Monday, October 13, 2008

Lead Generation: Offline Traffic

By David B. Ascot

This is something which all too many businesses neglect these days. Offline traffic generation is simply using offline means to promote your website. This includes radio sports, print ads and TV. When you have a high average value per lead, this method can work well.

While it costs more than online advertising, if your product or service is one with a higher price tag, it can be well worth this expense. This is also a great supplementary strategy to your online advertising.

We worked with a pest control company here in Sydney not long ago. This company has a full page ad in the Yellow Pages which we added a invitation to go to the company's website for a free download - in this case, a report about termite control.

Basically, if users don't call the company just based on the ad, there's a second chance to actually get their contact details on the website and use that follow-up sequence to convert them, especially for a relatively expensive and complex service delivery, such as termite control.

So basically, the overview of the process we use is to generate attention and interest, your aim is to drive traffic to your website with a carrot such as a free report or white paper. By doing this, you can capture their contact details and email address and then deliver the information and start to educate and qualify your audience using auto-responders and other types of strategies. When you do this you'll actually de-qualify the people who are not appropriate for your product and service, while making the people who are much more likely to inquire with you. So what you end up with are much more qualified inquiries and sales-ready leads.

If you operate a retail business, then you can capture names for your customer newsletter or some sort of offers that you deliver on an on-going basis. Borders Books and Music do this very well. I also noticed the other day that my local running shoes shop has an invitation to join their online newsletter printed onto every sales docket. It cost them almost nothing to do it, but it can add to the incremental number of leads that you generate on an ongoing basis. There are actually tonnes of opportunities to do this with all types of offline marketing.

Name Capture and Follow Up

Using name capture and follow up is the process of getting contact information from your prospective customers so that you can provide them with more information in the future. This is a great way to generate leads and leads to more qualified leads.

This also works as a conversion strategy, since these visitors will be people who are interested in buying your product or service. This traffic generation strategy can bring in a lot of repeat visitors to your site.

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