What is lead generation? Part1

Yes seems silly to ask, but sometimes you have to rein the business horse in and go back to basics to check the shoes to see why he has a counter-productive gait.

Lead generation are the activities you will do for your business to find new clients.

These activities are deeply ingrained in all business people and some activities are dead and buried, but for many it is like a soldier in the mountains still fighting in WW2 today, they just don’t know any better and continue to perform the daily routine and wonder why things are not improving.

Enough metaphors? Actually one is a simile but it is not a grammar lesson!

Types of lead generation activities:

Telemarketing

Now under the heading of telemarketing you will hear the team ‘cold calling’ which will make even the bravest warriors wince, (sorry last one honest!)

Cold calling is the telephone book in front of you or a cold database you just bought and battling with people who did not want or expect your telephone call, and you will be lucky in this day and age if you get to have a decent civil conversation with anyone all day.

Telemarketing on the other hand will be reaching out to people who have made some kind of contact with you already, and will at the very least have heard of your company. The comparison between telemarketing and cold calling is (aaargh need a metaphor here!!!) vastly different in terms of success rates.

So to use telemarketing as a lead generation tool you will need to have at least warmed up your audience beforehand and that does not mean you sent them an email telling them you are going to call them!

Exhibitions

I was working as a Marketing Director for an arts and crafts company for a while in North Thailand the company was successful for many years in the 1990’s and the owner retired and then got bored and came back to work and asked me to make him great again. Not long after I started, I asked the owner what was the main factor for his success in the past, and he exclaimed; “Expos, without a doubt expos!”

So I asked him when the next one is and he told me “We are not going to any more they are too expensive for us now in start-up mode.” Yeah go figure!

Exhibition attendance is the main marketing tool for businesses that are visual in their medium and you must be adding the costs to attend shows all over the world in your business plan if you are a start-up.

They are not cheap and if you have ever attended as an exhibitor, you will soon learn that like anything, having the biggest and most expensive stall does not always equate to leads, nor does the amount of pens and chocolates you give away either.

My wife loves it when I go to expos as a visitor she loves all the bags and little gifts I come home with, the brands mean nothing to her, but any good Marketing Director would counter the argument when in the boss's office with;

“These wives are walking around town branding our business everywhere with our names on these bags and you cannot put a price on subliminal branding!”

The boss sighs and thinks; ‘There he goes again with branding, it’s just one big money pit and I and my money will be long dead and gone before we have a household brand name!’

Many exhibitors will tell you they get as much if not more business from the other stall holders at expos and it is like one big networking event.

One thing for sure is they are not cheap to attend as an exhibitor.

Digital Paid Advertising

You only have to look at Google’s revenue year on year to know that if you attempt to advertise your business on Google with no training or coaching you will soon walk away from that experience broke but a wiser person hopefully. One of my clients last attempts before I intervened, was a calamity, he had got no qualified leads, and he was paranoid all his competitors had it in for him using different IP addresses and internet cafes to keep clicking on his ads.

But it is not just competitor clicks you should be concerned with, there is a procedure to get your keywords in your advert to match your website page so that you are near the top, and for this you have to know some SEO (Search Engine optimisation) so that you can add the right keywords to your site before they match with the ones on your Google advert.

Similar with Facebook advertising, everyone who is using the internet to market their business online will know Facebook marketing is very important, but you do need to get some consultancy from experts before you waste your hard earned and learn the hard way, through expensive trial and error.

Content marketing

This now deserves a heading of its own and is about how to drive targeted traffic to your website by writing content that is informative, useful and relatable.

Relatable is the most important for me , I find if I write a blog like I am writing to a good friend then I hope, well I have been told, that people can feel the human on the other side and we are all story tellers and it makes you more interesting.

Advertisers have been for years exploring the emotion in the ads especially TV I am certain all top advertising executives ask ‘What is the emotion we are selling here?” you have to get your intended audience to ‘feel something’ so even if you are selling nails (for constructing houses and wooden products) you need to sell a home and family with security and pride.

If you are not blogging in this day and age then you are losing the race and not relating to your audience and it works both ways, they are not relating to you.

It is 2019 not 1965 when few people knew who the big bosses were at big companies, there were too many echelons, but now with so many smaller businesses now, you have to have a voice if you are the boss and be at the front line of all your online correspondence, so that people can trust you and deal with you.

We will cover more lead generation activities in Blog 2

If this has frightened you off starting your own business or made you come to the realization that you are not covering all the bases and you just need to clone three more of you to find the time, then fear not. leads4biz.net is at your rescue:

We produce a list of leads every day of what products and services our members (over 6,000 from every business category) are looking to buy for $35 a month we will give you access to the decision makers in your business category who want to buy what you sell NOW! You can read the information about what they want to buy, their budget, where to supply to etc. and then contact them direct. It is, I am sure you will agree, much cheaper in money and time that doing all what we are writing about above, and it is instant!

See all our leads here