How Do You Define a Lead?

Show Notes

• For direct response marketing, a lead means you have contact information that you can use to reach out to a potential customer.
• How do you define a lead? Are your leads those that you have an email address, phone number, or mailing address for?
• If you want to be successful, you need to think about how you will convert a lead into business and initiate the relationship with a prospective customer.
• What can you do to generate a lead which will result in a sale?
• Consider how you communicate with people and which methods you use most frequently. (i.e. FB, snapchat, text, Instagram, email, etc.)
• Where are places you can connect with people from a business marketing standpoint?
• Utilize remarketing. Use a tracking code on your website or a site that you send your potential customers to. This allows you to identify a person and put an ad in front of them.
• If we simply rely on old methods of converting leads into customers, such as requiring an email address, then we experience more pressure to convert someone. As a result, we tend to put constraints on people to take action quickly.
• Some of our leads might be interested, but they may not want to make a decision at that point. If we ignore this group, then we are leaving a lot of opportunity on the table.
• What are the different classifications of leads and how will they lead to a sale?
• The new definition of a lead is anyone that visits your website.
• When people visit our website we can utilize a Facebook or Google pixel which allows us to tag them and market to them again.
• A lead that has been tracked via pixels gives us an opportunity to present information to a prospective customer in the future.
• Recognize that you have multiple opportunities to turn leads into sales.
• Consider your basic flow: First, find ways to get people to know that you exist, then consider where you will send them or interact with your information. Is it a place where they can be exposed to a pixel, so even if they don’t opt-in, you can continue to put your information in front of them?
• Potential customers do not have to take immediate action.
• Ask yourself, how is my message correlating with the needs of my market place?
• You can only focus on so much, and if your focus is on squeezing out an extra couple of percentage points in your landing page conversion vs. focusing on how your message matches your marketplace, you will lose the game.
• When you understand what a lead is, then it changes the way you approach your marketing and helps you to focus on the things that will create more return.

Transcription of Episode

[00:00:00] The other day I had somebody talk to me about the definition that a company they're working with used for lead. The definition they used was, anybody that was interested in their product. Of course, if you're involved at all with direct response marketing, you know that doesn't really fly.

For direct response marketing we consider a lead to be when you have contact information that you can use to communicate with a prospective customer. That's a lead. At that point, we have something that we can start working with. Before then, they're just like anybody else out in the market place.

How do you define a lead? Is that somebody that you have an email address for? Is it someone that you have a phone number for? Is it someone that you have a mailing address for? What's really interesting is most people don't think about how they're going to sell when they start thinking about how they're going to generate leads. If you want to be successful, you have to think about, how am I going to actually convert this lead into business? How are we going to close the sale or [00:01:00] initiate the relationship with that prospect as a customer?

If you don't think about that, then you go about it the wrong way when you start generating leads. You start listening to all the gurus, all the conventional wisdom, and you start making a lot of mistakes that cut off your options down the road. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about, what are the things that you could be doing to generate leads and what are those different classification of leads and how do those leads lead to an ultimate sale?

In the past, obviously, we've already covered that a lead is somebody that you have a phone number, email address, or mailing address for, some way of communicating with them. But today, our means of communications have changed drastically. If you look around today, how do you communicate with people? Not in business, but just in general, with people? If you were to go through the list, you might say, well, I post things on Facebook, I message people through Facebook, maybe I Twitter, maybe I Instagram, maybe I Snapchat, maybe I [00:02:00] text message, maybe I call, maybe I send mail, maybe less frequently than I ever have before, but we still send mail and then I also email people.

There's a big list of ways that we can communicate and interact with people and there's many more out there today than ever have been before. But which ones do you use most frequently? These are some things you need to keep in mind.

Take that list and we'll compare it to, where are places where we can connect with people from a business marketing standpoint? If we look at the the places where we can connect with people from business marketing standpoint, then we'd have to start adding in re-marketing, so you could do Google. Re-marketing means that you're going to place some sort of tracking code on your website or on the pages where you're sending people, and when they hit the that website go to that page, you're going to be able to now identify that person and be able to put ads in front of them in the future. This is what we call remarketing.

With that [00:03:00] definition, we open a whole new level of lead. We may be driving traffic from a myriad of sources, but we're driving to a website. When we hit that website, how are we converting them into a lead? Well, if we follow our old definition from 10 years ago, then we have to get them to give us an email or phone number or a mailing address in order for us to consider them a lead at that point. This is fine for most cases, except for, this puts a lot of pressure on this to convert that person into a lead at that moment.

The more pressure we have to convert people, than the more we tend to be heavy-handed in our marketing. The more we tend to put constraints on people to take action quickly, and that's not all bad. But if that's our only game plan, we tend to leave a lot of opportunity on the table. A lot of people that come to your website that maybe respond to a marketing piece may be interested, but not have enough information or enough [00:04:00] motivation to make a decision at that point. In anything that you may do to try and increase that, you may actually end up hurting the people who might have been interested anyways. We got to be aware of these things as we're trying to think about, how do we create an overall marketing plan?

The new definition of lead is anybody that could actually visit your website. With the the use of Facebook pixel, and we'll do a episode all about Facebook pixels, but with the Facebook pixel or maybe a Google pixel, we can place these on our website, and when people come to our website, we can kind of mark them, so to speak. We can tag them, we can identify them, and then in the future, be able to market to them again.

This idea now changes the way that we approach marketing. We're not only going for the immediate lead generation that's going to happen when that person hits that page, but we're also giving ourselves an opportunity to continue to present information to a prospect, a customer, a lead that has been pixeled [00:05:00] over a period of time to be able to continue to communicate our message and hopefully get them to see the light of the opportunity that we have for them to invest in our product or service. When you start seeing this, then you recognize, okay, I have multiple opportunities to convert a perspective customer into a lead and then multiple opportunities then to take that lead and convert it into a sale.

I want you to start thinking about, as you go through your business, okay, what is my basic flow? How do I get people to know that I even exist? Once I do get them to know that I exist, where do I send them or where do they interact with information that I have? Is that a place where I could now expose them to a pixel so that, even if they decide not to fill in a form or text in or order something, I'll be able to continue to put my information in front of them so that that person who expressed interest at one time will have an opportunity to become a customer in the future.

If we do that, [00:06:00] it drastically changes our approach. We're not as needy in the sense that we don't have to have them take that immediate action. We can let those people who are going to take immediate action and we can follow up with the rest of them through our re-marketing efforts. This is a huge game changer because it takes all the pressure off of you. Instead of focusing on which color button and which design of my landing page is going to be more effective, we can start focusing on the bigger picture which is, how is my message correlating with the needs of the marketplace?

One of the biggest challenges that you have as a small business owner is a lack of resources, even if your business is doing really well. You have a finite amount of resources. Those resources could be expressed in money, time, personnel, or talent on your team. You can only focus on so much. If your focus is on trying to squeeze out an extra couple percentage points in your landing page conversion versus how do I make sure that my message actually [00:07:00] matches the needs of the marketplace, you're gonna be losing the game.

That's why this is so important. When you understand what a lead is and what the opportunities are for you to be able to put your message in front of people, it changes the way that you approach your marketing and, as a result, where you focus your time and effort and hopefully it'll put your focus on those things that are actually going to create more return for you versus those things that everybody's pointing at and saying you have to focus on. Until next time, remember what a lead is and use that to your advantage. Thank you, this is Ryan Chapman with Fix Your Funnel.