Generating leads that convert into positive sales is for bread and butter for your business. The more leads that can be placed into the sales funnel, the more opportunities you will have to coax them to ultimately buy your products and services. Yet marketing strategies and advertising tactics don’t come cheap. While you are finding the best ways to prospect for those new buyers, you are finding that your advertising budget is tanking.
Cutting costs in other operations might not be feasible for your business at this point in time. Yet there are ways to increase your leads while decreasing your advertising expenses so you can stay inside your established marketing budget. Here are 5 tips that you can pursue to nurture and refine your lead generation in the most cost-effective ways.
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Give Stale Ads a Makeover
Well-performing advertising can begin to grow stale as the months and years go by. As less leads are generated from the ad, you still want to promote the same offer to your lead traffic without having to create brand new advertising. Instead of dumping the ad, you can revamp it with a fresh, new look. You can also tweak it a little to target a different demographic. It may only take less than an hour to refresh an existing ad versus developing a new ad campaign that could take weeks or months out of your time.
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Nurture Inactive Prospects
Not every lead turned into a sale when they saw your advertising in print, media and online. Their curiosity drew them to your business, yet they stayed on the fence without fully committing themselves into buying your services or products. Unfortunately, your staff moved on to the immediate buyers without fully nurturing these prospects further down the sales funnel.
One way to increase your leads is to revisit these inactive prospects. They may now be ready to turn into positive sales. If there are too many inactive prospects for your sales team to handle while garnering new leads, hire an overflow answering service that can help with the new influx of interested customers.
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Ask Existing Customers for Marketing Help
Often business owners are told to stretch their advertising dollars and target every type of marketing platform and ad campaign possible. Yet when you do too much advertising, it can start to become difficult to pinpoint which ads are working and which ones are barely seeing any action. One marketing tip is to ask your existing customers how they located your business or heard about your products and services.
Conducting surveys and asking for customer feedback can lower your advertising costs by allowing you to figure out which marketing tactics are working the best and honing those strategies to their fullest. You can have customers call or complete online questionnaires while offering them incentives for their time. Hiring an overflow answering service can help you field these calls without burdening your other staff who must also provide customer service to new clients.
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Find Advertising Avenues that Lower Your Costs
Some advertising campaigns will cost more than others. Direct mail advertising and print costs will be higher than email newsletters and social media advertising. Before making the big switch from print to Internet advertising, consider your customer base and demographic and how they interact with your marketing strategies.
You don’t want to cut off a viable lead source that may still rely on print advertising to find your company’s products and services. Yet if your main clientele can normally be found on the Internet, then you can make the switch while increasing your leads.
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Outsource Certain Aspects of Your Marketing and Advertising Endeavors
The reason why your advertising costs may be so high is that you simply may not have enough knowledgeable staff on your payroll to create the effective advertising that is required for your business. This circumstance could be driving your budget higher because they are spending too much time on website marketing strategies and not enough time cold-calling or following up with prospects.
A more cost-effective approach may be to outsource your marketing to an experienced company that can streamline your advertising options. They can increase your lead generation while decreasing the amount of money you are spending on ineffective ad content.
Sources: Business Know How, Modern Marketing Partners, Kissmetrics Blog
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