If your marketing and sales departments are looking for more
qualified leads, then search engine marketing is an inexpensive
way to find them. In recent years, search engine marketing has
grown in popularity as a cost effective tool used to generate
additional sales leads. What was once little more than an
afterthought in the website design process has become the best
kept secret of savvy marketers. This article provides a five
step process that will help fill your pipeline with a steady
flow of sales leads. In the article, I'll also share some
secrets of how to coordinate search engine marketing efforts
with other sales and marketing tools.
If you are responsible for sales, marketing, or your company's
website, then you should assess your current pipeline and
determine how many leads (or how much revenue) can be directly
attributed to traffic referred to your site from search engines.
While there is no way of knowing exactly how many additional
search-generated leads you could be capturing, remember this: If
you're not getting those leads, your competitors are!
Quick Primer For anyone who isn't familiar with search engine
marketing, it's simply the art and science of ensuring that your
website appears prominently in the results of search engines,
such as Google and Yahoo!, when people look for products and
services similar to the ones you sell.
Step One: Make Sure You Can Be Found! These web surfers and
potential customers will never get into your pipeline if they
can't find you! There are dozens of phrases that a qualified
prospect might use for a search that, ideally, should lead
straight to you. At an absolute minimum, you want your company
name and the trade names of your product or service to be
represented on the search engines, but think bigger! You also
want to be found for the product or service category and phrases
related to your products or services. In addition, be sure to
include phrases related to the problems or issues that your
product or service addresses before your prospect has a solution
in mind. Not all of your prospects are at the tail end of the
buying cycle! Capture them early in the process and you'll have
your foot in the door. Determining and then prioritizing the
list of search phrases that would yield the highest quality and
quantity of sales leads is critical to your overall success and
should not be taken lightly. Once you've compiled this list,
your website needs to go through a process called 'search engine
optimization'. During this process, the entire website,
including the source code and content are reworked (or
'optimized') so that your site is preferred by search engines
for the key phrases you have selected.
Step Two: Hook Them or Lose Them If you've done a good job of
optimizing your website, then your search engine positions will
gradually improve, and within a few months the site will start
appearing frequently near the top of search engine results for
your chosen phrases. At this point, it would be easy to sit back
and relax, but your pipeline won't get filled by merely
improving your website's search positions! The next challenge is
to hook the visitor and reel them into your website. Once a
search visitor hits your site, you have about five seconds to
convince them that you can satisfy their needs. After all,
remember that this is a search visitor. They are looking for
something and won't think twice about hitting the back button if
you don't give them a reason to stay.
For this reason, it is critical to make sure that all of your
traditional sales and marketing principles are being utilized
effectively on your web pages. Clearly communicating your unique
selling proposition, or simply why they should stay, is
necessary if you want to ensure that your hard work in step one
wasn't in vain. You'll lose a lot of visitors regardless of what
you say or do, and that's fine. We're only focusing on your true
prospects. Let the rest of them go because they'll just clog up
your pipeline anyway!
Step Three: Offer Something for Everyone That's Interested In
step one, you attracted lots of relevant traffic. In step two,
you targeted your message to ideal prospects and weeded out the
rest. In step three, it's time to get generous. Create two
offers and promote them throughout your website.
The first offer is a teaser giveaway that your true prospects
will find of value. It could be a whitepaper, free information
guide, case study, self assessment quiz, etc. This offer is for
prospects in the early stages of the buying cycle that are not
yet ready or willing to engage in a dialog. Don't require
anything more than an e-mail address in exchange, so you don't
scare them away. You'll be amazed how many C-level executives
request these sorts of offers from home with their personal
e-mail accounts.
The second offer is for something more substantial that requires
significant information and indicates a serious interest on the
part of the prospect. This offer may be a consultation, onsite
demo, trial offer, etc. Depending on your sales team's bandwidth
and the health of your pipeline, you can raise or lower the
number of fields you require. This change helps you to control
the number of leads the offer generates.
Step Four: Manage the Entire Pipeline! It would astonish you if
you knew how many companies follow steps one through three only
to let most of their 'first offer' leads slip away into oblivion
while spending the majority of their time with the 'second
offer' leads. While this strategy may produce greater short term
gains, it neglects a much bigger lead pool that could become a
group of serious buyers in the long term. Many B2B sales
departments have learned that their highest win rate is with
prospects that are still early in the buying process. If you
ignore them, then they'll seek help in the arms of your
competition. That's why it's a good idea to come up with a lead
management strategy to handle, sort, and respond to all of the
inquiries. There are many software solutions that will automate
this process with incredible flexibility and efficiency.
Step Five: Measure, Adjust, and Improve. Each step in this
process can be easily measured, analyzed, and improved. Make
sure that you have measurement tools in place and continually
improve the step that is your weakest link. Perhaps it's your
search engine positions. Maybe it's your message and design. It
could be your offers, or the manner in which you handle the
leads. Regardless, continuous small improvements in one or more
areas will make your website pipeline more efficient and
lucrative.
About the author:
Todd Miechiels is an Atlanta based search engine marketing
consultant. He is an active member of the Atlanta B2B marketing
community. His website is www.miechiels.com and he offers free
consultations.
Written by: Todd Miechiels
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