When you really attack marketing online for your business there are many different activities that you can implement. You could be doing everything from SEO efforts, paid search, social media, videos, article marketing and more. You might be so thrilled when you first start receiving leads that you don’t even consider where they are actually coming from.
Monitoring lead sources and the associated costs is an essential element to maintain the success of all of your marketing efforts. Consider taking a careful look on which sources and efforts are producing the biggest results. One of the best aspects about being involved with marketing online is the aspect that almost everything has the ability to be tracked.
It can take an adjustment but take the time to evaluate that not all leads are created equal. For example, let’s say you were generating 10 leads a month from your video marketing efforts. Furthermore let’s say that with the promotion of the videos, editing, and creation that each video cost you $100 and you were doing 4 of those a month. That means that you are spending $400/mo on videos, getting 10 leads (i.e. $40/lead); are those leads turning into actual business? This is an exercise that you can perform for each channel of marketing (i.e. paid search, social media, etc.) to determine not only the cost per lead, but which source is providing you with leads that turn into actual business.
Consider the following to help you uncover what is bringing you the most bang for your buck:
- Traffic – One of the first big aspects to examine is how much traffic is a particular resource sending you. When you look at the different forms of marketing that you have launched, examine if they are sending you traffic weekly, daily, or maybe it’s so much they send you traffic every hour. If one resource is sending huge volumes, see if you can get that resource to send even larger volumes of traffic.
- Conversion Rate to Leads– Traffic is nice, but conversions are even better. Getting that great website traffic to convert into leads is determined by many factors (i.e. landing pages, headlines, traffic source, etc.) so look at what is going on with your pages and also look at which traffic sources are sending such targeted traffic that you end up with higher conversion rates.
- Cost Per Lead – This is a key metric to evaluate. Evaluate this number and focus on keeping it as low as possible. The sources that send traffic that are cheap and convert well are ones that you will want to see if you can get even more great traffic from.
- Conversion Rate to Business – Leads are great, but are they actually turning into actual business. When you are tracking your leads, and cost per leads, it is essential to track the source of those leads to help you determine which sources of traffic are delivering your most interested customers. After all, if you had a stunningly low $10 Cost Per Lead but NONE of those leads turned into business, then it isn’t really a great deal. Keep in mind that you need to be honest with yourself and approach every lead with the same veracity to ensure you are giving them the best opportunities to convert into business.
Monitoring these four items will help you to keep your costs inline while keeping your focus on lead generation. Try to allow enough data on each of these items before you make any changes. Allowing for 30-60 days of data can give you a better insight as to what is really going on so you don’t accidentally change something based on some odd behaviors.
Online Marketing Requires Change
One often frustrating aspect of online marketing is the speed at which it changes. For years, in our real estate business, we were able to generate 100’s of leads monthly via paid search (Google and Bing) until the CPCs (Costs Per Clicks) got too high to make it profitable which forced us to adapt and change into other marketing channels. It was tough and even frustrating to have to launch new marketing efforts to generate the same volume of leads; however, as we were tracking our costs and conversion rates we at least understood that it was necessary to add other channels to help keep our costs inline. When you understand that your online marketing efforts will have to adapt and change from the very beginning then it becomes easier to make the change when you see your metrics get out of line.
Above all, have fun with the different aspects of online marketing. It’s fun to see leads pour in and even more fun when you can turn those leads into business.
