We often get asked by marketers and business owners what the number one channel to use is for lead generation. As an Internet marketing company, our answer to this question is that it depends on your industry and that technology is simply an enabler.
The most important thing to pay attention to is your earnings per visitor. And from a cost perspective, it’s a matter of understanding your cost per step in terms of your cost per unique visitor (CPUV), cost per lead (CPL), cost per presentation (CPP), and cost per sale (CPS).
By understanding this, you are able to compare the various channels and vendors that you are using and determine which channels are performing best for you from a numbers perspective.
You want to base your decision making on results, not technology. And ideally, you want to get your marketing campaign to a point where 90% of your spend is predictable and 10% is variable – allocated to testing new channels and vendors.
Now, I’m going to say something that may surprise you and it’s regarding social media. While social media is an important component of any company’s online marketing campaign, it quite often is a supportive medium. What I mean by this is that you can usually generate more revenue through traditional direct response marketing channels such as direct mail, email, and PPC, versus social media.
This does not mean that you should not do social media. It simply means that you should be clear about your expectations. Is it a great medium to have a conversation with your prospects and even existing clients? Yes. Should you use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google+ as part of your marketing campaign? Yes. Should you use it as a primary lead generation channel? No. Unless you have a large fan base that can be leveraged for a launch or to provide continued value.
The point here is that you can drive better results through a well-integrated campaign that is based on generating email addresses and an automated email campaign. This means that you want to use direct marketing channels to drive traffic, and support it with social media for additional traffic. You don’t want to depend on social media as your primary source of traffic.
Once you’re driving traffic through direct response marketing, you then want to focus on conversion through a well built Website, micro site, or landing page, and an effective automated email campaign that prepares your prospects to attend a sales presentation in the form of a sales letter, webinar, or call with a sales person.
The next common question that commonly comes up is how to track the results from each of your advertising campaigns. This is where things get a little more complicated. You want to ensure that you are sending your traffic to a unique landing page for each campaign. When your prospect completes your Web form to opt in, you want to use a unique code for each landing page that is sent to you along with the prospects details that you have captured in your Web form.
You then want to use a report to compare the leads, presentations, and sales against the expense and revenue associated with that particular vendor. While this is a more technical area of Internet marketing, it’s one of the most important. Please feel free to comment if you have any questions at all. We know that this is a technical subject.