I have been fortunate throughout my career to attend many events that celebrate the vital importance of small business and its contribution to local communities. My experience working with a franchised organization has given me a new perspective and appreciation for the competitive nature of small business and how valuable devising a simple lead generation program can be. While there are many great tools that can assist in the development of a lead generation program, it starts with a sound strategy and a commitment towards understanding the tactics that can drive the most effective leads at a cost that makes sense for your business. I will share five key strategies that can be utilized individually or collectively to help stimulate more qualified leads for any local business.
1. Lead Management:
While every lead provides an opportunity to convert a sale, you can increase your conversion rate by focusing on leads that exhibit certain characteristics. Customer segmentation analysis is usually associated with high cost and sophisticated regression tools. The fact is any local business owner can devise a simple scoring system to turn leads into conversion with more frequency. Take a look at your customer transactions and identify customer segments based on certain characteristics that make sense for your business. Once you identify key attributes that exist in your current customer base, score them on those metrics to get a unique view into who they are and what motivates them to purchase. Some key areas to look at are:
- Lifetime value - how many times has a customer purchased since their first purchase?
- Average ticket size - how much do customers spend?
- Promotion - do customers only buy when certain promotions are run?
- Channel attribution - how did you acquire a customer?
- Returns - is a customer a habitual returner of merchandise?
- Product - are certain customers more apt to buy higher margin products?
If you are a pure B2B company, you can overlay firmographics and industry attributes:
- Company size & sector
- Company annual revenue
- Product sale/type by industry
- Industry Attributes relating to average ticket, lifetime value etc.
There can be variety of other metrics that make sense for your business. Apply positive scores to good attributes and negative scores to bad attributes. This will help you identify who you should target, how you should target them, and even who you may want to stay away from. A simple scoring grid in Microsoft Excel can provide directional insights into your business that are just as valuable as advanced data modeling. You can drive down acquisition cost and drive up profitability.
2. Lead Nurturing:
Don't get lazy! While you consistently want to be searching for new leads, don't forget about the customers that have made your business successful. It costs more than twice as much to acquire new customers than to nurture existing customers - they have already shown an affinity for your product/service! Instituting a loyalty program is a great way to show your customers you appreciate them; however, there are also other ways. Social media affords small business an efficient way to communicate with customers very cost effectively. Establish and maintain a Facebook or Twitter page, and incentivize customers to join and participate. By publishing new, fresh content relating to your business or industry, you can provide your customers unique insights and look like an industry thought leader. You can also use social media as a primary research 'hotbed' to get real time feedback from customers as it pertains to product design, service enhancements, or content desires. This will make your customer base feel as if they are part of the solution and become more engaged.
3. Build and Optimize Landing Pages:
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| Marketing in the Age of Google |
For example, if you are a local dry cleaner, your website should clearly focus on your prowess as a dry cleaner; however, how can you generate incremental traffic? If you go to Google Adwords Keyword Tool (free) a quick search shows that there are 165,000 global monthly searches for the phrase "how to get stains out" with low competition. If you create a landing page on your site with tips on how to remove stains, you can drive a new subset of traffic who now views you as an expert. You can even have a coupon on that landing page to try and convert a searcher to a new customer. A fantastic book written by a small business specialist at Google who helped identify these trends is listed here. It clearly articulates how to use these tools and set up your business strategy. Remember:
- Create relevant landing pages that capitalize on search trends
- Organic search outperforms paid search by an 8:1 click ratio so make sure you are optimized efficiently
- Strong organic efforts combined with paid search can increase return on investment by 4:1 and increase leads by 2x.
4. Get Customers to Search For You:
In addition to building relevant landing pages, there are many other tactics that are search friendly to help create awareness for your business and optimize lead generation. You obviously started a business because you are an expert in that particular area; use your expertise to generate new customers. Here are several ways:
- Develop a strong social presence, but be sure to maintain it. Nothing hurts a brand or business more than an irrelevant social platform. Either choose to not have a presence or consistently update it with fresh content. This is a very strong way to engage with existing customers and capture new customers when searching for products and services.
- Mobile optimize your website - even if you don't have the money to fully optimize your entire website, optimize mobile landing pages to capitalize on the exploding trend in mobile search.
- Write industry white papers and work to syndicate them on third-party sites that prospects use when researching your business - all the way down the path to purchase!
- PR, blogs, public speeches, awards – if it makes sense for your business, become actively involved so your reputation can inspire trust in your brand brand.
- Consistent brand awareness efforts - maintain brand continuity. You want to be in relevant searches online, not show up where it doesn't make sense for your business. Not only does it waste time, it hurts your reputation and affects your brand.
5. Understand Marketing Metrics:
This is a very important part of identifying how to successfully market your business. Once you segment your customer base as in step one, understand how and why to market to each. You may not have to discount as strongly to some customers, while others require a steep discount to motivate purchase. This can help you maximize margins by knowing the most effective way to market to each group. Another important piece is to understand the metrics, there are a ton! Several ways to measure marketing are:
- Cost per lead
- Cost per acquisition
- Cost per sale
- Return on Investment
Understand which metric makes the most sense for your business and measure accordingly. My biggest piece of advice is to not necessarily only choose the program with the lowest cost. Marketing campaigns may cost more; however, if they deliver a higher basket size or better quality customer, they may make more sense. Identify what makes the most sense for your business and stick to it. Look at VALUE not only COST.
Conclusion:
There are many tools and tactics out there to help drive successful business activity. These are a few that will not cost you a tremendous amount of money; however, they do require a time investment. If you have the luxury of hiring trusted people to manage these efforts, or an agency to act as an extension of your business, that is always a plus. If not, choose what makes the most sense for your business and stick with it. If you believe in your strategy, consistency wins the game.
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