How Many Internet Leads (and Sales) Do YOU Want from your Online Marketing Plan?

Why do you have a website for your business? And why do you invest in online marketing efforts? To drive internet leads, of course. Often times, businesses invest in a lead generation program without delineating what their lead generation goals for that marketing plan are. 

Although you know that you need to invest in online marketing, how will you know if you’re getting “good” lead generation from your investment?

The How-To of Performance Benchmarking

No matter when you begin an online marketing plan to drive internet leads, you or your online marketing service provider needs to take a benchmark of your existing lead generation success. Think of this benchmark as a resting point, which represents where your lead generation comes from. 

To take your business performance benchmark, consider the following criteria:

• Unique Website traffic (How many unique people visit your site monthly)
• Monthly Lead Count (How many leads does your website currently drive)
• Conversion Rate for Online Leads (What percent of your website leads does your team turn into sales?)

Marketing analytics from Google or Hubspot offer these statistics and more as a support mechanism for your ongoing internet lead assessment.

When Do the Leads Start?

While there’s no set formula to determine your internet lead potential, the benchmark you or your web services company took at the beginning of your marketing plan can act as a starting point. By understanding your website traffic, leads and conversion rate for those leads at the “beginning” of your tracking period, you can gauge increases or decreases based on the marketing efforts you employ.

So, when you begin marketing efforts, there will be traceable changes to your monthly leads. That said, it’s important to keep in mind that if you had 1-2 leads per week from your website BEFORE your marketing efforts, a 100% increase in lead generation would mean that you would then be getting 2-4 leads per week from your marketing efforts.

If that sounds anti-climactic, then you’re not alone. Many times, the pace of lead growth can be slower than expected, and that’s where the benchmark comes in as a powerful assessment tool.

By gauging your lead growth by the benchmark, you can see what marketing efforts you’ve employed that have driven leads, and which ones haven’t. Then, you can ramp up those marketing tools in your lead generation program that are working, and tweak those that aren’t.

Use your benchmark to highlight the fluctuations in your company’s path to more internet leads.