In recent years, advances in digital marketing have both helped and hindered SMEs in their online lead generation, depending on the approach taken.
It’s a bit like what’s happened in the music industry, where ease of access to the technology has led to more content, but not always better quality content.
If I think back to the early 2000s, when we founded our agency, most enquiries were from SMEs who didn’t have a website and felt they should have one.
Their mentality was often a box-ticking exercise and we would do what we could to educate that online lead generation would become a competitive space where an SME would have to be amongst the best to succeed.
Now, where most sectors are saturated in the online space, there’s a need to out-smart your competitor on several fronts, and that’s where it becomes a science. So for example, in getting the exposure in the first place, there are decisions around which social and web channels to employ to
best connect with your particular market.
Then there are decisions around how to tailor content in each to generate genuinely valuable leads, (and preferably those at a relatively advanced stage in the buying cycle).
Then the science really begins.
Where do leads drop out of the website? Which fields in the form cause people to abandon? If we shave 0.5 seconds off the load time, how much higher does Google rank us? If we adjust the images, complexity of the text, colour scheme, how does it affect the conversion rate?
So now, where an SME has a mindset that it wants to dominate its sector in the online space, it has the opportunity to do that by bringing a scientific and analytical aspect to its digital marketing.
By Steve Brennan, CEO of Bespoke Digital Agency Ltd
Bespoke Digital Agency Ltd specialise in online lead generation and e-commerce, and work with clients across the UK in a range of sectors. Bespoke has a large in-house team delivering web design and development, optimisation consultancy, training and digital strategy workshops.
;
