Using Lead Generation services

by Simon Heseltine - RedBoots Consulting

Over the last couple of years there have been a number of companies that have sprung up across the web offering to generate leads for your business. These companies promise to drive leads to your business either for a fixed monthly fee, on a performance basis, or through a mix of the two. Typically these companies have relationships with various sites and channels across the web that deal with listings for specific vertical markets.

If you're a plumber in Peoria they should have a network that they can slice and dice to place you in to get the most relevant visibility, and therefore the most relevant leads. Most of them however, operate on a Pay Per Performance basis. Thus, your leads are delivered either through Pay Per Click advertising or, in some cases, through metered phone calls.

You'll also find that these services tend to offer landing pages, lead sites, or mini one page websites (terminology may vary) that they'll use to drive the traffic to. This is how they're going to measure the performance and effectiveness of their campaigns. However, don't be confused into thinking this lead site will replace your website and give you the web presence you currently lack.

The chances are there's not going to be a great deal of optimization or linking done to this lead site. Therefore you're not going to get much organic traffic. Even if it does manage to generate organic traffic, if the lead generation company controls the domain and the content, you'll lose your investment if you ever decide to discontinue their services.

How do you know if it's going to be worth it?

As with any marketing you're paying for, you need to know what your ROI will be. How much is it going to cost? How many leads will it generate? How many leads does it take for you to generate a sale? What is the typical value of one of your sales? Once you have the answers to these questions, you can evaluate whether utilizing the services of one of these companies is going to be worth it for you.

How do you pick one?

If you decide to go for this type of a service, you'll need to look at what they're offering for the money.

• What channels are they using to drive those leads?
• Do they have experience in your vertical / market?
• What do they define as a lead?
• What level of detail are you going to receive on your reporting?

It's your money, you need to make sure it's not just being thrown away on a Pay Per Click campaign on a fraud ridden 3rd tier search engine.

How attentive are they to your needs? These companies operate down at the 'mom and pop' local level where the margins aren't going to be high. They tend to be in the volume business, which means that there will be as much automation as possible.

Why can't you do it yourself?

For the most part, you can. You can go to Google maps, Yahoo local, SuperPages, TrueLocal, etc, and enter the information for your business in their system. The lead generation companies rely, in part, on the fact that self provisioning is viewed as a daunting task. This is why they offer to ease the burden and take care of the process for you. The various channels recognize this and have been trying to improve their self provisioning systems but they still have a way to go. (As Greg Sterling said at the beginning of May.)

"DIFM" (do it for me) is more powerful than "DIY" (do it yourself). But I also think that larger numbers of SMBs will do some form of self-service as those tools and entry points become more pervasive and simpler to use.

...and simpler they may well become if the various sites heed the call of Chris Silver Smith. Last month on SearchEngineLand, Smith called for the local online info sites to standardize on one format to make it easier for small businesses to propagate their data across all. (I don't imagine that the lead generation companies are too thrilled about that prospect.)

Simon Heseltine is the Director of Search at RedBoots Consulting and the organizer of the Virginia Search Engine Marketing Meetup group.

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