20+ Tips for Busy Business Owners Who Want More Qualified Leads
A list of the most important lead generation stats small business owners need to know in order to reach the right customers online this year.
The internet is teeming with digital marketing advice and strategies for small business owners, but when you’re busy actually running the day to day operations of a small or large company, — pouring through countless articles and statistics about optimization, sales funnels, and analytics is the last thing you want to be doing.
The digital marketing landscape is huge, and as more and more brands move their business online, it will only become more competitive for business owners and entrepreneurs.
Your key goal to make your marketing strategy more efficient over time, so we’ve compiled the most relevant statistics to help grow your business leads.
Lead Generation Stats by Industry
Lead generation, or the process of gaining inquiries or interest from potential customers, can look different across various industries.
For example, some industries rely on cold-calling or outbound marketing to find leads, while others may rely on a combination of contact forms and email marketing to grow their leads. Either way, determining how to define your sales funnel and lead generation strategy is easier when you have benchmarks to get you started.
Landing page conversion rates by industry:
- Travel: 5%
- Consumer Services: 5%
- Business Services: 3.4%
- Consulting: 5%
- Home Improvement: 3.3%
- Retail: 3%
Lead Generation Difficulties for Small Business Owners:
63% of small business owners report having issues generating leads.
40% of SBOs report difficulty proving ROI from marketing efforts as a greater concern.
and
60% of SBOs report not being able to track any ROI value from social media, specifically.
This busts open the myth that busy entrepreneurs and business owners are not invested in online marketing and gives us more depth to explore why businesses are struggling to keep up.
Since the tools and processes used to create successful marketing campaigns are always changing, those who are invested in generating leads online have to be willing to experiment and analyze their efforts in a more natural, intuitive way.
Tip: Use UTM parameters to track your leads from ad or social post back to your landing pages to get a better understand of your conversion funnel. Most tools like Facebook and Google Adwords offer free UTM builder tools. What’s most important is that you keep a consistent system for labeling your creatives and call to actions in order to better qualify your leads.
Success rates of trending marketing tactics
Pay per click
Consumers coming to your website via properly targeted PPC ads on search or social media are 50% more likely to convert than organic visitors.
Which industry dominates at PPC? Finance and insurance companies are leading the PPC pack with the highest median click through rate of 2.65%.
Local SEO
After seeing local search ads, 72% of consumers visited a business within 5 miles.
Landing page optimization
Adding video to your landing pages, particularly if you’re promoting a product that can be shown off, can increase landing page conversions by up to 86%.
So now that we’ve established how online marketing can actually translate into more leads and improved ROI for your business, let get into which channels can offer you the best avenues to promote your work.
Lead Generation Stats by Platform
What factors are driving most of the online leads for small businesses right now? Take a look below find out, plus learn which industry is having the most success with each!
Social Media
7/10 hashtags on Instagram are branded, and posts with at least one hashtag gets 12.6% more engagement than those without.
Branded hashtags are just as powerful as vanity URLs or the vanity phone numbers before them. If you’re looking for a simple and effective way to pique customer interest, look into ways to leverage a vanity hashtag.
Currently, about 25% of the entire world uses Facebook.
Facebook’s ad suite is already a powerful tool, but this data shows how the platform offers the ability for small business owners to interact with potential customers from all over the world without ever having to leave the office.
Coming up with a robust Facebook strategy, especially one that uses a combination of paid and organic engagement, will help any business owners start off on the right foot.
80% of Twitter users are “Affluent Millennials”
Twitter is perhaps the most controversial social networking site on this list, and despite its constant head-line making algorithm changes or even more notorious moderation issues, it may be the most important social network for promoting your products or services with decision-making Millennials right now.
Search engine marketing (or SEM)
The average cost per acquisition (CPA) on the Google Search Network hovers around $49 across all industries.
Some brands and types of businesses may look at that number and jump due to lower conversion costs on other channels. (For example, a makeup brand may find a cheaper CPA via Instagram on YouTube.)
But for the most part, paid search (i.e. search engine marketing) is a great way to keep your conversion costs low. Since you’re only paying when someone takes a desired action, such as clicking on your ad, business owners can ensure they are bringing the most qualified traffic simply through thoughtful keyword bidding.
Retargeting via display ads can add over a 1,000% increase in branded search queries for your product after just one month.
The display advertising landscape is lot trickier than paid search, but you shouldn’t write it off so quickly. Research the value of remarketing ads for your small business vertical. Also, assess whether or not running programmatic display ads on key websites and publisher pages to boost your brand’s awareness and credibility.
Mobile devices account for over 50% of all web traffic generated online.
If you’re business does not have long tail keywords optimized for voice search, a mobile friendly website and a Google My Business listing or doesn’t pay attention to local search SEO — good luck getting new clients or increasing foot traffic to your storefront. (Hint: these items are easy to set up and essential for the growth of any business with an online presence; look into them now.)
The new nature of search engine marketing is focused heavily on paid advertising and prioritizing the mobile experience for consumers. Outside of writing really great content that ranks organically (which takes significant time and effort, particularly in crowded verticals with great marketers), it’s hard to get away from the paid side of things.
Outreach
70% of Millennial Customers are influenced by reviews or recommendations from their peers.
People trust people. And despite the growing backlash for social media influencers in some circles, the concept of using brand ambassadors is as old as the advertising industry. Don’t be afraid to reach out influencers and spokespeople, especially ones who can push more traffic to your local or online business.
Also, don’t let huge follower counts intimidate you into throwing this strategy away — research shows that micro-influencers can be just as, if not more so profitable for brands and businesses that are looking to build a more engaged and loyal audience.
92% of mobile video viewers share videos with others.
If you want to leverage your customer base or social following to reach even more customers, use video. Over 500 million people watch Facebook videos every day. Additionally, marketers who use video saw their revenue grow 49% faster than those who didn’t.
Video content is highly favored by search engine and social media timeline algorithms. Giving customers a visual aid that can explain your value proposition, showcase product features or highlight different uses to make sure everyone understand why your business is a good fit — based on those search terms/keywords/interest categories.
For B2B campaigns, email marketing has 47% higher click through rating than B2C.
If your company brings in most of its revenue through partnerships with other brands (or via business and corporate clients), email may have the best ROI for your marketing efforts. This is great news as most B2B keywords are costly and email marketing requires less time and money investment than paid search and social.
Want to learn more?
Follow the willu blog for in-depth tips and insights into small business marketing, plus visit our website to learn how a branded vanity hashtag can help small business owners grow leads in every industry.
*All data points are sourced from quality digital marketing brands that you should be paying attention to if you’re interested in growing your business. They include: WordStream, MatchCraft, SearchEngineWatch, HubSpot Academy, Unbounce, and a special thanks to Medium’s Shane Barker for the inspiration!
