Since I started my own business I’ve had to learn a few things along the way. One of those things is marketing. An internet business is no different than a physical business when it comes to marketing. If done correctly it will generate proactive leads. On the other hand if marketing is done incorrectly it will generate reactive leads. In a moment I will get into the details of proactive versus reactive, but for now I want to take a moment and define the word lead.

The dictionary defines lead in many ways one of which is to show the way, another is to conduct or escort. Both of which are accurate but for marketing purposes they leave something to be desired. The simplest way to describe a lead in marketing would be to say that it is the end result of a marketing campaign. Some will say that a sale or non-sale is the end result, but I disagree. I would say that a lead is the end result. Either it is a productive (your pitch made a sale) or an unproductive lead.

As I mentioned before there are two main types of leads that I will deal with in this article. Each one has its positives and negatives, but in terms of money changing hands the proactive lead is far superior. A good proactive lead will close 70+ percent of the time. In sales a 70% close is pretty good. It might even be considered huge! Keep that in the back of your mind because before we get into proactive leads we will get into reactive leads.

Reactive leads
If you take a look at almost any blog or website out there, this one included, you will no doubt see one degree of ads or another plastered throughout its content. Depending on our skill levels we will try our level-headed best to integrate these ads so they are the most appealing to the users. The goal is simple; get as many different site browsers to click on as many different ads as we can to generate revenue. We don’t do it, though if it didn’t violate pretty much every single terms and conditions many of us would put a giant banner on each page declaring to the viewer CLICK MY ADS OR MY WHOLE FAMILY WILL DIE!!. Instead we try to blend the ads in with the content hoping one of two things happens. Either the viewer will click on the ad thinking it leads to further information about the article, or the viewer will click on the ad because by some miracle the right viewer and the right ad happened to come together. All of this is reactive. We want the viewer to react to the ad and click it. The sales and promotion process doesn’t begin until they are already browsing our sites.

The problem with this is that if you talk to any salesman they will tell you that the sales starts long before you show the product. With reactive ads you are showing the product and demanding a click right then and there. I say demanding because with third party ads where you are selling ads for the likes of BidVertiser and Text Link Ads (not to mention all the others) you only give the viewer one chance to click. They can’t book mark the page and come back later after thinking it over. It is do or die as far as generating revenue from that ad. I’m not a psychologist but even I can see the problem with that. Most of us do not click on ads the first time we see them. It used to be said that a person had to see a branding at least seven times before they would even consider making a purchase. More recent research indicates it is closer to 20 times. I don’t know if that’s a sign of the times, or better data gathering. Either way if you depend on revenue coming from those rotating ads you have a very large and difficult task ahead of you. The only way to generate revenue using this kind of advertising is to have hundreds of thousands of viewers a day. At that point it becomes a numbers game. If you have 250,000 viewers to your site and 2% of them happen to click on your ads that will give you 5,000 clicks a day. Which isn’t too bad, but really how many of us have that kind of traffic? Especially on a daily basis. The alternative is proactive leads.

Proactive leads
The power of the proactive lead lies in the relationship. It is something that is cultivated long before, and more importantly, long after the viewer ever sees your site. It often starts offsite, perhaps on a message forum or on a social networking site such as Myspace or Facebook. You build a relationship and you lead the prospect step by step to a final sale. At this point I would like to break down the steps so that things are a little easier to digest.

Prequalification process

Unlike a reactive lead where you are trying to convince someone to react(click) on one of the ads after they’ve gotten to the site with a proactive lead you are prequalifying them to get on your site in the first place. Think in terms of car sales. If you go to any high-end luxury car dealership you’ll see this process first hand. Before they even begin to ask you what you are looking for in a car they will begin the prequalification process.They will begin asking you a lot of innocent questions. They’ll ask you where you are from, what neighborhood you live in there, where do you work, do you enjoy it, what do you do where you work and many more such questions. All of the questions serve as a prequalifying process. Basically depending on your answers they are determining if you are even qualified to be talking business with them. If you are at a dealer that specializes in $120k cars but you live in the trailer park and are a shift manager at McDonald’s you can pretty much guarantee they aren’t going to take much more time aside from to be pleasant and get you off the lot. On the other hand if you own the swankiest house on the swankiest hill in the swankiest neighborhood they won’t let you be. The moral to this? Figure out a way to prequalify your leads before they even get to the site. That doesn’t mean don’t let anyone and everyone on, but be aware that there are certain people you should spend some effort on and others who you can expect to browse but not “buy”.

Getting them in the door

Once upon a time all it took to get someone in the door to the saleshop was an invitation. Most often this came in the form of a slickly written sign and/or a gimmicky sales pitch. The good news is that the same holds true today. That’s also the bad news. An invitation will get anyone in the door, and unless you want to setup some kind of password protection scheme you might as well get used to the idea that anyone means literally anyone. This is where the prequalification process is important. It allows you to concentrate on those people who are there with purpose instead of trying to please everyone. Once they are in the door you can triage them into two camps. The first are the lookers. These folks want to see what all the fuss is about, but short of the heavens aligning they aren’t going to make a purchase. The second group consists of the doers. They are there to buy and short of a catastrophic performance on your part they will do just that.

Leading them along

People are stupid. Plain and simple for all of our bravado and egos we are very simple, very stupid creatures. No where is this more evident than in the sales process. Each step of the way we want our hands held, out bottoms patted, and gleeful voice to tell us “Great job!” each time we take an action. We are all like that. Some more than others, but each of us wants to be confirmed. In the sales process confirmation of the prospects choices is the single most powerful motivator for them to move forward with the purchase. How you confirm them I leave to you, but keep in mind it has to be so simple a child can understand it. One of the most powerful confirmations I’ve found is a simple yet personal “Thank you”. It shows a person that you engaged with them at some level. That you have taken notice of what they are doing. It’s not the only lead along method you should use, but be aware of its power. I should quickly point out that you don’t want to have to lead people very far when trying to convince them to take action on the internet. Basically you want to convince them in one or two steps. The more often someone has to click the more likely they are to just leave.

The final push

The entire process up to this point has just been getting them to the right spot at the right time that they are going to make a buy. It is literally when the final “push” of the button (or click of the mouse to be more exact) occurs and the sale is made. This is why you spent so much time prequalifying them, showing them to the door, and then leading them along through the crowd. If you do everything else perfectly but screw this up you lose a sale. If you screw everything else up but by some miracle they find themselves here they may or may not make the buy, but chances are they won’t. This is not the time to try and convince them to buy. That should have been done long before now. At this point you simply want to close the sale. Don’t try anything gimmicky here. Just give them what you know they came for. As I mentioned people are stupid so don’t give them a reason to forget why they came in the first place. At this point the only thing you should be doing is asking them to click the link. No more, no less.

The follow through

After the sale is made you’re about halfway done. I’m not going to get into all the steps of a follow through but suffice it to say you need to follow through with your customers if you expect them to be back in the future. I mean more than a simple thank you I mean being proactive. Going above and beyond and far exceeding their expectations. It’s one thing to sell someone a block of adspace on your site, but it’s quite another to spend a few hours figuring out how exactly to optimize that adspace for a customer. That is going above and beyond, and is something each and every customer no matter how much money they spend is entitled to.

There you have it. In a nutshell a little bit about marketing online. Remember a reactive lead is someone you hope to convince to make a purchase once they’ve reached the sales counter. A proactive lead is someone you convinced long before to purchase something from you and they are walking to the counter with the item in hand. Reactive leads are things like Adsense where as proactive leads are things like adspace on your own site.

This entire article was inspired reading some comments over at my buddies blog, One Man’s Goal, specifically the comments to his article about using Myspace as a guerilla marketing platform.

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