oogle Adwords – 3 Steps To Targeted Sales Leads

Generating sales leads used to be a time intensive activity, not to mention the expense involved. What many sales professionals miss, however, is that that Google Adwords can help them gather targeted sales leads quickly and easily, at a very low cost.

In today’s economy, nearly every consumer is looking for ways to save money. Their natural starting place for research is the world wide web. The natural first stop on the web is Google. That means lots of searches.

When people search, they’ll see Adwords ads, either featured above or to the right of their search results. That’s not news. What’s noteworthy is that many sales professionals have overlooked this as a platform for gathering sales leads. The web isn’t only about making actual sales. It’s a gold mine for gathering sales prospects.

For example, let’s say Bob is a veteran health insurance agent. He’s tried advertising in the phone book, but that’s not working as well as it used to. It’s certainly not bringing him the young families that are the backbone of a health insurance agent’s portfolio. Fortunately, the web is exactly where those younger prospects are likely to spend most of their research time.

Healthcare is expensive these days. When someone is looking to save money on healthcare costs, reducing insurance expense is where they tend to start, especially if they’re self-employed. That means their Google searches are likely to focus on health insurance. And that’s an advantage for Bob.

Step one of his strategy is to create a landing page with a simple form for health insurance sales prospects. That means capturing a name, an email address and a phone number at minimum, and probably several other items to gauge eligibility and quality of the prospect.

Since Bob is not a web designer, he can hire a freelancer to create that page for him at very low cost. Maintaining the email mailing list at an autoresponder service is inexpensive as well, and the more sophisticated ones can deliver all of the form data to him via email.

Now all he needs is targeted visitors who might choose to fill out his form. That’s where Adwords comes in.

Step two of his strategy is to research keywords in the health insurance niche and find a set of keywords with decent traffic and relatively low Adwords bid cost. Google has a free keyword research tool that will help him identify those so-called “long tail” keywords. Typically they’re keyword phrases of three or more keywords.

Once he has identified those keywords, he can write ads that include those keywords and attract targeted prospects. He’ll send visitors to his landing page to capture sales leads.

Google Adwords has another valuable feature called Geo Targeting. It does not make sense for Bob to have his insurance ad shown all over the country. He would have to pay for a mountain of unqualified visitors to his site. With Geo targeting, Bob can have his ads shown only in the geographic location he chooses. That could be a state, region, city or a radius. For instance, Bob’s ad could be limited to a 50 mile radius of his home town.

Step three of his strategy is to optimize that landing page to maximize the conversion rate and minimize his cost per lead. He’ll have to pay for the traffic to test with, but the testing tool itself won’t cost anything extra if he uses Google’s free Website Optimizer. It lets him do A/B split testing (testing two pages with one element changed to see if it improves conversion) and multivariate testing (testing multiple page changes at once to compare conversion effects).

Those three simple steps can transform Bob into a web-savvy lead generation powerhouse that slaughters the competition. And Adwords can help him get there.

Check out how you can get more targeted sales leads with my landing page course.