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To grow a business, you need leads. So how do you fill the funnel, especially if you’re a small business that no one has heard of yet?
Well if I look back at how we’ve grown our business at salesforce.com, the formula has been pretty simple. It’s been all about driving traffic to our website, getting people to fill out a form, and then follow up with them using sales reps or email marketing.
To generate traffic to the website we’ve use tactics like PR, Events, SEO, and SEM. If you can get people searching for your product, those are highly-qualified leads because they’re essentially raising their hand saying, “I’m interested, tell me more.” The tricky thing for a small business is that it is not easy to get into the first page of search results and if you have to buy keywords, chances are you’re bidding against more sophisticated players.
The good news for companies who are just starting out is that we’re in the midst of a transformation. A transformation that is redefining the rules for online marketing and creating opportunity for those companies who figure it out first.
To help our marketers understand how the game is changing we drew a map. The map below will inevitably evolve as we figure out how to simplify it, but I wanted to share the V1 so you could see the different levers you can pull to generate leads and improve conversion.
The boxes in red and yellow up above are our tried and true tactics, but they’re also evolving. For example, the Google algorithms appear to be looking at data from Facebook and Twitter to help determine page rank. That means there is a hidden SEO benefit to content marketing beyond the direct pipeline it contributes. The boxes in green represent new opportunities for us. Since they are brand new, it’s hard for people to visualize how you generate leads from social. And in many cases it requires more content and engagement than traditional lead generation tactics, so these are new muscles we need to train and develop.
With the Prezi presentation below you can click through and see an example of each tactic. Once again we’ll continue to evolve this it as new and improved best practice examples emerge.
So tell us what you think?
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