Lead Generation on the Web

Do you sell services? Or products with a very long sales life cycle? Is it hard to convey the features and benefits of your offering? Do customers only buy after they've built up enough trust in you? Does it take you a long time to convert strangers into clients?

Then what you need are leads. Leads, and the way you nurture them, are the gateway to sales.

In this Short Cut, I'll teach you how to use the power of web landing pages to turn prospects into leads. I'll also teach you how to nurture those leads, build trust, and turn strangers into clients. I'll share some technical tips for how to identify lead sources, construct landing pages, and handle backend server processes.

Of course, you may be wondering: what's the big deal? Why do I need someone to tell me all this? Because, frankly, you're probably doing things in a haphazard way. Take a cold, hard look at your rainmaking process. How long have you been in business, or in sales? Do you know from month to month what your sales will be? Can you predict with some certainty when sales will happen? Can you rely on things to happen; can you make plans?

Probably not. You've been flying by the seat of your pants, or building up a referral base, or making things happen from some weird mixture of personal charisma, mojo, and endless 18-hour days.
How would you like to add a bit of sanity to your business life? What would you say if I told you that you can turn sales and marketing into a system-one that works year-in and year-out-with predictable outcomes? And that this system can build on itself, adding untold amounts of cash to your organization?
If you're not good at the leads game, don't despair.

You're not alone. According to the SBA, 50 percent of businesses fail in the first year, and 95 percent fail after the first five years. Why is that, do you think? Yes, some businesses close, and others get bought out. But the vast majority of them fail because they run out of money--and they run out of money because they don't have sales. They don't have sales because they're not doing an effective job of getting leads into the pipeline!

Here are a few other tidbits to balance-two interesting statistics that should stop and make you think:

* According to BtoB's "2007 Marketing Priorities and Plans" survey, acquiring new customers is the #1 marketing goal for 2007, cited by 62.3 percent of respondents.

* According to small-business interviews conducted by AMR Research, a Boston-based firm that analyzes small-business issues, up to 70 percent of all leads were not followed up. The result was an estimated 14-22 percent loss of potential revenue.

* In other words, the vast majority of business owners agree that acquiring new customers is a top priority, yet the majority of leads are never followed up!

Take a look at that last figure-14-22 percent drop in revenues-and apply it to your own situation. If your small business is currently making $250,000 in revenues annually, you could add anywhere from $30,000 to $55,000 to your bottom line just by getting your lead generation and nurturing act together!

So%u2026can I solve your problems with this Short Cut? Maybe. All I can do is provide you with information, examples, and encouragement. The rest is up to you.

I'm bringing you the best information I have, based on hundreds of client engagements ranging from simple HTML newsletters to full-on e-commerce portals. I'm also adding a pinch of knowledge that I've gained through reading countless books on marketing a professional service-not to mention the blood, sweat, and tears from running my own consulting group since 2001. I've doubled or tripled sales every year, and I've tried just about every single lead generation tactic I could try.

I hear a lot of stories from small-business owners who are stuck in an advertising bog. They've shelled
out thousands of dollars for various ads, none of which are working. The phones aren't ringing. The web site hit counter is flat. The cash register has cobwebs on it.

As the days turn into weeks turn into months, they start getting desperate. They start thrashing around, trying anything, saying anything, just trying to make some sales.
By the time they've run through their annual marketing budget (usually in a matter of months), they're a lot wiser and a lot more skeptical (if not bitter). They say things like "Marketing doesn't work."

They're only partly right, of course-a lot of marketing, depending on your business, your market, and your message, doesn't work. See, before you spend any money on any marketing efforts, you've got to take the time to develop a strategy. You've got to know from the start which strategies and tactics work, and which ones don't. You have to know your enemy-and in this case, the enemy is profligate spending.

Can you imagine a general not preparing his troops for combat? Sure, they've got rifles and bullets and helmets, but what good does that do them if they don't know if they're attacking a forest, a mountain fortress, or a beachhead? Are they attacking fixed positions with lots of trenches or just a thin skirmish line? Are they facing hardened, well-rested veterans, or a bunch of rag-tag reservists without bullets? Is the attack set for night, dawn, or noon? Who attacks the front and who attacks the flanks? What happens if the attack succeeds-what next? What happens if it fails-where do the troops retreat and regroup?

Any general who just threw his forces into a fight without a thought to strategy would soon find himself with a lot fewer troops to command, and possibly without a job.

Think of your marketing effort as a military campaign. Before you mix it up in the marketplace, you have to make a plan. Lack of planning usually means lack of success with marketing. Those who don't plan are usually the ones making comments like "Marketing doesn't work."

Whenever I hear that, I dig around a bit, find out what really happened. I learn that they sent out 10,000 postcards about their new software product.

"Great--who received the cards?"

"Oh, marketing VPs, of course."

"Why? Do they use the software?"

"No, no they don't. Really it's the entry-level folks who use the software."

"So why'd you send it to the VPs?"

"Well, they have to approve the expenditure eventually, so why not tell them about it first?"

Congratulations, you think too much! And 9,993 of the cards are thrown away. If you're lucky, maybe 100 VPs thought about sending the information down to their marketing specialists, but then the phone rang, or they had an emergency meeting to attend--and poof, gone!

It's tragic, made doubly so because it really doesn't have to be this way. Marketing isn't rocket science. It's all about identifying a need, communicating how you fulfill that need, and then keeping track of all the people who said they want to know more until you make a sale (or many sales).

I blame the advertising agencies for this, by the way, and I'm never shy about saying so.
Consider your typical engagement with an advertising agency. Let's say that you run a small but respectable consulting business, 2-3 employees, maybe a half million in sales a year. You're trying to grow your business, bring in bigger, steadier clients. You've just reached the point where you've tapped out your personal network and the sales are starting to slow down, which is a bit scary.

So you take a meeting with an advertising agency. They don't really understand your business, because you're very technical. They don't take the time to fully understand your market, because again, there are lots of little nooks and crannies that you've been working in. Finally, they gloss over the message in favor of the thing that really cranks their handles as "creatives": the media.

That's right. They want to start talking about TV ads, postcards, radio buys, and all kinds of stuff. Do they know if anyone in your target market (or markets) will respond to these media strategies? No, they probably don't-but they usually get to keep a nice percentage of your fee for buying the media in the first place.

Once the media is all figured out, they start working on the message. Unfortunately, they've only done a swift review of your business and the marketplace. If you're really lucky, they've worked with someone like you in the past, so they may have some relevant experience to back up their decisions. You usually end up with ads featuring cows with iPods skating across a neon landscape while talking about your cool services, but in a vague way reminiscent of Star Trek dialogue about sci-fi physics.

Then they send out all this stuff to be printed, recorded, and distributed, send you an invoice, and are on their way. Do they care if you succeed in the marketplace? Well, maybe in a distant, ulterior motive kind of way; after all, if you make a lot of money, then you have more money to spend with them.

It's all very good-for them.

Am I exaggerating? Or course. There are plenty of good agencies around, and what makes them good is not just a commitment to excellent creative direction and "good ideas." They also care about their clients from a business standpoint and never shy away from the strategy part of the equation.
However, I'm a skeptic through and through (which means that I must have evidence to believe anything) and when it comes to marketing, you should be one, too.

Don't just accept the fact that the agency person you're meeting with knows anything about your product, your marketplace, or your business. He probably doesn't even know all that much about marketing and sales, really, because he's probably either a creative type or an account rep straight out of college.

And worst of all, he probably doesn't know anything about lead generation, as he's mostly focused on branding campaigns that remind everyone that your product is cool.

Let's learn how to set a marketing strategy. I promise not to use a bunch of made-up words to make myself look smart. The core of any strategy is to answer the basic questions of journalism: Who are my buyers? What do they want to buy? When and where do they buy? Why do they buy? How much will they buy?
If you can figure out all of that and a bit more, you'll be well on your way to lead generation success.

We've created a Lead Generation Center to help you learn about the art (and science!) of creating successful lead generation programs. We've posted interviews, case studies, white papers, reports, and even code snippets to help you beat the competition!

A few years ago, I was introduced to the "Three M" approach to creating effective marketing strategies.

The approach came to me by way of Dan Kenedy, a respected direct-response copywriter and consultant, in one of his many books on marketing.

To understand the 3M strategy, picture an equilateral triangle. Each apex of the triangle contains a single word: Market, Message, or Media.

It's a great way to visualize the order that things should go in while developing a strategy (first figure out your market, then your message, then your media).

Over the years, I decided that I would add something to Dan Kenedy's original graphic. I call it the fourth M, which is where you really need to start the discussion. The Fourth M stands for Money.

Because I'd run out of apexes, I decided to set it in a crosshair right in the center of the triangle to remind me how important it is.

The visual is powerful, simple, and easy to remember. And it has never led me down the wrong path. Let's walk through it step by step and develop a working strategy for your lead generation efforts.

Money is all about your numbers. Basically, you have to know how much money you want to make during a given period. If you're a salesperson, you'll have an annual quota of sales. If you're a business owner, you'll need to have a certain amount coming in to cover all your expenses and make a profit.
Once you know what your goal is, you can figure out other key metrics that can guide you in your efforts, and even help you make good decisions about the rest of the Ms.

Let's go back to the consultant example. Your goal is to make $500,000 in the upcoming year. Your typical engagements run from $2,500 at the lowest end to $20,000 at the high end. You occasionally get a six-figure deal (but never more than one or two a year). When you look at your past performance, you realize that 80 percent of your income derives from the $20,000 sales, and 20 percent from a single six-figure deal.

You decide, for simplicity's sake, to use the $20,000 sales as your benchmark. To make your $500,000 goal, you need 25 sales for the year.
You know right away that you don't sell every proposal at this level; it's more like one in four. So this means that you must write 100 proposals in order to make 25 sales.

But you're not done yet. You know that for every company you write a proposal for, there are nine others who are just kicking the tires, needing more time or information in order to move forward, or who lack the required budget. So now you know that you need 1,000 leads during the year in order to get those 25 sales.

But how do you attract 1,000 leads? It depends on how you promote your products and services. In this Short Cut, we'll concentrate most of our attention on web lead generation-getting prospects to a web page so they can enter the marketing funnel. That doesn't mean we're going to focus exclusively on online tactics like HTML newsletters and Google Adwords, but it does mean that your primary lead generation vehicle-the first contact with the prospect-will be through an online medium of some sort.

If you must attract 1,000 leads, then some approaches will definitely not hack it. For example, can you imagine trying to attract 1,000 prospective customers by attending networking events? If you meet 20 new people at each networking event, you'd have to attend one a week in order to get anywhere close to your numbers. And each time you went, you'd have to get 20 new folks in the pipeline who also meet your other criteria.

What are the chances of that happening? I mean, how many times have you met interesting folks who are realtors, furniture movers, hair dressers, and opticians at networking events-and you're there talking about high-end web design or specialty computer equipment? Don't get me wrong, I love networking, but at this level, it can only play a supporting role.

What if you used direct mail or Google Adwords? Your reach would certainly go up, and you'd have some solid metrics. For example, you'd know from your Google Adwords efforts that you get 500 daily impressions and 5 daily clickthroughs to your landing pages, every day all year round. You're getting 1 percent clickthrough and have approximately 1,800 leads coming in. Yes, many of those leads would be only marginally qualified, but you'd have something in the pipeline.

That's much easier than running around to 50 networking events (paying for your gasoline and lunch, spending time away from your business, etc).
Let's move on to the rest of the triangle.

Now that you know your numbers, try to better understand the market. Who is your market? At the end of the day, no matter what business you're in, the market is a person with a need. Plain and simple. Even if you are selling to a giant corporate office, you are eventually going to be dealing with a director of HR, a payroll admin, a marketing VP, etc.

Knowing that you are focusing on a person with a need does some of the heavy lifting for you. You can split your research into two areas. First, you have to figure out who this person is (the demographics): Who are they? Where do they work? What is their title? How many people do they supervise? Are they married? Single? Female or male? How old are they? Are they new to their positions or have they been there a while? Who do they report to?

After that, you have to figure out what their need is, and what is driving that need (the psychographics): What kinds of problems are they facing? What do they think about when they wake up and get ready for work? What is their last conscious thought right before they fall asleep? How big is the problem? Just an annoyance, or is it a world of hurt?

Nailing down the market is the single most important thing you can ever do. It also requires the most work. You have to dig. You can't just buy a list of names somewhere. You can't just be happy to say, "Oh, my target market is marketing managers."
You have to know a lot more about them. You have to break them down into segments that make sense for your business. You start with questions, and continue with the questions until you feel good about what you know.

What is the age bracket for your marketing managers? How many supervise fewer than five people? How many supervise more than 20? How many of these marketing managers fit in between? Does everyone in their department run on Macs or on PCs? Do they use Illustrator or Photoshop? How many of them know HTML by heart? How many of them are tradeshow specialists as opposed to brand managers?

But you're not done yet, because you've only just scratched the surface. Now you need to dive deep. Go beyond the Macs versus PCs equations, figure out why they've got more Macs then PCs (if it's relevant to you). Figure out why they have a budget shortfall in sales training. Peel away until you come to the central root problem, the thing that drives all the behavior you're seeing every day.

Of course, you may realize that the central driver of their need isn't a problem, but a trigger. Triggers are similar to problems, but rest assured, you'll easily be able to tell the difference. Usually problems manifest themselves in a way that triggers change. Sometimes triggers just happen.
What kinds of triggers are there? It all depends on the type of business you're in, of course, but thousands of triggers exist. Maybe they have an extremely low sales conversion rate, and not enough money coming in. Or maybe their sales lifecycle is extremely long, which means new cash takes a while to make its way into the system. Or they could have an excessively high turnover rate in their sales force. The problem is slow sales, and the trigger is a top-down mandate from the CEO to do something about it, right now!

What about triggers that happen all on their own? New VP gets hired for a position, and she orders everything about the department torn down and begun anew.

So how do you figure all of this out? The old fashioned way: you ask. You can use surveys, make informational calls, and talk to everyone in your space. Read industry journals and the business section of the paper. Ask for intelligence when you take people to lunch or see them at networking events. Get the scoop!

Don't spend an insane amount of time on it (anywhere from a few days to a few weeks should do it for most of you reading this Short Cut), but do your homework.

I'm not talking about focus groups here! The worst thing you can do is to get a bunch of people in the room talking about their problems-especially if the competition is present. Instead, talk to your current clients one at a time, then ask them for referrals to people they know. Assure them that you're just doing an informational survey, trying to assess marketplace needs. They'll respect that.
Besides, if you've got a good working relationship, it should be a pro forma request.

Now that you understand your market, you can create your messaging. We're going to get into the details of messaging in the Promotional Creative section, so I won't get into the weeds here.

However, I do want to say a few very important things. Anything you've ever seen an advertising agency do with advertising, do the exact opposite. It will keep you from hemorrhaging money on useless promotional activities.

What do I mean? Pick up just about any magazine in your home or office and flip to one of those full-page ads. I'll do that right now to illustrate what I'm talking about. I've just opened up the January 2007 issue of GQ magazine, the one with Robert De Niro smiling out at me.
The page I open to is a Ketel One ad. It's not your typical ad, to be sure, as it features three lines of black text (in that weird German-looking typeface) on a white page. The ad reads:

Dear Ketel One Drinker
Please excuse us for interrupting
your read, but needs must.

If you look hard enough, you see, along the inside gutter of the page (by the fold) a copyright line in a teeny-tiny nanofont, at the end of which, in even smaller font, is the URL for Ketel One.

That's it! Nothing else. It's a striking ad, of course, without all the noise and hoopla that you usually associate with an ad in a national magazine. The strangled syntax aside (and oh yeah, I had to look up the web site to learn that Ketel One is a vodka), it's brilliant in terms of art direction.

This is a prime example of image (or brand) advertising. The sole purpose of the ad is to remind folks (trendy, cool folks who read GQ) that they should drink Ketel One. The subtext of the ad is that the only thing better than drinking Ketel One is drinking it while reading a cool magazine like GQ.

You are going to completely ignore this approach. Shun it. Revile it. Eschew it. You are going to:

* Create straightforward, attention-grabbing headlines instead of clever ones. These headlines will also (a) ask a question, (b) talk about the problem, or (c) make an irresistible offer, or (d) any combination of the above.Because you've done your homework on the market, you'll know exactly what to put in your attention-grabbing headlines.

If your market needs help with employee turnover, you can craft your headline around that. If their company is about to be acquired by a bigger company, they'll respond to the appropriate headline.

* Use powerful, short, and information-heavy paragraphs to persuade.

Use powerful visuals (if you can) to demonstrate the power of your product or service.

* Be happy if and only if the person digesting all this takes action. If what you are preparing is the ad, then he must click to your landing page. If he is at your landing page, he must fill out the form to get the white paper. Action is the only thing that matters. Humor is secondary. Cleverness is secondary. Action leads to $$.

* The only way to get people to take action is to offer them something compelling. It doesn't have to be a two-for-one coupon or anything else you've seen in TV advertising, but it does need to address their problem. For example, if they're responding to an ad that tells them they can get a free white paper, the white paper better relate to the problem they're facing.

What kinds of offers are worthwhile?

* Tell them about something new. Is it a new product or service? Is it a new price? People love to hear about new stuff. Is your product or service tied to new legislation, a world event, or even a medical condition? If it's breaking news, you might be able to take advantage of it.

* Tell them you're running a sale, an end-of-year closeout. I saw one email from a favorite jewelry store that announced "2002 Prices for 1 day"-the day after Christmas 2006.

* Give them a bonus or premium just for showing up. The classic offer here is a free report or white paper, but you can get creative here. Lately, I've seen a lot of free iPod giveaways.
An offer with some kind of time limit. Sounds cheesy, but those little countdown timers on web pages ("offer good for another 3 hours, 28 minutes, and 16 seconds...") really do work. A sense of urgency raises response every time.

* Exclusivity always moves the needle in your favor. Why do you think diamonds are so expensive? It's because they're not as plentiful as say, pieces of paper. Even paper makers can use the exclusivity angle (just ask the good folks at Crane paper).

* Any combination of the above. If it's an exclusive product, sold at a discount, but only to those who act before the end of the day, you're going to get a lot more response.

Finally, we come to media. Not all media are created equal. Some can reach a very wide audience of incredibly underqualified (or even nonqualified) people; others can broadcast a laser-sharp message to just a few key people; and a lot of others fall somewhere in the middle.

You may have thought, during the calculations in the Money section, that reaching out to the x number of leads you need merely requires a big enough media blast. That's probably only true in very isolated instances. For example, why would a Fortune 100 company that sells routers and other networking gear put ads on TV during prime time? What were they thinking? They probably thought, "Hey, here's a good way to get in front of tens of millions of possible buyers."

Except not all of us buy networking equipment, so the ad was wasted on how many people? Maybe they were tired of being that huge tech company that nobody ever heard of except techies (many of whom, incidentally, are in a position to order the equipment for the companies they work for).

The number one rule for any media buy is "Avoid the Club House Syndrome." The Club House Syndrome is really easy to spot. Go down to any swanky club house and hang around within earshot of any gaggle of CEO-looking guys. One of them will be bragging about the full-page ad he just got in the New York Times, and then another guy will jump in with the two-page spread he had in Wired, and then another guy will whip out a mention about the advertorial piece that made it into the London Times, and on and on it goes. It gets even better when you realize that all of them are CEOs of farm equipment manufacturing companies, and would have done ten times better putting ads in smaller markets or the trade journals-after all, how many farmers read Wired?

All of this is braggadocio, and you must avoid it at all costs. If you want to do any bragging, do it when you have enough money to buy the club house, and bar those other dipsticks for life.

The number two rule for any media buy is to think "Diversified yet Integrated." You don''t want to put all your eggs in one basket. You want to have an Adwords campaign, a newsletter, a blog, various ads, some networking, and some PR. But it all must have the same messaging behind it, or it's going to sound like noise. For those of you who work in very large companies with hundreds of products, you may have to modify what I'm saying here for your product line or sales region, but it has to be done! Without the integration element, without message discipline, you may as well just throw away your money.

By now, you know what your monetary goals are, and have translated those goals into the number of leads you need to make the sales to make that money. You should also know your market as well as you possibly can-not only the stuff you find in almanacs, but the stuff that makes the target market tick and keeps them awake at night. From that you can build some solid messaging and then deliver that messaging to the market using smart media.

In the next section, called "Lead Sources," we're going to talk a lot about specific media, and not all of it is prohibitively expensive. In fact, think of media as a way to carry your message to the market. A press release is media. So is a Xeroxed flyer. So is your business card with all your GSA schedules printed on the back (if you're selling to the government). Same is true of your web site or blog.