How to do Lead Generation via the Web

Written by Ken Beattie

Wednesday, 29 July 2009 10:18

High quality lead generation is probably one of the hottest topics of interest for many companies at the moment. The recession has really forced companies to become hunters of business rather than farmers of accounts. But how do you come by good leads?

In my opinion, there is no cure all solution, but there is a definite starting point. First of all you must have a good, market resonating business proposition. This should be a product or service differentiation, not just differentiation on price!

The next step is to ensure that ALL of your employees understand this proposition and get used to communicating. It should be clearly displayed on the first page of your website, you should employ a number of techniques to get the word out there and you must back up your proposition with case studies which legitimise your claims. You could set up an email marketing campaign backed up by a telemarketing or sales follow up, a seminar series, partnership programme or direct mail. However, one lead generation tool that is often overlooked is the company website.

This can be a great source of leads. One company I was recently engaged by saw a lead generation per month of ZERO (thats nil points) rise to 5 per month on a continual basis by improving its website and optimising it for search engines. They did no paid search, purely organic, keyword analysis, optimised well, good links to other sites. They offered free downloadable white papers and updated their news: crikey there are so many sites that don’t even do this on a regular basis!

Within 90 days, this company converted a customer who enquired via the web into a sale in excess of £150k. They are working on a second. For the cynics, and I am old enough to be one, no inbound telephone call AND no direct or indirect marketing to either target had taken place. You will have to take my word for that!

So the web works. Not just for the business to consumer side, not just for items under £50k but for much much larger deals than that, and in B2B marketing too. Happy hunting!

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