How To Ensure You Generate Enough Business For Your Website

Apart from pay per click advertising, search engine optimisation, exploiting social media such as LinkedIn YouTube Facebook etc. What else can you do to ensure you generate enough business for your Website?

Perhaps a better question is what should you do to generate enough business in total?

Smart online marketers; combine both online and offline marketing tactics and strategies to generate leads and sales for their businesses.

Then you are into a whole realm of different possibilities.

A great place to start is to work backwards from your annual sales objective.

How much turnover do you need at your average margin?

How much of your business is repeat business?

What is your average sales value?

How many customers stop using your services a year?

How many referrals do you generate?

These types of questions feed into your sales plan, which is concerned not only in answering them, but with the number of new leads required, to meet your annual objectives taking into account how many enquires you convert into sales; your closing percentage.

This could be via salespeople or on your website the same principles apply.

When you’ve figured all of this out, you will be in a position to know; how many leads a week, a month, a quarter you need to keep your business viable and hopefully growing.

When constructing your lead generation plan, some common situations to avoid include;

Having your ‘eggs in too few baskets,’ this is having too much business with too few customers or clients. The acid test here is; if you lost one or two of them what would happen to your business?

Not having enough lead generation methods in play - For example you rely on Pay Per Click and don’t do much else. More competitors enter the market, the price goes up of the Pay Per Click, followed by the quality and volume of leads go down. What would happen to your business, if this was your only lead generation strategy?

Spray and pray lead generation - Do a bit of everything and hope something sticks. This can be a very expensive way of marketing, it normally occurs when a business owner has not developed a marketing strategy, which should include a lead generation plan. All marketing can be and should be measured with returns on investment monitored.

Ineffective lead generation - This can occur when any of these situations are wrong; the message, (which could be the sales copy and the design) the offer, your USP (unique selling proposition), the correct medium, the target audience (The quality and responsiveness of the list).

Just one element being wrong can result in ineffective lead generation for example; if you have the best design, great product, a good offer and great sales copy, but you select a bad list, then it all starts to unwind.

Often when business owners suffer from ineffective lead generation, we hear comments such as ‘direct mail does not work, we’ve tried it,’ or ‘email marketing is a waste of time, it’s the spam filters,’ or ’nobody clicked through the website.’

There are plenty of examples of companies that use either of these mediums and make them work. Their lead generation efforts, using these methods are successful, because they have people that work for them, with the right skills.

I hope you’ve found this brief article thought provoking. If you’re not generating enough leads now to meet your sales plan, what’s been covered should help you pinpoint potential problem areas to avoid.

Beyond that, further help can be provide by our inbound marketing services at Integrated Marketing  who can help you put together strategies and provide agency services to work with you to generate more leads and sales. 

Should you wish to consider outsourcing parts of your lead generation strategies or explore how we can help you with practical ideas, call us during normal business hours on 01623 720022.

Take Care 




Regards 


Integrated Marketing  Copyright Mark Wheatley 2010 All Rights Reserved