A couple of years ago, I wanted to produce a reality TV show called, “Business Makeover.” I would bring in a team of business advisors, and within a month we would completely turn around a struggling business, capturing it all on film. The business makeover concept is still a lot of fun, but I eventually decided not to get into the TV business.
Today I was looking at a coupon I got in the mail from a cosmetic dentist and thought of a working title for a new reality TV show, How Not to Market. It’s amazing how many marketing dollars are wasted in the U.S. If you’re spending money on marketing in a particular area and it’s not making you money, STOP!
It’s also not enough to track how many leads are generated. A software company I worked with was generating about 800 leads per year at trade shows, at an average cost of about $140 each (when you added up all the expenses). But most of these “leads” were just people wanting the door prize. They wouldn’t return calls and would generally waste the salespeople’s time, so that their real cost was much higher.
In contrast, the leads we generated through search engine optimization and several email campaigns was significantly lower (about $10 each), but the leads themselves were already highly pre-qualified. A large percentage of those resulted in a sale.
When I compared the cost of making a sale through trade show generated leads vs. SEO generated leads, it was about 100 to 1.
To your success!
