How Effective Lead Management & Tracking Can Help You Beat the Cost-of-Living Crisis
Your business is facing threats from every side. Rising costs are everywhere. Energy, raw materials and rents, while consumer confidence has fallen to a record low, with your customers and potential customers cutting discretionary spending across the board.
So how do you keep down costs but also attract customers? You start by making sure you know where your existing, most profitable customers come from and ensuring that any current marketing is delivering. You start with effective lead management. Insite Web is here to tell you how.
The value of good lead management
If your business isn’t effectively managing your leads, then you are wasting money. Think about it. If you don’t know how your customers found you how can you make sure you aren’t throwing your marketing budget away on channels that just don’t attract business? Or how will you be able to direct your budget to the channels that do work?
That’s what effective lead management does. You track leads at every stage to understand where your customers come from, which of your ads are most effective and which marketing approaches just aren’t working for you.
Data vs vanity
Let’s start with your website. Maybe you think that your goal should be to increase traffic to your site by say 10%. All well and good. You might feel pleased that more people are visiting your website, but what do you with that 10% once they’re there? Just increasing numbers doesn’t necessarily increase sales. In fact, it could end up costing you money if you aren’t discerning enough and end up being contacted by people who aren’t the right customer for you at all. Your salespeople get tied up on calls with timewasters. Not ideal.
Managing and tracking your leads means that rather than just increasing the number of website visitors, you attract the right visitors in the first place, for example by using rigorously tested PPC. Once they’re on your website you know, because you have data that proves it, that any of the tools that you are using to capture customer details are the most effective at getting the information you need from the people you are trying to sell to.
Why track?
Ok. Let’s go back to that website and PPC. Your company pays for a Google Ads campaign. Your ad is seen, people contact you. Has your ad worked? The answer is without proper tracking – and an understanding of what ‘worked’ means – you don’t know.
Tracking PPC such as Google and Bing Ads seems the most straightforward you just look at how many people clicked on the ad and then contacted you. But it isn’t really that simple. If ads are being used to generate leads, most companies will get anyone who clicks on an ad to fill out a form, the company gets the details on the form, pass it to the sales team and then get on with the sales process.
This is full of problems though. What if they don’t fill out a form? What if they get to your website and just call? Or use live chat? For B2B sales decisions are often made by several people, so the person who saw your ad may come back to your site at a later date and then contact you. How do you know whether any of these leads originated in your Google Ad? If you aren’t managing your leads effectively, then you don’t.
What is effective lead management?
Effective lead management tracks every lead through every channel. In our example above effective lead management would mean creating dedicated landing pages for your ads, rather than just sending potential customers to your website. It would mean putting in place systems that record every contact that comes as a result of your Google Ad, regardless of whether that contact was made via form, phone call or live chat. Importantly effective lead management would test alternative ads (A/B testing) to ensure that you are always using the most profitable version.
How lead tracking saves you money
Lead tracking gives you data and data lets you make decisions based on facts rather than guesswork. When that data is telling you where your most profitable leads come from you save money by focussing on those and moving away from the channels that don’t bring in leads.
More widely, lead management and tracking can save you money by providing you with more qualified leads. Remember those website visitors? If you ask them to complete a form on your site, you can design that form to provide your salespeople with the information they need to understand the sales call before they make it, or information that can ensure that the most appropriate salesperson follows up the lead, for example because they have a particular specialism in your business. This saves you time and subsequently money. We’ll tell you more about how forms and call tracking can improve the quality of leads later this month when we discuss lead optimisation.
Track to the end
Finally, you can really feel the benefit of lead tracking and management if you feed sales data back into your lead management system. Essentially you record which of your leads resulted in sales, which will give you even more data about which of your leads are the most profitable. You can’t do this however if you don’t have the fundamentals sorted. So, start getting your tracking in order today.
Can’t wait and want to find out more now? Then book a free demo and consultation today
