Are Your Leads A Mirage

Are Your Leads A Mirage Generating leads, as the precursor to generating sales, is the lifeblood of any business.  You dont get business, you go out of business. As a small business marketer  who is always tight on time and money for marketing campaigns, Im always evaluating my lead generating marketing and assessing performance. Like many small businesses this is a part of a part time function.  I need to get to the point quickly and move on. Ive done Facebook paid ads and Facebook Page posts and boosted those posts. Ive tested LinkedIn public posts and posts to industry groups. Ive tested Craigslist Ads. Ive made opt-in offers at my website. Ive done drip marketing campaigns with email and blog posts. And until you do the analysis, you cant tell which is doing best.  And although Google Analytics helps you find some of those answers, there is often more to the story. Just because you get more sales from one platform does not mean it necessarily is outperforming the rest.  Sometimes paid ads bring in more bottom line dollars (after deducting the costs of those sales) than so called Free Marketing channels. And in the guest post below (they are marketing their services aka lead generation) there are some very interesting takeaways I think  you should  know whether youre a mid-sized company who will  benefit from their services, or a small mom and pop marketer who can still take these ideas to improve their business marketing performance. As I went through the slides, here are some takeaways I  found interesting How many visits it takes to convert into a sales lead.  Youll be surprised by the number. Why an inquiry and a lead are not one and the same.   Theres more to this than you think. How overstating your leads will result in poor cost per lead and ROI assessmentwhich could mislead you into thinking a bad campaign is actually profitable. Here you go. When you’re trying to generate quality leads, relying on conversion data in your marketing campaigns will leave you in a vulnerable spot. Based on “The Critical Importance of Lead Validation” study, as much as 50 percent of a company’s conversions are not sales leads. Overstated conversion data causes you to invest in campaigns that are producing much less ROI than you think, and to make campaign changes that make performance even worse. as much as 50 percent of a company’s conversions are not sales leads Click To Tweet By validating leads, the process of separating non-sales conversions from sales conversions, you’ll uncover inquiry data that will help you optimize your campaign to its full potential. That data includes how many sales leads you’ve generated versus other conversions, and the online marketing source for each of sales lead. Without this process it is impossible to determine the true effectiveness of your lead generation. In the presentation below, you will find more eye-opening lead generation data. The importance of lead validation by organic seo services company, Straight North. Aaron Wittersheim is an accomplished entrepreneur with more than 20 years of business and technology experience. He is currently Chief Operating Officer at Straight North, a Chicago-based Internet marketing company.