This article about local lead generation comes in two parts: compilation of some worthy ideas from the Internet, so you don’t have to look it up yourself as well as list building techniques we use at GRIN Launcher.
Outline
Why local lead generation tho?
Kevin Jordan coined the term and Mark Fortune who has written a book called The Small Business Owners Guide to Local Lead Generation.
Q: … guys have stuck the word local in the title and so I wonder is there a difference between local lead generation and just everyday lead generation?
Mark: Yeah, well, we felt like there was… we all sort of realised that we’re all working with clients that are local businesses and sometimes they face some unique and common struggles across just the local spectrum and these days, especially in the online world, you can really narrow down your focus as to who your local market is.
So, if you’re a local veterinarian clinic, you’re not really concerned with marketing outside of a three- to five-mile radius of where your business is so there are very specific things, especially in the online world, that you need to worry about in order to bring in the right kind of customers to your business
Local lead generation ideas
Content
Familiar with staring at empty word doc for a while? Well, content creation is not about writing, its about storytelling. Consider this hack:
one thing that I’m doing right now with the owner of a clinic for weight loss is instead of just writing his blog, what we’re doing is every week I interview him about his own business as if we’re doing a podcast episode and then I can write the blog post using a transcript of that so that it’s in his own voice.
PPC ads
That’s a mainstream acquisition strategy as well, lots of resources. My two cents are:
- When you have a polished website with clear CTA, contact details, a story told and all that – try driving traffic to see how well it converts and if it does – well, dive into local SEO.
- Hire a freelancer to set up proper tracking via Google Analytics (free) and Google Ads campaigns. Ensure the use of commercial keywords with appropriate match types. Here are a few examples of lists we built:
Local SEO
The topic was covered so many times on the Internet that I don’t see a point of writing it all over again. Here is a resource you can refer to https://seoexpertbrad.com/local-seo-checklist/ to get an idea.
b2b list building & prospecting
If you target local business (that’s a local lead generation too, right?), it boils down to making lists of prospects. In a perfect world each entry on a list would contain:
- Decision-making person name and his role
- His or her email address
- Phone number (a corporate will do as well because upon calling you to ask for a specific person, so there is no problem with gatekeepers usually)
From my experience running b2b sales campaigns, personal email addresses are rarely obtainable for local \ small businesses, while for phone numbers we see coverage between 60% to 90% on the whole list.
So, sources to compile lists from:
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator might be a good start. It offers a free month on sign up for every (cough) new email address, but you can’t do much with the list unless you get some additional software like Lead IQ ($60 per 300 emails a month). At GRIN Launcher we built our browser extension to parse results at bulk or per contact basis. Here is a LinkedIn scraping article with more details.
- Lists of local businesses on the Internet (duh). If they are big enough, you parse them via web scrapping services (SaaS or individual freelancers) or hire VA from the Philippines (few bucks per hour) via Upwork or Mechanical Turk.
Common pitfalls of small business marketing
Worker VS tool mindset
Often unprofessional contractors do the job not good enough, and then business owners lose faith in specific tools \ platforms \ techniques \ advertising channels. So for a business owner, it is vital to see the difference. Here are two examples of that attitude:
- We worked with an online store that outsourced PPC ads to two different agencies so they could do benchmarking and see the results in comparison.
- We work with a b2b insurance agent who outsources telemarketing, and the first experience was an utter failure on the vendor side in terms of communication & results. The second vendor we tried with a client yielded results so good that I can’t tell you ROI, so you don’t call me a liar.
Post regularly or don’t post at all
It is actually hurting that business because when someone goes on your Facebook page and sees that the last post there is Happy Thanksgiving 2012, it’s what we call the social media ghost town effect and it makes people wonder is this business even open.
Mobile friendly website
You might think – boy, its 2019 out there, aren’t all websites responsive and past this “common” pitfall you see re-typed on every single “marketing hacks” posts?
At GRIN Launcher we sit on top of 20M+ websites database (as of April 2019), and a HUGE portion of them is not mobile friendly.
We’re redesigning their website specifically because of that issue. It’s a veterinary clinic and they have good search rankings. They’re actually pretty good marketers and have a successful business, but 40 percent of their traffic was mobile and the latest Google updates have really punished their traffic and there’s really no way to get around that other than to rebuild your site in a mobile responsive design.
To sum it up on the local lead generation
Learning language 30 minutes a day is better than raving 8 hours session on a weekend. Same with marketing – it should be an ongoing, structured effort. Too often small business owners are sucked into everyday hustle and pay attention to lead generation on an occasional basis.