Applying Lead Generation to your Business

"Hi! I'm Tim Ricke, past entrepreneur of the year, on behalf of Expert Village. In this segment; lead generation. When you think of that, many people say well that's advertising again. This is prior to the marketing. In lead generation, you must select the areas to put your marketing dollars in. That's what we're referring to. Once they're generated, then the marketing carries it forward. Let's look at that. First of all, you have to select the area. You want to list all these areas. If you need to be or want to be a successful franchisor, you need to be able to offer this to your franchisees because it'll vary in different areas of the country what they have available to them. So in need generation, you look at TV, radio, newspaper, coupon, the internet. Whatever it might be that they can use in their area, you want to be able to look those. You want to look at frequently of advertising. One of the biggest mistakes new business make is when they go to advertise they think they can put an ad in once and get results. People do not accept you that way. They must find some trust by seeing that you're going to be there next week, so there must be a frequency so plan that into your budget on your advertising. Next are the costs and the costs relate right to how often you run those ads. Find out the cost of the ad or whatever market you're going to use or all of them are you going to franchise because you want to be able to get that to your franchisee some guidelines as to what they can expect. Then you have to look at the ratio of that. As an example, we ran a TV ad on our maid service between 6-7 on ABC 5 mornings a week. We wanted to add up the results and see how well it was working, except we were getting no calls from TV at all, but we were getting an awful lot of them for radio. The unusual thing is we weren't on the radio. That gave us some concern. How could that be? Then one morning before I'm going to work, I'm standing shaving in the bathroom and I hear our TV commercial and it dawns on me. They're hearing out TV commercial and the result is they think it's radio. All of a sudden, TV is really working because now we new about what was going on there. One last thing on this. We changed our time slot to from 12-6 instead of 6-7. We got 3 times as many slots, but we weren't closing the sale. People that have money to spend on maid service are busy getting ready for work in the morning, but if they're up all night they don't. We learned something, but we watched what was going on with the marketing. We had not paid attention that qualification. Those details we would not know, so be careful if you're in marketing."