Keeping The Leads Coming (To Your Store)

Let’s talk Ecommerce, specifically your digital store. Stores of all kinds allow Customers to come in and exchange money for goods and services, that’s their purpose. To do that though you need Customers, and that means you need leads, potential Customers who are going to be converted into sales by your excellent sales pitch.

Without a steady source of leads, your store ceases to be able to do its job, a serious issue when you’re trying to build a business off of it. Today we’re going to look at what steps you should be taking to ensure your source of leads coming to your online store is dependable.

Make Sure You’re Generating Leads Online

It’s only sensible when your business is online to generate your leads there too. Even if that weren’t the case, the internet is an enormous and ever expanding place with unlimited reach, it can benefit businesses of all types. If you’re not already making use of online lead generation, you should be. 

We’ve lost count of the number of Small Business Owners we’ve met who have had a business built solely on referrals or recommendations, only to find the rug pulled out from beneath their feet when those dried up. And that was before the pandemic took off!

Everybody lives on the internet, so make sure your marketing strategy features it prominently. If you’ve got a great Marketing Strategy in place in another media form (perhaps print or radio Advertising), we’re happy for you, but you’re not entirely secure. That’s not to say you should discard everything that is working for you, but branching out is going to give you and your business stability.

Diversify Your Lead Sources

If you’re already getting leads through an online source, that’s excellent. If you’re not, we’ll wait for you. All done? Then let’s continue.

The next step after expanding into online lead generation is expanding some more to ensure you’ve got multiple streams. Having one source of leads is better than having no leads at all, but it’s not a guarantee of a future supply.

For example, Facebook Advertising is probably the most targeted form of Digital Marketing there currently is, but you don’t want all of your eggs in one basket, as the recent Facebook outage demonstrated quite well.

Facebook has made some pretty sweeping changes in how their Ads run, and how users see and interact with business posts. Although they’ll always want to keep their advertisers happy, you don’t want to be too exposed to the actions (and inactions) of a business you have absolutely no influence over.

Another great example is the regular updates Google makes to its search algorithm. If Google tweaks their formula tomorrow and you tumble down the organic rankings, your leads from that source are going to drop just as hard. You can recover from this of course, but that takes time you may not have if that was your whole business you just lost.

Don’t rely too heavily on just one business or process for all of your online leads. Having multiple lead streams is going to safeguard you against unforeseen surprises.

Plan For Both Long and Short Term

One last step you should be taking to secure your leads is to ensure you’ve got a good mix of instant and long-term Digital Marketing Strategies in place.

For instance Search Engine Optimisation is relevant for just about every business in Australia, but it’s a slow burn of a process. Improvements can take months to improve your ranking, and aren’t going to provide your business with a quick injection of traffic if that's what it needs.

On the other hand, Pay Per Click Marketing starts attracting leads and providing an immediate boost to your business in only hours, but it stops working the instant you stop paying for the campaign. By using both together, you’re going to not only increase your sources, but you’ll be better placed to handle a drop-off.

If your SEO ranking falls off a cliff with a Google update, you’ll know that you can bump up your PPC budget to compensate. Conversely, if your PPC campaign stops converting or your Cost Per Click becomes prohibitive, you’ll still have the steady trickle of leads coming from your organic visitors.

Attracting leads is one of the most important and time consuming tasks faced by Small Businesses, and one of the prime causes of businesses going under. Leads become Customers, and Customers are the lifeblood of any business, make sure you take adequate steps to ensure they keep on coming.