How do businesses survive? What does a business need to live?
They need a cashflow, that’s the main thing. Businesses without incoming money? Well, they are certainly doomed. That’s the entire point of a business. Cashflow means that you must have clients or customers. To get customers, you need to be promoting your services and marketing your business. To market your business, you need a budget.
And suddenly, it seems like keeping your business alive is a rather complicated ordeal and not the dream job you imagined when you started off. Everything appears to be a catch-22 and in a way it is. You need money to survive, but you also need to spend to get that money coming in, in the first place.
So, what else does a business need? Well, a website would be helpful in the modern-day. Websites are the way that you can establish a virtual ‘bricks and mortar’ presence for your company.
Sites can host e-commerce marketplaces ensuring you can sell your products or services, but also act as a promotional platform via marketing and something known as lead generation.
(Image Source)You know what a lead is right? Like a detective investigating a case, a lead is something to take you forward. In commercial terms, a lead is someone who shows an organic interest in your business. You’re not going up to them and shoving a flyer in their face, no – the lead is coming to you and almost asking to get involved.
Your website is key to lead generation. Your website via forms and offers can gather the data needed to generate leads and bring them into your business. But how do you do this?
Before it gets rather complicated, there’s a rather basic approach. Newsletters and offers are a perfect way to generate leads and they aren’t in your face. The lead is doing all the work here, you’ve just given them a platform.
By constructing a landing page with an offer you can grab the data needed to work with your leads. For example, place an offer in return for data. Put a form up that is filled out by the lead that gives them access to the advertised offer. You will then have a lead that you can email and speak to, because they have given permission for this to happen. Leads from your website are the perfect way to get started. This isn’t something that has an expiry date and you can keep running offers and gathering data for as long as you deem fit.
There are many more ways to gather leads, but starting from the website will be enough for you, for now. You can certainly look at using social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to take the next steps in lead generation, but the key to winning at lead generation is by actually knowing what it is. Now you do and you can work on upping your game, but start out with the baby steps until you know what you’re doing.
