Lets say we want to show up in google if someone enters “blue widgets Miami”.

• Having a listing in the regular results google displays might get us 10 visits per day
• a listing in the map Google tends to show for local searches now might net us 20
• Having a paid ad at the top or right side of the page might get 5 visitors

If we had all 3 of those, most would think we would get 35 visitors per day (20+10+5), but recent studies by Internet Marketing geeks like us revealed the extra exposure got significantly more attention from those users. The affect was more like 70.

It’s like when you’re approaching that common tourist stop on the highway and they cleverly repeat the billboards several times in short spans. Repeating the message tastefully can have a powerful effect.

Having multiple listings on a page also seems to subconsciously reinforce the idea you are a major player in the market. People inherently trust what Google displays – proves itself repeatedly in usability tests where we watch people click around on the web.

So how do you get those multiple listings? There are methods with the usual requisite acronyms like SEO, PPC management, and Local search optimization, but a business has essentially 2 choices.

1. Hire a company to do all this for your site – Hiring specialized staff just isn’t cost effective for most local businesses. However, hiring outside firms can get expensive and results are by no means guaranteed. I don’t want to cast doubts on the Internet Marketing industry, but many players in a local market don’t have measurable proof of results. Anyone with a computer and an internet connection can say they’re an Internet Marketing consultant, and nearly every web designer is adding Internet Marketing as an add on service to get some recurring revenue after the job is done. How many artists that design book covers are also wizards with advertising the book?
2. Don’t worry about the listings for now, and focus on your business. K2 Leads can provide high-quality leads on the web and we prominently feature you on sites we get ranking in the major search engines, and run ads for. You don’t have to get your hands dirty with the often-confusing world of testing ads and save your money in the process. K2 Sends you the leads, and you only pay for the ones you receive. How is that for proof of results?

As a business owner, I’d take #2 any day and work on scaling my time and effectiveness in the areas I’ve already mastered.

Contact us today for a free evaluation of the local lead generation potential for your business and to learn more about how K2 Leads can deliver more new customers to your business every day and let you focus on doing what you enjoy most.

Since most company’s marketing budgets and time are unrestricted, knowing the value of a lead is crucial to determine my return on investment and make wise choices regarding where I invest my marketing budget.

The first chance to improve a businesses marketing budget is when we find a lead is worth less than what a company is paying to get it. Quite often advertising mediums that can be difficult to track are losing huge sums of money, but businesses keep them running because they don’t know this is the case.

There is another scenenario where even if the advertising is making money, a company can still lose vast amounts of time and opportunities if they don’t know the value of a lead.

“Blue Widget Corporation” (changed the real name) is doing Internet Marketing and getting new customers for $75 each. Management sees this number and wants to keep constant improvement in all areas and cut costs. They make substantial efforts to lower the $75 cost. This is a competitive market, but with 40 man hours they are able to lower the cost by $5 over the next month.

What Blue Widget Corporation did not consider was how much the lead is worth. The company made $755 minimum over the lifetime of each customer.

Knowing this piece of data, do we put 40 hours into cutting costs by 6%, or do we put 40 hours into figuring out how many more leads we can get and scaling the campaign? In essence, this company was “printing money” but focused on the wrong solution.

Follow these simple rules to calculate the value of a lead

1. The data does not have to be perfect - I’ve watched companies never complete this step because they wanted perfect data (which doesn’t exist). Just get some numbers out there and adjust them as you get more data.
2. Any company can determine this – if a business has a long sales cycle or uneven distribution of revenue among clients, this can still be calculated. Just make a best effort and use simple mean, median or mode to get numbers that make sense for your situation. If this becomes too difficult, then look at it from the cost of acquiring current customers and look at the issue from the perspective of opportunity cost – could I be getting the same quality leads somewhere else for less?
3. Net, Gross, whatever – I’d recommend looking at gross profit for simplicity sake, but know how that applies to your net profit.

Sample calculation

This company is a glass manufacturer looking for leads from builders, and commercial contractors:

• Converts 27.5% of phone calls into sales
• $1750 avg. profit per order across all product lines (they just divided # of orders by total sales after eliminating a few of the highest and lowest outlying orders from long-time clients)

Each lead = $480 gross profit with net being more like $360.

If they want to make a 100% return on their investment, they can pay up to $180 per lead. Once we know this data, advertising budgets should become essentially irrelevant, so long as cash flow can be increased. This company then focused on maximizing the use of any marketing channel that could get them leads at this price or less and took substantial market share from their competitors.

If your marketing could use more accountability and focus, K2 Leads may be able to help. We also make advertising even easier by assuming the cost of advertising. We all agree on a price per lead, and you just pay us for the leads you receive.  Contact us today for a free opportunity analysis to see if our project would be mutually beneficial.