Based on your input, your score is LOW.

There is nothing wrong with receiving this score. In fact, most businesses that do all their own marketing themselves get similar scores. What this means is that you are in need of some quick measures to put in place in order to get more leads.

How to Improve Your Score…
Based on our professional experience, here are 3 tips that will help your business:

Tip 1: The Biggest Marketing Mistake

Most businesses that start marketing run a very general campaign. The key to being successful in your marketing is to be niche specific. Instead of marketing the whole business under a single campaign, break down your niche services into individual campaigns.

Once you identify those niches within your business, create individual pages for the top three niches. Make sure that each of those pages has an attractive offer (e.g. Free Quote, Book a Consultation) that addresses the problem your prospects are trying to solve. These pages are called landing pages; the concept is to drive your targeted traffic to land on these specific pages.

The idea behind this exercise is to focus on the top 20% of your services that generate 80% of your results. As you can imagine, this will result in far more focused prospects visiting your website. This is called the Pareto Principle, otherwise known as the 80/20 Principle.

Case Study – Accounting Practice

A certified accounting practice wants to do some online marketing to promote their services for the end of the financial year. Their initial marketing campaign promoted general accounting services in Brisbane. This campaign generated very poor results that could not justify the investment.

After applying the 80/20 Principle, they established three niches:

Individual Tax Returns – Fast, low price tax returns via online submission.

New Business Planning – Free consultations for start up businesses.

Xero Training – Set price course to learn the basics of Xero.

Since they started promoting these three niche services, their marketing suddenly become more specific and their cost per lead dropped. Most importantly, they can now measure their cost per (lead?) for each of these niches separately. During this marketing exercise they found that their “New Business Planning” service turned out to be too expensive to market, whilst the other two niches easily generated leads.

Tip 2: Educating Your Clients

There are lot of industries where the cost per lead can be extremely high. To bring this down, usually as a business owner you would be required to educate your prospects. This education could either be a meeting, phone call or additional website information (e.g. articles or tools). The education process needs to address your clients’ “wants”, “fears” and “frustrations”.

What are these?

Your Clients’ Wants:

To solve their specific problems.
A fast outcome.
To deal with an expert.

Your Clients’ Fears:

You might not the right business to deal with.
You might be to be too expensive.
The process could take too long, etc…

Your Clients’ Frustrations:

They might have previously tried a similar service provider and had an unpleasant experience.
What you are offering might not work for them.
They want proof of your work (e.g. testimonials, before/after photos)
There are many websites that offer things like free reports, training videos or support tools (e.g. budget calculators). The main objective is to educate the prospect and at the same time to gather their contact details (your lead). For example, in our experience working with builders, the prospects are usually not as willing to get a quote straight away; however, they are happy to exchange their details for designs or reports on the process.

Tip 3: Marketing Budgets

Establish a marketing budget based on your sales goals. What this means is that you need to work out how much you are willing to pay (per?) customer and how many leads you need to obtain one client. There are many different ways to calculate this, but for service based industries this is roughly based on 10% of the sale. So if your single service sale price is $500, your budget should be around $50 to acquire that customer.

Case Study – Concreting Business

The best way to work out an average cost per lead is to go through a set of questions. Here are some questions to guide you through the process:

How many leads do you need to get a new client?

If your answer is 5, then your lead to sale conversion rate is 20%.

How many visitors do you need to visit your website to get a single lead?

If your answer is 50, then your website to lead conversion rate is 2%.

Knowing those stats, how many visitors do you need to get one sale?

1 client = 250 visitors (5×50)

What is the marketing cost per sale?

If each (visitor?) is costing you an average of $1.50, then your cost per sale is $375.

If you are unsure about any of those questions or are not sure where to look up the stats, perhaps taking a step back and working on your stats should be your starting point.

To track conversions properly we recommend using Google Analytics (a free tool). You will need to make sure your website is also tracking form submissions. The simplest way to do this is by setting up forms on your website and adding Google Analytics goal tracking. If you are not technically savvy we would advise you to outsource this process.