Get a 15% Increase in Leads for your Business in 3 Weeks

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A bold goal: if you implement these ideas, you can increase your business 15% over the next 3 weeks.

This series of blog posts outlines a strategic approach to getting more leads  into your business. More leads results in more customers which results in more revenue.  (At least theoretically- if you are not converting those leads, then all bets are off. A topic for another day.)

Our goal is to gain a 15% increase in leads for your business within the next several weeks. This is an excerpt from a longer course in lead generation strategy and tactics- strategies for quickly increasing your business opportunities.

If you are online – we are increasing traffic to your website(s).  If you’re offline we are bringing more customers into your store or office.

What we are going to do is show you how to package a series of tactics – online and offline – into a more effective, more strategic marketing program that quickly ramps up your revenue.  More strategic because you will know exactly how much to invest in each marketing channel to produce your target revenue.

Increase your lead generating channels

Often businesses are built on just one lead source or channel.  It might be search engine traffic, pay-per-click, or email marketing, but whatever it is, if you business is built on only one lead source, perhaps even two, you are vulnerable.  That’s because markets and technologies change and what worked yesterday might not tomorrow.

I am going to show you how to work with multiple streams of business opportunities.  Just one new lead stream can improve your business overnight, and by strategically adding complimentary lead programs, as well as strengthening existing programs, your business can have more sustainable profits in record time.

In this series of blog posts, I hope to persuade you to amplify and diversify your lead generating efforts so that you have multiple marketing channels working on your behalf. You might be tempted to skip over this first section since it probably looks like too much work. Don’t. Don’t skip these setup steps.

Lead Generation = Marketing = Attracting Customers to your Business

Where do you put marketing on your P&L? Quit looking at marketing as a sunk cost.  I want you to finally start looking at marketing as a part of your cost of sales, rather than as an expense to be reduced.

When you think of marketing as part of your cost of sales, the relationship between marketing and revenue becomes clearer. You realize there is a multiplier effect on your marketing budget so that for each dollar you spend on marketing you can expect a return of 5-10 times that amount in revenue, sometimes more. Once you realise that you can plan your marketing investment as a way to reach your revenue goals.

Without this understanding you will tend to hold back, trying to keep your marketing expense “in line,” and it is shocking how much this holding back on marketing can hurt your business.

This connection may not be evident if most of your marketing is “hope marketing”.  That is you print up a brochure, put an ad in the paper and hope somebody sees it.    The marketing I want to move you toward is much more granular; you will be able to make a connection, a direct connection between the dollar you spend on marketing and the $10 you receive in revenue.

Takeaway: if you are thinking of  marketing as pretty brochures and radio ads and sharp logos, think again. This ain’t your mother’s marketing strategy.

Define Your Revenue Goals

If you have studied goal setting at all, you realise that the first step to achieving a target is to define it.  Surprisingly, not every business has defined revenue targets. Your plan may be to simply get as much business as possible and you’ll just keep spending some portion of your cash flow on lead generation. That is certainly a viable way to run your business, but it doesn’t give you any insight into managing for particular results now or in the future.   Defining your revenue goals is the first step to knowing how much you need to invest in marketing to increase your revenue by a desired factor.

So Step #1 – Define Your Revenue Goals – How much money do you want to make in the next 3 months, 6 months, 12 months? Go ahead, write it down, I’ll wait for you to find your notebook.

Metrics

The second action is to connect your lead generation activities to your revenue results.  Marketing produces leads which convert to customers.  Those customers produce both short and long-term revenues and profits.  Have you worked backwards from: desired revenue – mix of customers – number and type of leads – to determine your marketing requirements?  Remember what I said about goals.  Many of us are probably shooting in the dark, hoping to just grab as much revenue as possible.

For example if you sell a $500 coaching program, as well as a $47 e-book, how many of each will you sell this year in order to hit your goal revenue? Do both types of customers come from the same marketing channel? You need to know these numbers in order to decide how much you are willing to spend per marketing channel. Getting these numbers and making these decisions is a topic for an entirely different course.

But here is what you need to know: Knowing how many leads you need and what it will cost you to produce them, allows you to know exactly what will be necessary to reach your goals.

Quality of Leads

Another aspect you want to consider is the quality of the leads that come in.  Many online businesses don’t think about things like this especially for the traffic that comes to them through natural search.  Many business owners see an increase in traffic – where ever it comes from – as desirable. But all businesses -particularly service-oriented business es and many off-line businesses -need to qualify leads because you as the business owner will spend energy -time and money -working to close the sale.

If your business is on-line and your traffic is not targeted, you will have a high bounce rate.  (It’s beyond the scope of this discussion to fully explain why this hurts you but here is a short explanation.) So we want to help you qualify leads and minimize the problem of  leads that do not go anywhere.

Before we go into the strategic stuff, before you learn all the strategy,  I want to show you an easy first step.  The first step is the easiest way to generate more leads for your business.

First Strategy: Do more of what you are already doing

If you are already doing something that is working reasonably well can you simply do more of it? This surprised me when I first heard of this tactic. My first reaction was “that’s not much of a strategic idea.” It’s surprising how many people don’t consider this but simply putting more resources into your business will often bring in more leads.

1. For an online business, do you have affiliates? If you have affiliates bringing in sales for you, add more affiliates.
2. Do you have joint venture partners? If you have one joint venture relationship that is bringing in sales for you, go out today and find a second one. For many businesses all their other marketing activities pale compared to what comes to them through their joint venture relationships.
3. Write out 5 things that worked for you last year.  Share these with all of your affiliates and joint venture partners.
4. If AdWords pay per click is working for you and is profitable, but you are minimizing your budget, a bigger Adwords budget could dramatically increase your leads. How many keyword sets do you have in AdWords? Can you create a new set of keywords targetted to a new landing page?
5. Do you send postcards once a month? You could increase that to two times a month. Adding another wave of postcards, e-mails, phone calls or whatever else it is that you are doing could make the difference between okay and great. Figure out what is working and find out how to do more of it.

Maybe there is something that is already on your list you were going to do, but it just did not get done. For example I considered postcard mailings for many, many months before I finally broke down and got a postcard campaign started.  I hesitated as the project just seemed like too much trouble.  I finally decided to use Send Out Cards to get it done easily and economically.  (I am not a rep for them but I can hook you up with one if you are interested in this lead source.)

Rather than spend your time reading blogs like this, go get that thing done. I’m serious. If you have an idea that you think will knock business out of the park for the next six months, why are you not doing it right now?

Magic Bullet

Don’t be disappointed if you came looking for a magic bullet.  The next strategy is another no-brainer that you are probably not doing or doing haphazardly  but don’t overlook this very simple first idea: do more of what is already working.

P.S.

On my weekly mastermind call yesterday I was asking the group about a strategy I was considering implementing.  And…. the collective answer was: why don’t you do more of the other strategy that is already working? Not in an “all your eggs in one basket” approach but a “get what you can out of a working strategy” approach. Practice what you preach.

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