LinkedIn Groups
Group: American Society of Business Publication Editors
Discussion: Leveraging Your Web Leads
Good article.
I think two other important factors are consistency and timing. You need to consistently follow up on leads, at least once a month (checking back), and build a relationship with each potential client. It could take 6-12 months sometimes to finally be able to offer a proposal or close a project. It’s often just timing; the person is not ready or there is nothing they need at the time. Stay active, consistent, and keep in front of each client so you’re on their mind when an opportunity arises.
Chad Robert Stewart
Director of Marketing
Global Strategist & Senior Consultant
Wolf Management Consultants, LLC
2223 Avenida De La Playa
La Jolla, CA 92037
858-436-5667
Posted by Chad Stewart
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Group: eMail Marketing Group
Discussion: Leveraging Your Web Leads
That's exactly what our core business model is. We take in fresh leads from companies and monetize and add value to them which creates extra cash flow streams for them. We take their leads and have them cleaned and mailed to generate cleaned deliverable email leads or we have them called and dnc'd to generate leads with good phones (successes). This adds a lot of value to the lead feeds for our clients. 🙂 I only wish we had more clients to do this for, we rely 100% on joint ventures and word of mouth to get the word out about our services.
Allen Bisconti
Posted by Allen Bisconti
Your points on leveraging your web leads are all very good. Hopefully I can add more value to the points you have made.
The first would be to have a plan before you even begin your online lead generation. Too often I see business owners and SEO/SEM firms concentrate solely on the lead generation aspect without any consideration being given to "conversion".
In fact, I'd go so far as to say there is a universal emphasis placed on the importance of lead generation, with little thought given to conversion.
All of the lead generation in the world won't make a business a single penny until and unless they can convert those leads to clients/customers.
I find the most common mistake made is on failing to plan for the conversion of most web lead generation campaigns.
Thinking about, and planning for the conversion is where the lead generation plan should begin. Reverse engineer your web lead generation starting with the conversion plan for those leads..
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Group: Web Developer & Graphic Designer
Discussion: Leveraging Your Web Leads
Thanks for posting this article. Some very good advice for a young company like ourselves, and indeed for any company with an online presence.
Posted by Dean Ryan
This was a very informative article. I learned a lot that I will take back to our team.
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