If you have a higher priced service that’s new or does not have a strong brand in your geo or demo.. you may encounter issues converting a sale online. We have found that doing branded targeted lead generation can create a great flow of business. Currently we are working on a project where an annual commitment and upfront payment is required. In this case there are two levels starting at $360/yr for the basic plan and a $1500/yr plan that includes live access to a professional. We’ve decided to do lead generation and work with their sales team to close the sales.

On this particular project we are paid per closed sale. Normally we don’t operate under this arrangement, but we have a strong relationship with the company, trust their ability to sell, and have solid tracking in place. Those three factors are critical for the longterm success of any campaign where the marketer is paid per sale from leads generated.

To start we’re going to make a few branded landing pages that have some dynamic elements for A/B testing. We’re going to be collecting leads via webforms as well as publishing a tracked toll-free number. We like to use hostednumbers.com for getting our phone numbers. Hostednumbers reporting is great and they can link up with Google Analytics.

Screenshot of a report I generated for one of our campaigns using a local and toll-free number.

Since we aren’t using a virtual receptionist to take info before transfering, we would normally get a unique inbound number from them to transfer our calls to. It’s easier to match up reports and helps avoid situations like “they called us directly” or “we’re not sure who that came from”, etc.

For traffic we are going to begin with PPC (search) using Adwords, Adcenter, and Yahoo. The leads we generate will be sent realtime to the sales team as well as entered into our autoresponder that will send out follow up emails attempting to do a close online. We will publish the tracked phone number again, too. We made sure that we’ll be the only ones emailing the lead with follow ups to avoid the prospect getting annoyed.

Once we have a good conversion rate on our landing page (leads and sales), we’ll start incorporating other sources of traffic and increase our spend.

I am very optimistic about the success of this program. Their services are of great value to small business owners. I will give more details and updates as we progress with the project.