During our time in marketing, we’ve heard this plea a fair few times from clients.
They know the end result they want but have no clue whatsoever how to get it.
They believe they need marketing support—which they’re right, they do—but have no interest in how new leads appear and the work that goes into getting them. This makes things difficult if, at some point, they think the leads should be coming in quicker—you know, a few weeks after parting with their deposit…
It takes time and energy to secure leads. And it’s frustrating when a business owner has no knowledge of their customer or where these fabled beings may be found. The answers to these questions should drive them, and it should be what they base much of their business’s operations on if they want to grow their enterprise.
When we hear this phrase, ‘we want more leads’, it invites questions:
How many leads do you need? How much work can you comfortably cope with, without compromising on your quality of service/the product?
How do you describe a good lead? Which objections would a semi-warm lead need qualifying before they make a purchasing decision? What are their pain points?
What have you tried before that has or hasn’t worked?
How long does it typically take to acquire a lead?
Where do your current leads come from?
What’s your budget? How much is a lead worth to you?
You see, ‘we want more leads’ isn’t a simple demand. At Novus, we would require context, information about your customers, an understanding of what makes potential leads tick (read: buy).
The last question is particularly important. A lot of marketing activity needs funding to reap the rewards, i.e. speculating to accumulate. PPC, advertising and social post boosting, for example, need financing. You can take the free road towards the same end results, but it’s a very long and very laborious journey. Paying for positioning represents a shortcut to those lovely leads you require.
We’ve done some great work for clients…had them ranking number one on Google for their chosen keywords, had their phone ringing with people ready to buy and a strong pipeline of potential leads waiting in the wings, ready to be converted. A year later, our contract with our client comes up and, amid all this wonderful activity, some business owners decide to go it alone.
Only they underestimate the time it takes to keep that pipeline stocked. Or how difficult it is to consistently post engaging content. Within a couple of months their phone stops ringing, they slip from the rankings and they almost go back to where they started.
Marketing is not a ‘peak and trough’ endeavour. You can’t throw all you have at it in times of famine then believe any success will be self-sustaining when a feast occurs and good, qualified leads come in. No one’s saying that you can’t take your foot off the gas slightly at that point, but to turn the engine off altogether is madness.
There’s no reason why you can’t learn to do your own marketing once it reaches a certain efficiency—we’re one of only a few marketing agencies who are more than happy to train you so that you can fulfil your own strategy; however, time is your enemy. If you’re going to spend time you didn’t used to spend on promotional activity, it’s got to come from somewhere. You either need to forget about any downtime for, well, forever, or bring someone into the business to take over other tasks, so that your time can be freed up. This still constitutes a cost—so, why not just continue with us and have us do it all for you?
There are so many myths and misunderstandings surrounding marketing services…they’re often perceived as unnecessary, superfluous or underrated. It’s only when you’ve decided that you don’t need help that you realise you most definitely do…by then, however, the damage will have been done and you’ll be racing to play catch-up.
Engaging a third party such as Novus Marketing Solutions for marketing support is a long-term solution. If you come onboard, consider the team at Novus as a collective employee (albeit one that works elsewhere)–an integral part of your workforce. If you see our help simply as a way to kickstart your marketing strategy, that’s absolutely fine, just make plans from the off about how you will take over the work when the time comes.
