***Are you evaluating your lead generation strategies?

Generating new leads is a focus of most business owners. But do you ever stop to evaluate where your leads are coming from and how your lead generation methods are working? It is important to have systems in place to track new leads and evaluate each lead strategy.

There are a couple of ways that you can do this.

1. Website –
If you have a website then it should be one of your lead generation strategies. You want to have your subscription form on your site for your newsletter or email list. If you don’t, you will not be able to keep in touch with folks that visit your site. Take a look at your website statistics to see what kind of traffic your site receives and where the traffic is coming from. If your web host does not provide statistics you should set up a Google Analytics account and add the code to your web pages in order to track your traffic. You want to know who is visiting, how long they are staying on your site, what pages they are visiting and where they came from to get there. Did they do a search? If so, what keyword were they searching that landed them with you? Once they are there are they interacting with you and your site: subscribing to your newsletter, taking surveys, leaving feedback on your guestbook or forums? All of this detail is great information for you.

2. Leads –
Do you receive leads from referrals, lead boxes, listings in directories, yellow pages? When a new person contacts you it is a good idea to ask where they got their information from. Recently several business owners have asked whether the Yellow Pages is a good place for them to spend their money. As a business coach I really don’t know the answer to that because it is different for each business. It depends if YOUR business is receiving calls as a result of the ad. That is why asking about where the lead came from is so very important.

It's essential that you know where your leads are coming in and what isn't working. It's not cost effective or wise to use mediums that aren't working. They should be changed so that there are more leads generated, in the case of a website, or done away with altogether, in the case of arnnewspaper advertisement.

The medium that you dispose of right now can always be revisited in the future.

A down economy is a great time to evaluate everything that you are doing, but it is not a time to eliminate advertising and marketing. You have to continue to market or you won’t have new leads and referrals. Do your marketing wisely, track it all and evaluate relevant pieces each month.

As part of the new Business Coaching Express program I am offering a marketing plan review. If you have questions about your marketing then sign up today.