How to keep Generating Small Business leads during COVID-19?

COVID-19 has evolved into a global event impacting public health as well as the economy. These are uncertain times, and we don't have all the answers, but what we do know now is that small businesses have felt sudden changes in their campaign performance as a result of this worldwide pandemic.

We’ve seen that global events often impact Google PPC performance, and COVID-19 is no exception. As businesses change their operations, people stay in their homes more, and the world reacts to a pandemic unfolding in real time—they turn to online search and news for answers to their questions and solutions to their new needs. For some advertisers, these new searchers are driving new audiences to find their way to advertisers' sites, and some are becoming new customers. For others, the results aren’t as great, and the strategies will need to shift.

Should I buy leads during COVID-19?

Depending what business, you have? You need customers so, Yes, the answer is YES! When you buy leads, you get in front of interested potential customers almost immediately. You set the spend target, so start off small and as you start seeing ROI (return on investment) increase the ad spend.

What are Leads in sales?

As you begin your journey down the entrepreneurial path, you will find that having a supply of sales leads is the most crucial piece to building your business at a rapid pace. There are many moving parts to owning a business, we all know that. Sales cures all business ailments and purchasing an interested customer’s information is a much quicker route to get the results you need to dominate your market.

The concept is simple – you hire a contracted company to go out and find sales leads for your business type and they send those leads directly to you or your sales team to close. Sounds easy enough, but the problem lies within the integrity and quality of the company you have chosen to hire.

Where To Buy Leads?

You can find many lead generations sources simply by doing a Google search for “sales leads” or “buy leads”. There will be a few blog posts on the subject, but then you will start to see some lead generation companies in the search results. You will also find many intense opinions from owners and companies that were burned by a lead generation company. Contrary to that, you will also see many businesses that contribute all of their success to purchasing leads. Your experience will depend on how you treat the leads given to you and how well you execute your internal sales process.

The largest issue most people discover is the exclusivity of the leads given to them – meaning the lead is shared with more than just your company. This causes a “race” between your competitors and yourself to be the first ones to come in contact and hold a consultation time with the potential customer. If you are the first business to contact the lead, you have a high chance of closing the sale. However, if you are late to the game and are one of the last companies to contact them – you likely won’t even have a chance to put your hat in the ring.

How to Buy Leads from Google?

Typically, you will need to pay a company a monthly retainer to provide high quality leads for your business, or some lead generation companies offer a “pay per lead” type of deal. The best option if you buy leads is to pay a monthly retainer and let them send you an endless supply of leads to contact and close. However, there is a much better alternative to just purchasing massive amounts of leads.

In most cases, you are better off hiring a full-service marketing company that will not only produce content on behalf of your business but also build sales funnels that lead into your company. That way you not only receive sales leads, but you also elevate your brand to the public eye.

Building Your Own Marketing Plan

When you start a company, your plan is to be in business for many years. So, investing in your own internal marketing efforts is absolutely essential. In 2020, the most important factor in marketing any business is building digital brand recognition and the public support of your company. With social media, SEO, and quality website design – you can accomplish this relatively quickly in your first year of business. Even if you have been around for many years – if you fail to have these three components actively managed, then unfortunately your business will fall behind the industry leaders in today’s business world.

Investing in SEO and website design is by far the most profitable form of marketing in today’s economy. However, building your brand and digital presence can take time and effort – so if you are currently drowning and needing sales immediately then buying leads and running digital ads is the way to go.

Let’s put it in these terms – when you start your business you either need to rent your office space/building or you can purchase and own it outright. The same goes for your leads and marketing plan – you can either continue to “rent” leads from lead generation companies or invest in “owning” your leads and marketing strategy for years to come by building out your website, SEO, social media, and sales funnel.

The ROI is much higher when you invest in your own marketing strategy. We outline the best strategy below for you to get a nice up-front push going for your marketing plan. If creating and managing your strategy seems daunting – our dedicated Marketing Consultants can help you design an entire marketing system custom tailored to your business

Using Google Leads to Your Advantage

Anyone that looks for a service or product nowadays uses Google. We know that there is a lot of searches carried out on Google every day, but  how many exactly? Google processes over 3.5 billion searches per day (Internetlivestats, 2019). If you break this statistic down, it means that Google processes over 40,000 search queries every second on average. If you break that down by country, state, and region – it’s very obvious that your business needs will be highly visible on

Google in all areas.

Google has three (3) main areas for you to take advantage of when people are searching for your service or product. Google Ads, Map Pack, and Organic Listings. Let us take a deeper look at all 3 of them and exactly what you can do to manage them.

Google Ads has helped many businesses scale their online leads and have been the sole reason a lot of companies have seen digital success. You will notice when you search for something in Google such as “real estate agents” you are served with a page showing local agents and if you scroll down agents from the whole state.

The red arrows point at the “Ads” area. The idea is that the searcher will click the top result more often than others when completing a search. The more you pay and bid on each click, the higher your ad will show up in the Ads results. If you create a Google Ads account and attach a credit/debit card, you can start paying Google to appear in these areas once someone searches for a certain “keyword”. In this example the keyword was “real estate agents”. Before launching your own campaign, we recommend reading our article on Google Ads and PPC Ser vices.

Google Map Pack

The Google Map Pack is the section below the ads. This serves up the top 3 companies relative to the location of the searcher. This area of the results page receives about 30% of clicks when people are looking for a service or contractor type of business. Here is a visual view of the Google Map Pack:

 Google My Business

There are a few things you can do to show up higher than others within this section.

First and foremost, you must register for a GMB account – this stands for Google My Business. You can register for this account easily by typing in the Google search bar “Google My Business” and then selecting the top result and following the on-screen prompts.

Secondly, you need to have as many customers as possible give you reviews directly to your Google profile. They can do this by either googling your business and then clicking the “review” link under your site name, or you can generate an automated link to the review section that you can give out by email/messenger/etc. to all customers.

Lastly, you’ll want to optimize your entire Google My Business “GMB” profile with updated information on your business, address, phone number, hours, owner information, and add in as many pictures as possible directly to your Google My Business profile.

Google Organic Listings

This is by far the most coveted spot on the Google search results page. Ads and Map packs combined get roughly 41% of clicks from searchers – but the top organic results that show up directly below the map packs receive the other 67% of clicks and online traffic.

Google has conditioned its users for so long around ads and the quick results, that people nowadays know the ads are paid for and at most times don’t fulfill the needs or answers for what they are searching for. Here is where you want to be:

The yellow stars outline the top 3 organic positions. When you hear the term SEO, it stands for Search Engine Optimization. This refers to the act of optimizing and improving content and back-end technical coding on your website in order to show up higher in the organic search results within Google and other search engines.

Most businesses will hire a company that specializes in SEO to handle the entirety of the workload for them. It is very time consuming and extremely confusing unless you have coding or technical background experience. Some businesses will pay up to $200,000 per year to an SEO agency to secure and maintain the #1 organic position for different keywords – that shows you how important and profitable SEO will be for your company.

Google Wrap-Up

If you can get your business to appear at the top of those 3 individual areas in the Google search results pages, you will undoubtedly experience a large influx of sales leads and calls coming into your business. Now the fun begins, it is time to put the potential customer into your sales funnel and start your sales process.

Investing your marketing budget dollars into Google optimization is the smartest plan for long-term success and sustainable growth. Google has a computer algorithm that tests your website and automatically compares it others – so it typically takes about 7-12 months to rank a website for certain keywords as it climbs up Google’s results pages and they check your content. Point is – start investing with an SEO agency ASAP. Leads will start to trickle in over the coming months and reach full strength in about one year – at which point you can stop paying for and buying leads from other companies.

Our Recommendation in the Google Ads vs Facebook Ads Debate

If the judgement is going to be based on return on the actual investment dollars spent, Google Ads has often proved to be the undisputed king. The fact that we managed to achieve more purchases all by utilizing a lesser ad spend, goes on to show the effectiveness of Google Ads in terms of ROI.

The answer might surprise some but from what we saw through this test, just reconfirmed what we have believed for a while. If you are a new business and need to make a hard choice based on getting more sales right now, a lead campaign on Google will provide you with the better return on investment, based on a sales outcome.

Even though Google Ads generally require a larger advertising budget, they also require experience. Google wants to deliver the best to its user, so you have to deliver the same. The quality of your ad and website content rather than the ad spend is a significant Google ranking factor when it comes to ad bidding wars and your ads being shown over the competition. To make sure you’re the triple threat you want to be, we highly suggest working with an agency who has advertising experts in your industry.

So, with all of this being said, if you’re a new business with a decent budget and a simple goal, Google Ads might be the best option for you when looking for a simple answer in the battle of Google Ads vs Facebook Ads.

The Flip Side to Our Recommendation in Google Ads vs Facebook Ads

Facebook Advertising beyond a doubt should be at the center of a business owner’s marketing plan. Especially when it comes to his/her paid social strategy. Not only does it give you a deeper insight into your audiences’ social behaviors, but also allows you to grow a social community around your business.

One that we all know is the most important factor for business growth – word of mouth. No other advertising platform has greater power when it comes to creating communities and fan experiences around businesses like Facebook does.

The return on investment from Facebook Ads is much deeper than something can be measured by dollar amount alone. We all know the huge potential of the channel and how big of a crowd puller it can be. That makes its advertising platform a force to be reckoned with.

As we said, every business is different.

With different products and unique customer profiles.

This means what might work for one business owner, might not for another. This is certainly true when you are judging your return on investment in advertising.

Talk to our team today to see how different ad platforms fit into your business and learn how we can get you a better return on your investment.

Our Final Verdict

Sure, we had a clear winner in this debate. But the bigger debate of paid search vs paid social is clearly one that requires a lot of testing with many different variables. We also understand that the answer is not always as simple as the one we discussed today. The choice depends on various factors like your business objectives, your business type or your customer audience. All have an equal role to play in the success of a campaign and the ROI achieved.

The choice may not always be clear. But we frequently recommend business owners to look beyond ROI and consider judging campaigns based on the total value they bring to your business – even in the case of Google Ads vs Facebook Ads. Value can be anything from building brand awareness to reaching potential customers or getting more leads, conversions, and purchases.

We want to wrap it up and leave you with the following thought:

Google Ads will help you find new customers right away and, in the process, give you an instant return on your marketing investment. While Facebook Ads will help new customers find and explore you. And this way gives you a better ROI in the long run.

Strategies for Success

Whether you have built your own lead source internally or you choose to buy leads, you will need to be able to plug the potential customer into a sales process that is tested and proven to drive revenue. Here is what a successful Strategies for Success sales process should look like:

1. Call the prospect as soon as you receive their information.

2. Briefly talk with them about their needs and what they are looking for.

3. Do not give out price or discuss in-depth features, save that for the time of your actual meeting. Build value in your company but keep this call brief and to the point.

4. Set a solid time to meet with the potential customer in person or over the phone. The sooner the better, always go for a next-day or same-day meeting.

5. Send a calendar invite to their email to solidify meeting time.

6. Bring all sales materials and required paperwork to the meeting, be ready to close the sale.

7. Don’t back down on your price.

8. Try to find out exactly why they are shopping for your service and really dig into why they need a company like yours.

9. Don’t get timid when presenting the final close paperwork. Be confident and believe in yourself!

10.    Once the deal is closed, hand them a document that outline all of the next steps and what their on-boarding with your company will look like.

Conclusion

The option to buy leads online is a Risk vs Reward strategy that most Digital Marketing Agencies use on a regular basis, and for some businesses it really works well. The only way to tell for yourself is to try it out and test it against building and owning your own lead generation sources. Cold calling, cold emailing, direct mailing, canvasing in person. For most, the financial investment required to do both may not be feasible – in this case we recommend speaking with a marketing specialist and determining what the best route for you would be.

Contact Mobile OPZ for Website Design, SEO, AdWords PPC