As the Internet continues to evolve, and as businesses lean into it to attract and indoctrinate new clientele it becomes increasingly difficult to measure where your time, energy and marketing dollars are best spent.  This is a huge pain business owners have in 2020. As a business owner I feel you, there are so many mediums, so many ways to communicate with people it can seem daunting to try and delineate where you should be focusing your energy to grow your business.

Right now our nation is undergoing the Coronavirus pandemic, because of this there has potentially never been a better time to start tracking and understanding how your business is benefitting from your online marketing efforts.  In this blog series I’m going to give you my 3 best actionable tips you can do to help you track where your leads are coming from today.  So without further ado…

 

Tip 1) Track How Online Leads Found Your Website

My first tip for helping you track where your leads are coming from is all about your website. If your business doesn’t have a website or if your current website doesn’t generate leads for you this may not apply to you.  The tip is this, if you know how someone found your business’s digital home, your website, that is a metric you can use and track.

But Heath, I don’t even know if I have Google Analytics installed on my website, much less how to generate a report to tell me how people are finding my website.  That is ok, I’m going to give you an actionable step you can do to your website right now to help you track this better, and all you’ll need to do this is your computer.

Head over to the contact page on your website.  Go do it right now. First, does your contact page have a form visitors to your website can fill out?  If yes, great! Most contact forms capture the standard information such as name, email, phone, and your message.  What you can do right now to better track where people who fill out that form are coming from is by adding a ‘radio’ button with the question “how did you hear about us?”  I’m a visual learner, so it might look something like this:

You of course have to account for human error.  With the ad campaigns we run for our clients we use pixel conversion tracking so we know if someone found the website from clicking on one of our legendary ads.  Even with that in place people will still click the “Facebook” option, so it’s not totally accurate because you have to account for human error.

 

Tip 2) Track How Online Leads Call Your Business

My second tip is pure gold.  Imagine if your business had multiple phone numbers that all lead to the same place, and you were able to use and track how often each number was called?  The truth is in 2020 you can do this and you don’t have to activate a new phone number from your mobile carrier. There are telephone software companies out there like Twilio that will allow you to purchase as many local phone numbers as you want, program them to function the way you want, and even integrate them with your favorite reporting software.  Consider purchasing a new business phone number and setting it up to forward to your cell phone. You can use new phone numbers to track where each person got the phone number from, letting you know where you got your leads, and where your leads got your contact information from.  Knowledge is power and now you know how people are calling you.

 

Tip 3) Track Where Every Online Lead Comes From In A Single Document

This last tip is probably the best gem of them all.   First I want to just say that if your business is frequently running low on leads and new business entering your sales pipeline it could be because you don’t have enough funnels that leads are coming to you from.  The biggest mistake I see business owners make when marketing their business is thinking that as long as they have one marketing campaign active then it’s all good. What if the company or website where you advertise goes down?  Your business would as well.  The key to having consistent leads coming in for your business is to have multiple streams where the leads come to you.

Think about all the places you receive new leads from online.  If you have at least one on your list, that is enough to create your own reporting software that automatically compiles all leads into a single document.  In 2020 there is integration software out there that even the least technical-savvy person can master. The integration software I recommend you check out is called Zapier.

Taking action: Lets say you have a WordPress website with Gravity Forms installed.  You can integrate your Gravity Form to populate a Google Sheet using Zapier. Imagine being able to look back on all the leads entering your sales pipeline through your website–in a single click from your smartphone?  Gravity Forms even has its own integration addon as well to connect to a Google Sheet if you want to bypass using Zapier.

There is a downside to the scenario I described above, and that is Gravity Forms is a paid-for licensed software, and so is Zapier.  The cost isn’t overwhelming, but you do have to pay monthly to have both. That’s when working with a digital marketing agency can come in handy.  Not only can they help you with handling all the setup on the technical side, they can also save you money by bundling all the licensed software for you.

Creating Smart Marketing

When we work with clients to set up their marketing funnels, tracking where their leads come in is how we lay the foundation.  We’re technical experts, and it’s our goal to help our clients make informed decisions when it comes to their marketing.

I hope this blog gave you a gold nugget or two for tracking your online leads. Creating smart marketing can happen from anywhere, and you don’t have to wait until everything opens up again to get it done!

Stay personable, Heath