The Secret To Successful Internet Marketing: Follow Up, Follow Up, Follow Up.

Nowadays, a lot of attention is paid to improving your Internet presence. Your website, social marketing, and pay-per-click advertising are just some of the methods that marketers suggest. At the very least, these efforts are time consuming and often expensive as well.

Make sure your time and money are well spent by using an effective process to keep track of the responses you receive. Unfortunately, it is not as simple as placing Google Analytics on your website. That assumes that all of your prospects will respond via the web, which is not always the case. Some of your hottest leads will actually pick up the phone and call. You’ve managed to hit their hot button and they want to take action. Lead tracking should also be built into your plan.

It is vital to implement tracking mechanisms for all the avenues the funnel takes you (including your website, email campaigns, online directories, and LinkedIn, to name a few). It’s also important to note that the vehicle a potential customer uses to contact you may not have been the initial reason they took action. For example, they may have filled out a form on your website, but were referred by one of your customers. Or they called you but didn’t get your number from your website, they saw it in an email marketing article you sent them.

This means that you need to have a consistent process for collecting follow-up information from your leads and a way to include it in an overall monthly marketing performance report. Obtaining accurate information requires detailed specific questions.

• How did he find out about us? Starting with a broad question will help you identify unexpected sources (a customer reference, a LinkedIn contact you have in common, etc.)
• If they found it online, was it through a search engine or through a link?
• What was the search engine they used or what was the name of the website where they found the link?
• If they did a search, what word or phrase did they write (try to be very specific)? Did they include a location like city or state?
• Once they got to your website, what did they like that prompted them to contact you?

Be careful trying to get the answers to all of these questions through something like a website form. The more questions you require a prospect to answer, the more likely he or she will be excluded and you could lose the prospect entirely. At some point, you will be required to follow up with leads by phone. Either during an initial inbound phone consultation or an outbound call you make to follow up on a contact you received via a website form or email.

Remember, the prospects that contact you are gold. They are “conversions”. People who really took action. You need to know what you did well so you can do more!