GUEST ARTICLE FROM RISE LOCAL

Our view on lead tracking is that it is a MUST if you want to progress a lead to the next stage of your sales funnel and close the deal.

So if you don’t have a proper system in place to track your leads you should get one. 

That’s our view. 

Now we’re in touch with a couple of digital agencies who specialise in Ad words and Lead Tracking and here’s a great article from one of them. Our friends over at Rise Local, about why lead tracking is integral to your business. 

What “Speed” Is Your Business Doing?

Trying to grow your business without proper lead tracking is like trying to drive without a speedometer.

You have no idea how fast (or slow) you are travelling. 

In this article, you will learn how to measure your marketing performance by getting an accurate count of all the leads created. You will be able to stick a “speedometer” on your marketing so you know exactly how fast you are going.

A thriving business is a profitable business. If you need to increase your profit, there are two ways you can do it:

1. Increase your revenue
2. Decrease your costs

If you want to increase your revenue you can do that by increasing your jobs. 

Winning more jobs means more revenue.

To win more jobs you can generate more leads.

But if you want “more” of something, you need to know the numbers. How many leads are you currently generating?  How many do you want to generate? 

Before we can answer those questions, we need to define exactly what a “lead” is in your business.

A lead is any enquiry from someone interested in your service.

That enquiry can come from a number of different sources:

• Phone calls
• Website enquiry forms
• Website live chat

To answer the question – “how many leads did we get this month?” – you need to track all these lead sources.

Let’s look at each of them.

Exactly how many phone calls do you receive?

Incoming phone calls are the fuel of any trades business. If the calls stop, you stop. Your whole business stops. 

So it is critical to count and track every call. 

This is where “call tracking” comes in. There are businesses that specialize in this service. 

It is important to note, we are not talking about a telco service here. You will still use your existing phone company.

But the call tracking service sits between the caller and your business. It counts the call, records the call and identifies which part of your marketing activity produced the call.

Nothing changes at your end. You receive calls just the same as you do now.

But the call tracking service captures some really important data from these calls.

Using this data you can see exactly which piece of advertising the person was exposed to when they called. 

You can use tracking numbers on all your:

• Website
• Google My Business listing
• Facebook page 
• Printed materials
• Direct mail and magnets
• Vehicle signage
• Newspaper ads
• Sponsorships
• Radio and tv ads

Any marketing you do needs to be measured so you can judge its performance. That means counting and tracking every phone call you receive. 

How many web forms?

Some visitors to your website will complete your contact form, rather than call you.

When someone sends a message from your website, you can count and track these leads.  This is usually done with Google Analytics. 

The best way to do this is with a “thank-you” page. When someone completes the form on your website and hits the “send” button they are directed to a page that thanks them for their enquiry.

It is this page that we track. Anyone who visits this page has completed your form. So we can count visits to this page to calculate how many web enquiries have been made.

Counting the chats

Web chat services are growing in popularity. Many trades businesses have added them to their website. You may have to.

It is important to count and track web chat enquiries. These are leads just like the others.

The best way to do this is to integrate your web chat service with your Google Analytics account. When you do this you can count web chat leads alongside phone calls and web forms.

How fast are you going?

Every month you need to know what “speed” your marketing is doing.

That means, how many leads did you generate and what did they cost.

You need to count all your leads – phone calls, website forms and website live chat.

You need to attribute each lead to a source – Google ads, organic search, Facebook ads, Google My Business etc.

Once you have all this data, your “speedo” will look something like this:

In one report you can see:

• How many leads you acquired in the month
• Revenue created
• Cost of media (ads)
• Sources of your leads
• Sources of your website visits

With this information you know at a glance if your marketing is working or not. You know exactly how fast or slow you are going and can make smart decisions about what to do next.