Leads and marketing – things I DON’T want to hear from you

Recently I had the displeasure of dealing with a business owner with such arrogance and impatience I struggle to understand just how her company isn’t broke.

It was the sight of the company website which initially prompted me to call this organisation for a chat about their website and general advertising techniques in the contemporary age.

After about 15 minutes I politely left as her voice died off in the distance. It was only the second time in my career I ever bailed out of a meeting.

Within her impatient rant, she sprouted the 5 things I never want to hear in a marketing context from any business:

1. Our product/service is used everywhere
2. There is no time to do all this
3. New blogging ideas don’t last forever
4. This isn’t a real advertising technique
5. It will overwork our sales force

This is my response to those prompts.

1. Our product/service is used everywhere

Even if your product or service is used on a widespread basis, it is careless to generalise and sit on your laurels in the digital age. Why? Because somewhere in the world another company in your industry space will fly past you with a clever digital marketing platform that you may not recover from it.

Always remember, regardless if you have 100 clients or a billion clients, each fits into a specific buyer persona - or in simple terms, characteristic bracket – but if you don’t make an effort to characterise them you are not moving your business into the modern age and will find it harder to generate leads. The longer you wait to set up this platform the harder you will feel it in the next few years compared to those that have made the effort.

By the way, after her rant on how they are everywhere she then went on to say her market is ‘niche’. Go figure.

2. There is no time to do all this

There is no time for you to grab a toolbox and do a service on each of your company cars, but the cars still end up serviced. This person, who has a near-dysfunctional website with six broken links on the home page alone, can’t see the clarity in outsourcing a function so important that not only will it provide lead generation, more clients and better clients, it will actually see her website fixed along the way.

Make no mistake, without a good website that is continuously tweaked and maintained, you may as well forget about marketing well from here on.

In her situation, the irony is that once you land on the home page not only is it near impossible to work out what her company does (and it is a division of a multinational), to actually find out the next logical action is to contact them but the contact button is a broken link. Go figure.                                                                            

3.  New blogging ideas don’t last forever

People say that about songs and music, and new tunes pop up each day and plagiarism cases are rather infrequent.

Blogging and other forms of content is the new mainstay of getting more clients and better clients, but in truth it isn’t as easy as it sounds. It is the craft providing collateral to feed into the Google searches of potential clients, so talk to someone specialised in this area. Not just proven writers but those who understand the technology that makes it work in the digital space.

We all think we can write, but we aren’t talking love letters to your primary school sweetheart. This is business and investment, so don’t feel ashamed if you need advice or an outsourced service.

Remember, we all sing pretty well in the shower but most of us would empty a room quick smart in a karaoke contest

If you don’t respect the power and influence of Google and other search engines by now then you never will.

4. This isn’t a real advertising technique

When I heard this I could have exploded.

Content is now pretty much everything in marketing, advertising and lead generation. Sure, there are other forms of collateral be it graphic, video or design, but the one that leaves a legacy is the content your company has on the web. It’s a form of online real estate and it’s all yours and when people land on those skilfully prepared pages with their strong messages and information value, you have a captive audience.

There are of course many interpretations of what online content – particularly blogs – is really worth; in my opinion it is not a case of someone reading about you, they are actually reading you!

5. It will overwork our sales force

On the contrary, your sales force will have more time to actually sell. One of the main benefits of blogging and other forms of content is that given enough time it will exponentially increase its lead generation power.

The ultimate goal is to eliminate cold calling altogether. A salesforce will tell you it hates cold calling above all other duties.

You have probably heard this before in passing, but maybe never had anybody offer a little more reasoning and qualification on this matter.

If so, be our guest and download this document. It opens fast and it’s totally free!