It is a new year.  Let's keep our business resolution and generate even more leads in 2010.

But I warn you! No crash diet! Yes, analogous to the crash diet, where one goes out on January 2nd and joins a gym and purchases far too many diet shakes, wasting valuable time and money only to find themselves abandoning the entire endeavour by February, there is the crash marketing strategy, and it is equally as pointless.  Ringing in the new year by spending all of your marketing budget and allocated time on a few flashy, splashy campaigns that, once over will not yield you any further leads is as frustrating and as self-defeating as an unused gym membership. 

So, like the diet gurus recommend, let's make 2010 our year by embracing a "lifestyle change." Instead of starving our marketing efforts for the entire year after a few gorges, let's make small, inexpensive, and effective changes to our daily business lives.  The result will be a steady stream of new leads that do not dry up once your budget does. We shall begin by making our website into a continuous lead-generating machine.     

Part 1: Make your website work for you utilizing the TCM approach!

What exactly is the TCM approach? I was reading this wonderful article by Online Marketing Consultant Bob De Stefano entitled "How To Make Your Website a Lead-Generation Machine" and he cited what he termed the TCM approach: Target, Convert, and Measure. First, you must Target your desired audience, those who would be your ideal prospects and leads, enticing them to visit your website.  Second, once they are there, you must capture their contact information and Convert them into leads.  And third, you must Measure your results, lest you find yourself with an expensive treadmill clothesline in your basement.  Breaking down the TCM approach, we begin with step one.   

Target

In order for your website to work for you, you must first work for it.  You need to make sure that your targeted audience will find and visit your website. Studies show that over 80% of prospective customers begin the process of finding the product or service they are looking for in search engines. Therefore, in order to target your audience, those people who would need your products and/or services, you need to utilize search engine optimization (SEO).  A quick review: SEO is the designing, writing, and coding of your website so that it will get found organically in search engines, preferably at the top of the results page. The top two ways search Engines like Google rank websites is by keyword relevance (how relevant are the keywords used in your site's copy and code) and link popularity (the quantity and quality of third party sites linking to your website). Always remember, when choosing keywords, think of which words your target audience would be searching for, not you the expert in your field.  You can also use Pay Per Click (PPC), where you are only charged when someone clicks your ad on a search engine, delivering them to your website. At only ten cents per click, this method of targeting is quite affordable as well. If your company has social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook this will also help you rank higher organically in the search engine results.  We will discuss in further detail maximizing your social media sites in Part 2 of this New Year/New Leads/"Lifestyle Change" series.    

Convert

Now that you have a steady stream of targeted visitors coming to your website, you need to convert them into real leads you can deliver to your sales team. Do not simply rely on your Contact Us page to do so.  Make Calls to Action available at every turn on your site, but in a manner that does not remind your visitors of the gym game Bombardment. Entice your visitors with valuable information and special offers in exchange for some basic contact information. Examples include ordering online, signing up for upcoming events, and subscribing to a newsletter. 

Measure 

Remember to always measure your efforts, every step of the way.  This is in fact the most important and yet least utilized aspect of the entire marketing process.  If you aren't measuring your results, then how will you be aware of your return on investment (ROI)?  Be sure to measure everything! What landing pages are pulling in the most traffic to your site? What methods are converting the most visitors into leads? You can set up a web analytics system for your metrics.  I suggest Google Analytics.  It is very simple and a free service.    

So remember:

Target the audience that you want and pull them into your website.

Convert your visitors into leads.

Measure the entire process to see what is and what is not working for you!

Want to learn more?  I suggest reading Bob De Stefano's article "How to Make Your Website a Lead-Generation Machine."

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