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lead nurture

Critical Success Factors For Online Lead Intake

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The individuals that interact with online clients via lead intake at professional service companies need to understand how these online opportunities might differ from traditional walk-ins or phone calls.  Before the advancement of the Internet as a common consumer tool for research and communication, there were only two principle ways in which a prospective client would make contact with your business:  walk-in traffic  (face to face) or incoming telephone calls (phone to phone).  Now business professionals must also be proficient in digital communications including email (keyboard to keyboard) and social (keyboard to community).

Today’s Internet represents a powerful unique way for clients to both investigate options and perform research before making a critical final engagement decision.  The marketing strategy, the communication platforms, and the vital skills and abilities required to satisfy and inform these clients are uniquely different from the traditional traffic channels.

What Are The Critical Success Factors For Internet Lead Intake?

The responsibilities and skill set required for successfully processing, intaking and closing an online engagement opportunity requires specialized training, abilities and mindset because and online lead generation IS a different process. Let’s look at some of the differences from traditional traffic compared to modern traffic channels.

The following chart compares the differences in focus in building customer value between the traditional intake and online intake:

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  • Focus is on identifying client needs, selecting the right service or product, making a value / benefit presentation, gaining a closing commitment, negotiation and closing on the product or service
  • Face to face
  • You control the flow of information
  • You control the pace of the process – who does what when
  • Buying commitment required in exchange for pricing disclosure
  • Emphasis on building value in service or product
  • The opportunity is NOW: Go for close
  • One and done, get ready for the next opportunity

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  • Focus is on confirming the client needs, engaging the client / customer in an exchange of information, validating the value / benefit that your service or product offers, and closing on an in person appointment
  • Keyboard to Keyboard
  • Customer controls the flow of information
  • Customer controls the pace of the process – who does what when
  • Up-front pricing disclosed to build customer trust
  • Emphasis on building value in the business relationship
  • The opportunity is indefinite: Go for an appointment
  • Success requires tracking and follow-up

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What Does A Successful Lead Intake Process Look Like?

The most effective managers of Internet leads will need to have core competencies in three important areas:
1. Technology:

  • Must be comfortable with information technology, it changes rapidly.
  • Embrace multiple communication platforms. Be fluent with how your leads want to communicate with your business.
  • Capable of learning and utilizing lead management applications.

2. Online Lead Process Management:

  • Can organize multiple engagement activities at once to accomplish business objectives.
  • Understands how to arrange information and files in a useful manner utilizing technology.
  • Knows what steps in the process to measure and how to measure it.
  • Good at figuring out priorities in getting things done.
  • Does not get overwhelmed by multiple engagement and administrative tasks.
  • Breaks down engagement activities into the process steps.
  • Focuses on outcomes that drive success.

3. Online Engagement Skills:

  • Assumes client / customer has previously completed some research online.
  • Has excellent communication skills that engages the client / customer, validates customer research, builds trust and secures in person appointments.
  • Is able to write a digital communication that is clear, concise and gets a message across that provides value to the client / customer.  Understands basic digital protocol for email, social media, and other digital platforms as it pertains to your business.
  • Patient working within each client’s / customer’s information agenda while maintaining a focused results oriented engagement plan.
  • Understands the business’ services or products and can easily answer basic related questions in a way that projects professionalism and increases client trust and confidence levels.
  • Drives engagement forward to the desired business objectives: set an appointment.

The digital environment is extremely dynamic and the business engagement process does vary from traditional brick and mortar client acquisition methods. Success is measured differently, because the business objectives align closely to the client objectives with a focus on outcomes; in most cases setting an appointment becomes the priority rather than closing a client.

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To recap a successful lead generation intake process, it is critically important to review and know these key concepts:

  • The engagement strategy, the communication tools, and the skill and ability required to successfully handle inbound leads are uniquely different from the traditional role for walk-in traffic.
  • The most prosperous people in these lead intake positions understand the responsibilities and skill sets required for successfully processing and engaging the online opportunity and recognize that it requires specialized training to maintain a competitive edge.
  • Everyone interacting with an online lead makes a unique contribution to the clients’ experience and perception of the brand value.
  • The online lead intake process has a distinctly different focus than a traditional engagement process in building customer value and provides validation to the customers’ decision.
  • The lead intake team that handles online queries will need to have competencies in three important areas; technology, online lead process management, and online engagement skills.

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How Much Does Your Free Organic Traffic Cost?

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The Real Value Of Free Organic Traffic

Any business that depends upon free organic traffic for customers or clients must recognize the value of their organic traffic. That means the vast majority of business owners that either do organic optimization in-house or employ a vendor or agency to optimize their organic presence, know that your FREE TRAFFIC IS NOT FREE.  Treat your organic traffic with the same level of intensity that you use for your paid traffic, because organic traffic has value too!

Why Organic Traffic Is Not Free

What is your time worth? If your time is valued at $50, $75, or $250 an hour, can it be better spent doing something other than optimizing your web site? Average business person spends 8 to10 hours a month on their web marketing meeting, writing, tweaking, reviewing their internet strategies.  At $100 an hour, that’s $800 to $1000 of time invested to drive “free” traffic.  When you review your return on investment to find that your $1000 of time investment delivered client sign ups of $10,000 then you enjoyed a 10 to 1 ROI, which is great if that was your target. But if you signed up only $2,000 of new clients and the 2 to 1 ROI is not enough to keep the lights on, then maybe it’s time to rethink how your handle your free organic traffic.

Free Stuff Is Easily Discarded
Many studies have shown that perceived value of items correlates directly to how that item is treated.  The difference between your evaluation of the benefits and costs of the item when compared with other costs and benefits becomes the perceived value. If you are given a “free” roller ball pen, you may use it every single day, but if you lose it, no big deal right? Now you are given a free Acme roller ball pen that you use every single day. If you lose this pen, will you feel the same as losing the plastic pen? Not so much. Even when both are free, the perceived value to you differs.  Knowing the value of your organic visitors by source is a metric most successful online businesses monitor frequently.

How To Calculate The Basic Value per Visitor

The simplest way to calculate the value per visitor is to start with your desired outcome, in most cases profit.  Then all you do is divide the total online profit by the total number of your visitors.

Simple Example:

Profit / Visitors = Visitor Value
An e-commerce retail website
$150/1,000 = $0.15 per visitor value

Professional Services Example:
A personal injury law firm with a 2% closing rate on auto accident cases.

$150,000 / 1,000 = $150 per visitor value

In the professional services example when you assign the visitor value to the 200 “free” contacts (form submissions and emails), that value of those contacts is actually not zero but $30,000. Will you handle your $30,000 of opportunity differently than you would handle free? Of course you will. So stop burning up contacts or leads, build a process to handle your valuable free organic traffic opportunities!

When you use visitor value data to make smart informed business decisions, then assigning the right focus to these business opportunities is the correct course of action. With a renewed focus on the value you are receiving, defining a processes to maximize your conversion of these opportunities, your business will flourish.

lead nurture

How To Get A Fast Start In Lead Generation

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Fast Track Your Lead Generation

Want to increase your bottom line with lead generation but don’t know where to start? Lead gen fundamentals are often nothing more than a simple math problem; thoughtful tracking of the numbers yields results when done correctly. As only one part of your overall digital strategy, lead gen can be a welcome boost to profitability, just don’t lose sight of the rest of your business. Take a step by step approach to the part of your marketing by starting with a clear definition of your customers or clients. Develop this user persona as a first step.

Step #1. What do your potential customers want?

Remember that zero potential customers wakes up in the morning and screams loudly, “Please market to me today!” No client thinks of themselves as a “lead” for your organization. The key is to understand these individuals and discover what they truly want or need. Start out by answering questions that drive them to seek solutions, questions like:

  • What are their pain points that keeps them awake at night?
  • What do they want to avoid so bad that they are willing to pay others to do?
  • What are the goals or objectives that they want to achieve?
  • What problem are they trying to solve?
  • How are they trying to change their current situation?
  • Where do they go to seek help or solutions?
  • What is there sense of urgency to resolve a problem or change their life?
  • How soon do they need to act?

Fortunately there are many different avenues to go to uncover this information. Effectively monitoring social media, client interviews, discussions with customer facing groups, posts from industry thought leaders, surveys, white papers,  are just a few of the ways to learn and better understand  what your potential customers want. The success or failure of your lead generation efforts hinges right here at the start by answering the question – what do my clients and customers want?

social media

SEO Scare Tactics Versus Today’s Reality

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Here are 6 SEO myths perpetuated by less than ethical professionals and lazy optimizers that does not fit play well in today’s digital marketing environment. These six SEO scare tactics can hold your business back from potential growth and valuable ROI.

Scare Tactic #1 – SEO Is An Event

SEO is a process, not an event. You cannot just SEO the site, launch it, and think optimization is done. With constant changes that evolve the digital landscape, being stuck in the past is dangerous and downright foolish. Many business do not keep up with the changes either in thoughts or actions, and do not embrace the change as an opportunity to be better than competitors. These businesses create systems and process that strongly cling to what use to work, a last grasp at the past. Looking forward to the future is not done by looking backwards. Effective SEO demands forward thinking and flexibility to engage with new ways of doing optimization. This does not mean that your business can skip the fundamentals of search engine optimization, rather it assumes that the SEO basics are in place as a solid foundation to build on. If your business is simply doubling-down with commitment to last years tactics, then you are exposing yourself to many missed opportunities that best in class SEO offers.

Scare Tactic #2 – Focus Only On Keywords To Win Business

The singular obsession with keyword phrases is too granular.  Old SEO goals focused on rankings for keywords; not only getting the phrase ranked, but keeping it at all costs. That thought encouraged all efforts to get the top spot on page one as the priority, no matter how it was done. This old SEO mentality of the past, would drive focus on one principle keyword or keyword phrase. The SEO practitioner researched a targeted keyword where they wanted to rank, and then focused on that keyword only. This singular approach exposes those types of tactics to the whims of algorithm changes and is extremely reactive SEO.

  • Keyword density is important – keyword density makes content unreadable. There’s a reason SEO’s laugh at this joke; “An SEO walks into a bar, bars, saloon, whiskey bar, pub,  and orders a drink, beer, shot, liquor, wine…”. Natural semantic phrases used in search work better in moderation.
  • Abundant redundant keywords – usually found in links, footer, page titles, anchor text, alt text, are aggressive over-optimization and once again reads and looks like spam. Avoid doing this.

This is no longer the world of effective SEO. Exceptional digital markers look beyond the keyword and into the mind of the people that are doing searches. Today’s SEO is about user intent and user engagement with the brand. Focusing on intent highlights the need to optimize for semantic phrases and long tail searches. Semantic SEO is all about understanding what the person is actually trying to accomplish with their search and how best to present your brand for that intent. Alignment of the brand and how people engage with the brand is the new focus. How your brand is viewed is the improvement that will drive organic success and ultimately more business results.

Scare Tactic # 3 – Rank As a Success Metric

bad seo strategySending this little red flag up the flagpole opens all kinds of doors.  When that long list of unsolicited keywords that your business does not rank for suddenly becomes important, it’s time to just stop. What’s the economic benefit of these terms when most have zero relevance to user intent?  Then in the next business discussion with that client, they hand you a 20 page ranking report tracking hundreds of utterly useless keyphrases?  Been there too? Then ask this question, “How are your analytics? What’s the correlation between the ranking report and your actual business results?”  Even though your business may rank for hundreds of terms, the key phrases from an unwanted solicitation become the focus and urgently require immediate action. Rarely does this fear tactic ever benefit your business. If your definition means SEO is chasing rankings, then note that SEO style is dead. Omni-channel marketing is the here and now in the current marketing environment.  Brand marketing across multiple channels offers the best chance for success.

Rankings are dangerous because they are assumptive:

  • Assumption #1- the ranked key phrase has an audience that’s relevant to my business
  • Assumption #2 – the ranked term is aligned with searcher intent
  • Assumption #2 – the searcher will actually click on the search results to my website
  • Assumption #2 – the keyword is aligned with my landing page
  • Assumption #2 – the entire engagement listed above will result in a conversion to a client or sale

These ranking reports are easy but often manipulate the truth of the business ROI. It’s always a bit awesome to for a client to say “We’re #1 in Google for bounce house injury lawyer in Tupelo, MS!” or “We’re the top of page one for Red Widgets In Wichita!!”

Rank is easy to sell, because it’s easy to understand. It’s even a bit sexy because it appeals to ego and vanity. However it’s the responsibility of professional marketers and savvy business people to move the rank conversation from the old way of thinking into a more meaningful discussion, one that will benefit the business.  Focus on measurable KPI’s for Brand, Audience, Engagement, and Outcomes. These are metrics that when improved, increase contacts, promote sales and drive real money to the bottom line. Don’t fall into the easy trap of taking the path of least resistance, plan an SEO strategy that will target the right keyword phrases that target the relevant audience, at the right time, that presents the business or brand in the best possible light. That it key to long term growth in a new SEO environment.

Scare Tactic #4 – The Sun Rises And Sets On Google

For those businesses that perpetually wear “Google-goggles”, you may not know this, but you have a problem. If you are super excited that so much of your organic traffic comes from Google and you think that means you are “winning”, please think again. It means that with all of your eggs in the Google basket, your business is actually at risk. The next Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird, or other animal update can put a serious pinch on your online presence.  Just as smart investors never put all of their money into one single stock to mitigate their risk, smart SEO strategies create diverse traffic mediums with multiple inbound channels.

Progressive SEO strategies look for opportunities to promote your business or brand in many places.  Your plan needs to be as diverse as your audience, to maximize success opportunities.  Omni-channel marketing (always on, always everywhere) is the new normal to get your value proposition to the masses.

Scare Tactic # 5 Content Is King

Guess what? Content is king, but crap content is not. Developing thin, anemic content focused on ranking for a keyword is not only a bad SEO technique that just won’t go away, it can actually do way more harm than good. There was a time that using the right keywords in the correct amount, could lead to improved rankings. Google’s Panda algorithm filters absolutely loves to crush that junk content into oblivion.

The key was simple, content was always supposed to be written for readers first. Many people chose to write content for the search engines first, and human readers second. This type of content is exactly what the search engine algorithms try to minimize. The best content is well written, filled with relevance to the search and delights the targeted audience with a “WOW’ factor that’s very engaging and highly shared.

negative SEO facepalmIt’s time to move away from creating thin content for search engines. Start developing your brand and business by writing your audience. Understand the who and the why and it’s becomes easier to create great content. Writing quality high value content for your audience does not mean it’s mutually exclusive from writing for search engines. Quite the opposite, awesome content is generally shared and can drive meaningful back links. If you are not excited about your content, how will your audience be excited?

How About Some Article Submissions?
Please no. Going hand in hand with low quality content is  generating Article Submissions as link bait. Long past it’s prime, stop doing this right now before Panda seeks you out. Article submissions consisting of thin content might be any easy way to create some quick back links to your domain, but is this really the best use of your marketing efforts? The time and effort to be consistent in article submissions might be better applied elsewhere.

For example, why not try to build some actual relationships by networking within your industry and sharing stories and blog posts that can real value to their website and the online community of your audience? What better way to build quality and authority for your own web properties?

What About Some Press Releases?
Seriously, no. Now for the other thin content tactic to never use again, press releases without real news. Please just stop. As a true method for public relations, blasting your business or name on the newswire on the slim chance to get some links from a legitimate news channel is not a sound practice.  Issuing non-newsworthy Press Releases as a links promotional tool mirrors the waste of time like article submissions.  Again, in a post Panda and Penguin world, this practice puts your business at risk when done incorrectly. How would you like your back link profile to show the submitter as the authority in the anchor cloud instead of your business? This happens more often than you may think. If you do something truly remarkable, newsworthy that adds real value to your community, a press release MAY be in order and MAY be effective to promote your brand. If this is not the case, just keep building relationships with trust over time.

Scare Tactic #6 – SEO Works The Same For Every Site

This is a big one, but clearly not true. SEO is not the same for every site. Content profiles differ, back links differ, anchor clouds differ, code base, site architecture, site design, domain tenure, all of these things differ site to site. Applying sound solid SEO principles will benefit every website, but results will vary greatly. A single SEO magic trick will not be “the silver bullet” to drive results. Search engine optimization is really a series of a thousand little details done well in context to each other that maximizes value and generates performance results.

whitehat SEOSo how do you move forward with a SEO strategy for your business? Start by understanding exactly where you are today. Use your analytics to establish business critical goals and KPIs. Make your KPIs DUMB – doable, understandable, manageable and beneficial. Focus on effective – what are the metrics that actually grow your business and creates positive ROI? Understand that search engine algorithms remain dynamic and in a constant state of refinement. With this awareness refine your focus to only do the right things, the right way, all the time. It’s not always pretty, sexy or fun, but it still works. SEO tactics must support your business goals, either economic or strategic in nature.  SEO strategy success simply comes down to working towards established goals. The goals must align with the actions that make money and have KPIs for each of those actions. Your focused efforts here helps ease concerns about Panda, Penguin or any other algorithm shifts.

local seo

Why Local Search Is Important

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What Is Local Search And Why Is It Important?

There is no question that having an easy to find website with accurate information is of the utmost importance. In the quest for greater online visibility, an increasingly big player is local search.

What Is Local Search?

Simply put, it is searches done by a variety of search engines that provide results within the searcher’s area. These search engines are not unknown small engines. Some examples include Google Maps and Bing Places. The bare minimum information for your business is usually already on these engines. Users do not have to go out of their way to perform these kinds of searches: Try entering ‘food’ into Google and see what happens. In addition to the standard list of search results you will get localized search results. Every time someone is looking for something, modern search engines are usually smart enough to show the local results.

Why Is It Important?

With millions of people on smartphones, local search is quite literally at people’s fingertips. When someone is actually walking or driving around your town looking for a business, one like yours, they are frequently going to reach into their pocket and rely on something like Google Maps to find what they need. Ensuring that the information on these apps and websites is accurate and detailed is of the utmost importance. If prospective customers try and fail to call the disconnected phone line listed online, chances are they are just going to call someone else.

What Are Local Citations?

A local citation is when your business or website is mentioned on another local site. This can include pages with listings or pages for local government institutions. These citations of your business and website are taken into account by Google when attempting to assess your webpage. For that reason, it is important to get yourself on local listings and find opportunities to get more citations where you can.

If you have been doing what you can to optimize your site for search engines, local citations and search may be what you are missing. Pay mind to this component of your business and it can only help.

Importance of social media for small business

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The Value Of Small Business Social Media

Now, when running a business, one must have a solid and reliable online presence. With a website, SEO strategy, and social media accounts, a company can reach more customers and make more money. With that being said, many do not know enough about social media and they end up missing out on opportunities. Fortunately, with this quick guide, one can understand why social media for small business is beneficial.

What Social Media Applications Are Great For Small Business?

What: when thinking about social media, most think of Facebook and Twitter. These are, by far, the two largest outlets and the ones most people should concern themselves with. Now, this does not mean that social media for small business is simple. Instead, when setting up accounts, one should take the time to fill out their profile and make plenty of posts. At the same time, a business owner must communicate with visitors as this is the best way for a business to gain market share.

Many small business owners do not feel that they need social media marketing. Whether a person runs a one-man show or has 50 employees, they must use social media. When using this outlet, one can reach out to customers of all income brackets and ages. Remember, almost everyone heads online and visits social media pages every day.

Why many entrepreneurs do not think they need Facebook as they are satisfied with their current marketing plan. While some people do well with advertisements and referrals, social media helps. In fact, most will see the benefits quickly as they will see a spike in website traffic. Not only that, when using social media marketing, an entrepreneur will see that he or she will not need to spend a lot of money to find customers. This is a serious advantage for a small business owner who does not have a large marketing budget. Simply put, dollar for dollar, social media is a reliable way to bring in customers and increase sales.

Fortunately, even a person with limited computer or Internet experience can set up a social media account. When signing up for an account, a business owner must provide basic information about the business. Once established, the business should have no difficulty in finding followers for the page.