What is your budget for lead generation?
I find it interesting how many companies classify their website as an IT expense. What that tells me is that many business owners and CEOs have been let down by web companies who have failed to demonstrate how their website can be a vital lead generation tool.
Here’s a scenario. We have several clients who spend in excess of $100,000 on their yellow pages ads each year. They have now found that:
- Their website increases the number of leads that they get from the yellow pages
- They get as many, if not more, leads again through Google and search engines Â
- The cost per lead is incredibly lower.
Interestingly, we don’t tell our customers to get out of the yellow pages (since it works for them). We just show them how to use it more effectively in combination with their website.
Now imagine that they couldn’t afford to work on their website because it wasn’t in their IT budget. How many leads they would have missed out on!
The point is, an effective website is a marketing investment, not an IT expense. Therefore your website should appear in your marketing budget, not IT.
About the author: As the owner of a web marketing business, I’ve spent the last 7 years studying ways to boost the conversion rates of my clients’ websites. Today, our best websites convert up to 20% of visits into leads and 50% of leads to sales. The target for our clients is a minimum 5% conversion rate on visits to leads which is staggeringly more than the typical website at 0.1%.
Bitemark specialises in designing, building, writing, managing and marketing websites with high conversion rates.
