Majority of Small Business Owners Say Their Lead Generation Efforts Aren’t Working

Lead generation is the lifeblood of any business. Unfortunately, when surveyed, only 10% of small business owners said that they believed that their lead generation efforts were paying off.

This is especially true for small businesses that don’t have a marketing department. In one study, small businesses reported that the greatest barriers to effective lead generation were a lack of staff, budget or time.

Gone are the days when lead generation meant simply finding a list of people who were likely to make a purchase and passing those names on to the sales department. In today’s digital world, businesses need new and better ways to stand out in a crowded marketplace. This is especially true as prospects, overwhelmed with the sheer number of marketing messages on the internet, decide to tune those messages out altogether.

So what are these prospects doing instead?

They are doing research on their own. Simply by searching the internet, prospects can learn for themselves which products or services are a good fit. This means any business that expects to grow and thrive must create a strong digital presence. But for a small business owner with no marketing staff and not a lot of experience, that’s a tall order.

LeadGen Compass hears this from small business owners every day. These business owners are looking to secure qualified leads through a digital presence but feel helpless to do so. While it is easy to get discouraged, there are ways for small businesses to compete with similar-sized – and even much larger – competitors online.

The first thing we tell small business owners is that before they do anything  else, they need to identify exactly who their target audience is. Next, they need to figure out how they are making the lives of that target audience easier or solving a problem. Once they do these things, it’s time to focus on building relationships, not making quick sales.

Today’s small businesses can use methods such as blogging, social media and PPC advertising to get noticed online. These methods also will allow them to collect valuable information about prospects. By funneling prospects to a landing page on your website, for example, you can then offer an incentive for them to give you their contact information.

Once you have a lead’s contact information, you can use things like an email newsletter to begin to build a relationship. The key is to always view lead generation as an ongoing process.

Finally, even the best and most effective lead generation strategies need to be continually refined and tested. Trends are always changing so lead generation methods will need to be tweaked and new methods tested an ongoing basis.

In a perfect world you would be able to create an in-house marketing department that would handle all of your lead generation tasks. After all, who has time to understand the latest methods of lead generation, let alone put them into action? You have a business to run! Another option is to hire a marketing firm to handle your lead generation efforts.

At LeadGen Compass, we specialize in helping small businesses just like yours successfully design and implement a lead generation strategy – no matter how small or how large your budget.

At times like these, many small business owners long for the days when generating leads was much simpler. It’s important to keep in mind, however, that while lead generation was indeed simpler in the past, it wasn’t nearly as effective. Today, when prospects are looking for solutions online and yours stands out, the chance of converting that prospect rises exponentially. And that is what makes investing in lead generation so important.