M & A Rainmaker

Sometimes I look at all the information that I see via the Internet – emails, social media posts, blog posts etc etc and I think – well all these people are preaching to the converted ( or partially converted ) !!

Everyone that is communicating with me or whose information I see knows ( more or less ) about the Internet, websites, social media and many of the related topics. They range from the gurus to the newbies and everywhere in between.

I suspect ( strongly ) that the people we really need to communicate with and educate are not seeing all of this information.

Why? Well basically they are barely on the Internet and probably not on any social media – or if they are, only casually. I can think of 2 businesspeople that I know – one in New York and one in Leicestershire U.K. – right off the top of my head. One is a V.P. in an IT related company the other owns garages and other businesses.

I have not talked to them in detail about this but I think we can assume that their businesses have websites but that most of their sales and marketing is done using more ” traditional ” means – advertising, cold calling, mailshotting etc etc. I could be a bit wrong about this because they may have marketing departments that are using e.g. social media but what I am right about is that they themselves ( and they are decision makers ) are not communicating or hearing what is being said by ” all of us ” !!

What they are interested in though is Return on Investment and building their businesses.

To start with: What was the investment into their website and what was the return ??

and this is where it all starts to get difficult because they probably know what they spent ( and are spending ) on their website but they probably have little idea of the return that they are getting. To know what return they are getting they are going to need to know:

– How many leads did they get ( in the same time period as the costs ) ?

– How many of these leads turned into actual orders ?

– What were these orders worth ?

Now they can do Return on Investment !!!

Getting a lead implies a couple of things:

1. That somebody found their website.

2. That they took some sort of action as a result of doing so ( signed up to an email list; took up an offer of some kind ; phoned in etc etc )

For somebody to have found their website they did one of a few things:

a. They knew the name of the company website for some reason and put this into their browser. ( They might have see it on a van or an advert ).

b.  They Googled something. ( The company name or a search term that the website came up for )

c. They went to another website which referred them to this website.

d. They responded to an email marketing campaign by visiting the website.

e. They were referred to the website from a social media post.

f. Some other source.

Source: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/16759/3-Tips-For-Better-Lead-Management.aspx?source=Blog_Email_[3+Tips+For+Better+Le]

So you can see from this that the first thing is for the website to be FOUND.

Then for the person finding it to TAKE SOME ACTION ( creating a lead ).

Then for this action ( lead ) to result in an ORDER. ( Which may require some ” nurturing ” )

How do you get FOUND in the first place ??

Well you must understand what you want to be found for and these words, phrases and terms must be in the titles, ( Meta ) tags and content of your website and blogsite.

That is how you will get FOUND in the first place.