1

What are leads? Contact names in a bought database? Business cards from a trade show? They could be both, but they must be more. Both are suspects; a lead must be interested in your product or service too.

In the dark ages, we used to cold call to get leads. In the middle ages we paid telemarketers to do it. In the modern age, we get leads to find us.

This short guide shows how to help more leads to find you, and how to qualify them into prospects, without opening an eye.

1. Find out what they want Marketing 101 tells us that the cheapest customers to acquire are those who find you. Sure, but you don’t want to spend a fortune doing it.

Your first challenge is to find out what they want. They’ll be using Google (probably) and keywords. How do you know which ones? Easy. Make a list of words you think describe your product or service (your offer). Then, find out how the words rank (globally or by country depending on your focus).

Your Digital Marketing guy can do this. He can also find out what words competitors are using, and a pile of similar terms people are looking for. If you want to DIY, you can buy software or services like Wordze, Keyword Elite, Keyword Companion, etc).

2. Refine it You’ll end up with thousands of key words or terms but don’t be put off; it’s a real opportunity.

You may be tempted to go for the words that get big numbers, say 4,000 searches a day just in Australia (like IT security), but don’t. Firstly they're broad and secondly, the big guys will be paying a fortune in Google Adwords and back links (see later) to own them.

Look at broad searches like IT Security, but these will include other words in and around yours (e.g. xxxITxxxsecurity) and you won’t know which ones they are.

Better to look at exact searches (IT security), but also SEO competition (how many pages are competing for

the term) as well as how much is being spent on it. If there are 4,000 searches a day here, there could be 10 million pages competing for it and $0.3 million being spent per day to own it.

If your pockets aren’t that deep, go 1 or 2 levels down to find the terms that describe exactly what you do (e.g. IT managed security services, Brisbane). There might be only 2 searches per day for this term, but if it’s exactly what you do and you only want local customers, they’ll find you easily. This is because there are far fewer pages (read competitors) competing for it.

3. Enhance your bait, don’t stuff it So now you know a term that 2 people per day are looking for. What do you do now? You don’t take IT managed security services, Brisbane and plaster it over every page on your website. Apart from making it obvious to your visitor that you’re ‘key word stuffing’, Google will penalise you and downgrade your site.

Take one page (or create a new one—see over) and put this key term in the URL (can’t usually do this for Home), in the H1 (main heading) and 2 hidden yet vital places—the Title Tag and Meta Description. These are the first 3 lines that come up on the Google results page when your term is searched.

The first line is the Title Tag and the next 2 are the Meta Description. These 3 lines are all your searchers will see when your term comes up, so make sure they’re persuasive (not technobabble) but kept them tight. It’s like Twitter; you have to be brief. Use the terms also a few times in the text, but only where it makes sense.

10 Steps to Lead Generation As You Sleep It’s easier than you think

2

4. Deliver on the bait When they get to your page, they’ll be expecting to read about IT managed security services in Brisbane, so if your home page doesn’t say that, don’t send them there. That is, don’t make your Home page the bait, chose another.

There are 2 ways to do this 1. find the page that most delivers on the term or 2. create one that talks about it exactly. The SEO experts prefer the latter (and so do we) and if you check their sitemaps, they have heaps of ‘other pages’ that don’t fit their main menu structures. That is, they’ve created lots of pages that deliver exactly on the key terms they want to be found for.

5. Ask for something So, your searchers have found your page, what now? How will you know what they thought or did then? Unless they instantly picked up the phone and called you or were tracked by your website, you’ll never know.

So, ask them to take action e.g. download a resource, ask a question, contact you by email, anything that requires them to provide their email addresses. You can then track their responses individually (if you can track web visits) or statistically via Google Analytics (you’ll get the numbers but not the names).

6. Give something back Your best chance to get their details is to offer them something of value for free — a useful download, a brief guide, link to a useful resource, video etc.

Apart from asking their first and second names and email addresses, don’t ask for more at this time. We use and recommend Marketing Automation software to deliver and track responses and to ask specific questions per resource or in sequence, but we don’t suggest this on your first contact.

7. Add them in The first download is the first move. After they’ve taken the bait, you may or may not know if they’ve opened and read the resources, but you do want to keep the relationships going. So, put them into your system and send them something else of use in 2 weeks or so. You still won’t know their specific pains, but you can send them another useful resource and

ask questions to find out about their pains, but don’t ask too many.

8. Reel them in On the second and subsequent downloads is when you can ask specific questions to find out if these 2 are leads, tyre kickers, students or spies. Apart from phone numbers and company names, you may want to know where they’re located (Russia and India may not be too useful), company size or vertical, interest in your resources (tyre kicking or looking for a solution), current pains, and if they have projects or reviews planned to fix them in the next 12 months.

Once you have interest in your offer and a project or review date in 6-12 months from a company of the right size and location, you have a lead your sales team (or telemarketers) can call to start direct dialogue. Mission accomplished.

If neither is a lead (now or at all) you can put them onto ‘drip feed’ campaigns based on their profiles. They may be leads one day or might refer you to someone who is. Either way, don’t ignore them.

9. Send out more bait Assuming you want more than 2 leads in your pipeline, you can 1. add more landing pages to your website matched to key words 2. split other resources into small articles to publish for back links 3. place some Google AdWords. These will give you more key word searches or make your page(s) rank more highly with Google so you’re closer to the top of the search results.

10. Automate your bait If you want to qualify leads as you sleep (or play or focus on core business) the best way is to automate your lead generation i.e. set and monitor which is not set and forget. You need to read your lead reports.

It doesn’t matter a lot which software you choose, and most aren’t expensive, but don’t try to do it manually. You could end up with gaffs, gaps and overlaps. A sure way to lose leads while you sleep. ###