October 7th, 2009 → 12:33 pm @ Richard
Would you like to generate more leads for your business but don’t have the budget to make it work? Think again. There are plenty of low cost strategies available once you know what you’re looking for.
Effective lead generation is a three-stage process:
Each of these three steps can cost money but if you’re putting together a low cost marketing strategy you can make simple decisions to keep the budget in check.
The first step in any lead generation strategy is to attract people to your business – and more particularly your website – with good marketing. For many businesses marketing means advertising, but advertising can be an expensive way to promote your business.
Marketing is bigger than just advertising and here are three simple marketing methods you can use:
SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of making your website and content easy for the search engines to find and more likely to turn up in the search engine results of your target customers. Do your SEO homework well and you can attract people who are searching for solutions – solutions that you provide – at no cost to you.
Good SEO comes down to five simple ideas;
You can find more detail about SEO in our free report.
PR (public relations) is traditionally about encouraging the media to write about you and your business – usually by issuing press releases and building relationships with journalists. More recently, online press release services have made it possible for businesses to create ‘direct to consumer’ releases (news releases as opposed to press releases).
These releases are designed to be SEO friendly and get picked up in the search results. If you’re writing for news releases try including a call to action that encourages people to visit your website. Either way, PR can be an effective way to attract leads without spending a fortune.
PPC (pay per click) is advertising. But it’s also one of the most focused and cost effective forms of advertising. A good example of PPC ads is Google Adwords. Adwords ads are the ones you see to the right of your normal search results. You can create an ad, decide what search terms the ad will appear next to, bid on how much you are willing to pay and then set a monthly budget. You only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad – meaning you can create very specific advertising campaigns on very limited budgets.
Once you have attracted people to your lead generation system the next step is to develop those leads and identify the ones who are ready to buy. This can often be a time consuming process if you try to do it manually – and the more time consuming it is the more expensive it is too.
Perhaps the best way to ensure that a low cost lead generation strategy is to automate as much of the process as possible, using:
The majority of your lead generation program is much more cost effective in the long run than relying entirely on paid staff (or your own time) to accomplish it. In short, if you need a low cost lead generation strategy, focus on using low cost marketing strategies and automate as much of the process as you can.
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Do it yourself: For more lead generation ideas Download our free report
Tags: Automated Lead Generation, Low Cost Lead Generation, Pay Per Click Advertising
