Could you grow your business significantly if you could find a good source of leads? This is a common refrain I hear from different service businesses. Business owners and salespeople are good at closing the sale if they can just get in front of a good prospect. The challenge is finding that source of leads. Many businesses rely on referrals, which are inconsistent, or networking, which is a huge time commitment with limited results. For those businesses that have tried advertising, results are mixed at best. So what is a business to do? Having been in marketing for the past 22 years and running my own business for 10 of those years, I have figured out a few things about generating a consistent flow of quality leads. There are four components you need:
Differentiation - some way of standing out from your competitors, even if it is just personality or a specific way of doing things.
Clarity of message - if others can easily explain what you do, then your message is clear.
Multiple touches - few people decide to work with a service provider after only one interaction, so you need to build multiple touches into your marketing plan.
Good targeting - if you are not getting your message in front of the right people, you might as well be shouting in the forest.
When you put all of these things together, you can build the Perfect Lead EngineTM. Can this work? You bet. Here are a two client examples:
A family law firm that generates 30+ leads per month that have been screened based on search terms and an ad that is tuned to appeal to only their ideal type of client.
An organic landscape company that can easily turn up or down the number of leads generated based on their current pipeline and keep the business growing at a consistent rate.
If this is of interest to you, then you are in luck :) After taking a couple months off from the blog and thinking about what direction to go with it, I have decided to focus it on lead generation and start publishing it weekly. We will be looking at the different components of the Perfect Lead EngineTM, our proprietary process for helping service businesses generate very targeted leads, and how you can apply it.