It’s easy to be skeptical about online lead generation when you haven’t had success with it before.
The stories you hear are often too good to be true. Business falling out of the sky, phone lines ringing off the hook, inventory selling out in seconds flat.
Recently, we met with a service company business owner and presented what we do to him.
His skepticism rose up in a flurry of dismissive questions.
We made no promises and instead just laid out the simple facts: this is what we do, this is why, and here’s how we track every single thing so you know whether or not your money is being spent to get actual results.
The beauty of doing online marketing is how trackable it all is.
You just have to watch each step in the process day by day.
Money in the front becomes clicks on an ad. Those clicks become calls or new subscribers. And then those calls or subscribers become actual checks being cashed in your business.
You wouldn’t know this if you’re on the outside of the world of online lead generation, but the tracking tools available make it totally possible for you to watch the entire process as easily as you can watch a mouse run through a maze.
And, every single month, if you want to do the legwork, you can boil all your lead generation efforts down to an essential equation:
Money Generated From Your Ads / Money Paid for Your Ads = Your Return on Investment (ROI).
This isn’t brand advertising; it’s direct numbers-driven marketing.
So, this business owner gave us a chance. He decided to sign up for our service.
Guess how long his skepticism lasted?
At the end of our first month handling his online lead generation, we were able to sit down with him and present the following:
- A spreadsheet of how his ads performed and how much he spent
- A spreadsheet of the actual calls dialed into his business off of his ads
- A .zip file of MP3s of the calls dialed into his business
- A list of the new email opt-ins garnered in the past month through the lead pages we designed for this business
- A spreadsheet of the business generated off of these calls pulled from the service management software this company uses
- A simple summary breakdown of the key numbers – Amount spent, Number of Legitimate Calls Received, New Customers Generated, Total Revenue Directly Generated Off of the Ads
So, ask yourself a question:
If you had that kind of breakdown of everything you had spent on marketing and all the interest (and actual closed business) your marketing spend had generated, and if the end result was that you spend $1 to make $4, would you remain skeptical?
Nothing disintegrates skepticism like actual numbers.
These days, we actually enjoy bumping up against the skepticism of a business owner who’s been burned many times before.
Because we know it’s only a matter of time until we convert that skepticism into confidence, clarity, and excitement.
