Follow 5 Simple Steps To Generate Business Leads Online Today

Dan Ray Updated on Apr 15, 2016 Tutorials 48 Comments

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If you need to generate new small business leads online for any business whether they operate online or offline, you are going to love what I have to share with you today.

I am going to show you precisely how to generate small business leads over my shoulder step by step with real life examples.

Although this tutorial focuses on generating leads for a wedding piano player, I’m also going to show you the results of the exact same strategy when applied to a photographer and a baker.

What You Will Learn

How to generate business leads online easily
How to target your audience
How to attract high quality leads
How to setup a high converting landing page
How to convert leads into sales
How to apply this strategy to any online or offline business

ALERT: Instantly Increase Your Conversion Rate With My Personal Case Studys!

Case Study Results

Before I show you the ‘how’ I want to show you the results of this strategy for our wedding pianist.

Here you can see an overview of the campaign from Facebook-

And here you can see the performance data on the landing page that I sent the traffic from Facebook to-

Essentially I spent £116.28 on 63 clicks from Facebook, then 18 of those people filled out the lead form.

This works out at a cost per lead of £6.46!

Those 18 leads turned into 7 immediate jobs for my client at an average profit of £300 each making for a total of £2,100. 6 more leads also booked for the coming months but at the time of writing no payment has been made yet.

5 Simple Steps To Generate Small Business Leads Today

The best way to go about this is just to show you the steps I followed, this took me a total of around 3 hours and has generated over £2,000 for the client at a total cost to him of £316.28-

£200 for my fee
£116.28 in ad costs

I am going to show you at the end of this article how that £200 fee turns into £1,000 monthly revenue for me.

Ok so 5 steps… READY… SET… GO…

Step #1 – Create Facebook Adverts

We are going to take advantage of Facebook Adverts to generate business leads. If you need a primer, Matthew has an awesome guide about how to advertise on Facebook.

If you already know the basics of advertising on Facebook then please continue.

I created 2 simple image ads that were both 1200×628 pixels, one is simply a picture of the guys face smiling, the other is him playing piano.

Then I wrote 2 very simple headlines (25 characters) and 2 basic bits of text (90 characters), the only aim of this part is to get people to click the ad, don’t worry about anything else.

I then mix the 2 images with the 2 headlines and 2 pieces of text for 6 total ads.

Here are 2 example of the ads

Why Create 6 Adverts?

I created 6 adverts for 2 reasons-

People react differently to different ads. For example 1 of the ads had a click through rate of 3.2% (which is very good) but an ad with the same image and different text had a click through rate of 0.3% (which is very bad).
The price it costs to run different ads is wildy different. Click prices between these 6 ads (that were targeting the same exact audience) were averaged between $0.18 and $1.98. Obviously we don’t want to pay $1.98 when we can get the same result for $0.18.

So I like to get 6 ads up, let them run for 3-5 days until Facebook has run it’s algorithms through everything and optimised your ads and then ditch the dead weight (read as “pause anything with a CTR below 1% and a cost above $1 per click”).

That allows you to drive costs down and get more clicks for your money easily.

Step #2 – Targeting The Right Audience

Next we need to make sure we are targeting the right audience for our adverts. We don’t want to advertise wedding pianist services to someone who just got married right?

People often over complicate this, but Facebook allows you to be extremely specific.

For this client I simply wanted to attract people who wanted a musician for their wedding.

Facebook makes that easy for me and I setup my targeting as follows-

People in a relationship
People who were engaged within the last 12, 6 and 3 months (you can find this in the life events section of the “more demographics tab”) SUPER HINT: this tab is an absolute goldmine in these small markets, it even lets you target friends of people who have an anniversary soon or people who are currently in a location that isn’t their home town.
People in the location of the clients business area, eg his city +20km

I have toyed with people who are interested in wedding stuff too, but this didn’t make a difference to conversion rates.

You can just type “wedding” into interests and all of the available interests concerning weddings will be listed.

Step #3 – Create High Converting Landing Page

I use LeadPages to create my landing pages, I absolutely love it!

I simply selected a page that I thought looked cool and filled out the text in about 30 minutes, you can download the exact HTML template I used here.

You don’t have to use LeadPages, you can do this with any number of options like OptimizePress but I like LeadPages, it’s easy and it tracks everything I need it to perfectly.

Here is the page I’ve used, I also have a different page set up to split test against but this is the winner. I have removed any blatant personal info from the image but the idea is based on building trust and authority-

You can see a live version of this page HERE.

Step #4 – Controlling Lead Quality

The amount of information people give you when filling out a form directly corresponds with the quality of the lead (read quality lead as “easy to close” lead).

It is basic psychology that when people spend more time or effort on something they become more dependent on the outcome.

This makes sense that having somebody fill in a more detailed form, will mean that they are more interested in hearing from the client (and therefore easier to close).

This may mean that you get less leads coming through, as it simply takes more time/effort for people to fill out the form. However it filters out any of the “tyre kickers” and results in a much higher quality lead.

So essentially you always have a choice between two types of leads-

High number of leads (with a short, quick, easy to fill in form)
Higher quality leads (with a longer, more involved, detailed form)

I know it can be tempting to simply go for the higher number of leads but I know which option I would choose every single time.

If somebody is willing to fill out the form I’m about to show you, they are going to be very easy to close, it’s that simple.

Here is the exact form I use and he closes around 80% of the leads-

Again you can see this lead box by clicking through to the sales page and using the send enquiry button at the bottom.

Step #5 – Setup Retargeting

If you don’t know what retargeting is, basically it is a method of adveritsing to people on Facebook that visited your site but didn’t take the action you wanted them to.

In this example I used retargeting to display adverts to people that visited the landing page but didn’t convert into a lead.

To do this simply install a Facebook pixel, create a new audience and show them the exact same ads for the next 180 days.

If they are going to hire my client at any time, they will have access to his ad.

Installing A Facebook Custom Audience Pixel

Go into your Facebook ads manager and find your audiences option.

Click “create audience” and then “custom audience“.

You will then be met with these 3 options, select “website traffic”

This brings up the options for exactly how you will target your visitors. you don’t have to do right now.

So long as you add the pixel code to your site, you can set up these audiences at any point. BUT INSTALL THE PIXEL ASAP

These are the options:

Anyone who visits your website – will simply target anybody who visits any page on the site where you have installed the custom audience pixel, you will be asked to select a site from a list if you choose this option.

People who visit specific web pages – this option is for if you have a very specific page that attracts people that you want to retarget. For example a sales page or a specific product on an ecommerce store.

People who visit specific web pages but not others – the option that I use the most. It lets you target people who have seen a specific page but not progressed to a page that you want them to.

For example if you have a sales page and a thank you page for when they buy your product, you would target people who have seen the sales page but not the thank you page. This allows you to only target people who were interested in your product but haven’t bought yet.

People who haven’t visited in a certain amount of time – pretty self explanatory.

You can then set your time frame. I generally use the maximum 180 days but you may have a specific need to target people who have visited more recently.

Then name it something memorable. I use a simple “Retargeting | name of site | type of audience targeted” system and write anything specific in the description section.

Then just click on the little gear symbol in the bottom left corner and make a copy of your pixel code. You will need to paste this code onto every page you want to retarget.

This is where things get interesting…

For example, on my blog I target every single person who visits any of my pages on creating an agency (simply by typing the word “agency” in the “People who visit specific web pages but not others” section) whilst making sure that all of my URL’s that are about this topic contain the word agency.

I then exclude any people who visit the thank you pages that are displayed when somebody buys any of my products.

This allows me to stop showing the people who have already bought from me the same ads over and over again, which would be a huge waste of everybody’s time as they aren’t going to buy again and would likely annoy my visitors.

It also allows me to segregate them into a new buyer audience (by targeting people who viewed the product purchased thank you pages) and put them into a new funnel for a different product.

So essentially I am using retargeting for 2 reasons-

Pull people back into a funnel if they visit a page and don’t purchase or send an enquiry
Segregate people into a new funnel to allow future sales and not annoy them with ads for stuff they already own

This ensures that you are giving people the maximum amount of opportunity to convert into a customer/client/sign up or whatever else your aims and goals are for your paid Facebook traffic.

This type of setup isn’t always necessary as in this case study as we only have the 1 service to sell, however I wanted to use a more complex example so that you can see the potential in using retargeting to move people either down a sales funnel or to segregate them into another.

Results In Other Niches

Earlier I promised to show you what happens when I apply this strategy in the baking and photography niches.

So I approached a wedding photographer and a cupcake baker in the same city as the wedding pianist.

I told them what I had done for my piano client, except this time my fee was £500 per month and I can generate business leads on demand, they both signed up.

To fulfill the business leads for these client I simply tweaked the Facebook adverts and the landing page, kept everything else exactly the same aaaaaaaand…… BOOOM!

Wedding Photographer Results

I spent a total of £97.58 to generate 25 leads at a cost of £3.90 each-

From LeadPages we can see the page had a 36% conversion rate which could be improved on with split tests to lower overall lead costs.

Out of the 25 leads my client only closed 2 of them. However wedding photography commands a higher price and he made a total of £3,000 across the 2 leads he did close.

Once you take out my fee of £500 and the advert costs of £97.58 the client made a total profit of £2,402 / $3,744.

Wedding Bakery Results

In this example we spent a total of £39.81 to generate 12 business leads at a cost of £3.31 each-

In LeadPages you can see exactly how the landing page performed-

Out of those 12 business leads my client did an outstanding job closing 10 of them to provide everything from wedding cakes to cup cakes for a total of £1,400.

After my costs and the advert costs that leaves a total profit of £860 / $1,340!

Wrapping It Up

I hope you can see how simple and effective this strategy is to apply to any business, I’ve shown you 3 related but very different examples but you can really apply this to any business.

Improvements can be made to every campaign by tweaking/testing the landing page and adverts which would lower costs over time for clients that choose to keep me on a monthly retainer.

Generating small business leads is a results driven business and once you prove yourself with a simple campaign it’s very easy to turn that into a long term relationship.

At the end of the day all you have to do is create a few adverts and a landing page which most people can do in an hour.

Above all keep things simple, concentrate on each individual action-

Make people click an ad
Make them fill in your lead form
Close the sale
Use retargeting so that you are there when they decide they need you

If you have any questions or comments then please feel free to ask below and I will answer them all or feel free to check out my blog at www.danray.me!

Internet Marketing 2016

Wednesday, 2 November 2016