Lead Generation in the UK

The Whole Pie

 

Here in Soho at LeadPoint UK we often talk about sellers earning the ‘whole advertising pie’ rather than just taking the first slice. We quite like our food, in particular the local burrito shop with a life size donkey out the front, but when we aren’t eating we also love making our sellers money.

 

The pie analogy refers to sellers who could monetise their websites through lead generation rather than turning their money portal / website into an ugly mass of advertising covered in banners and Google AdSense etc..

 

Rather than allowing another seller to buy inventory on your site so they can drive traffic to their lead generation site, using one of our banners and linking it to one of the following micro sites will allow a seller to receive an income on a cost per lead basis:

 

http://www.loan.valueplace.co.uk/

http://www.mortgage.valueplace.co.uk/

http://www.privatemedicalinsurance.valueplace.co.uk/

http://www.debt.valueplace.co.uk/

http://www.ukpaydayloanstoday.co.uk/

 

A lead generation campaign allows you to keep your own traffic and maximise your yield per visitor rather than letting another seller advertise on your own site and selling the leads for a huge profit!

 

Is there a risk? Of course, without the steady advertising income it becomes harder to plan budgets but when you consider that a private medical insurance lead or a Life Insurance lead sells for £35 for many, it’s worth the small risk. If you have a decent site with a steady stream of traffic then lead generation could reward you handsomely, more so than just selling the space on your site for advertising where you have little control over the content.

Alain – Alain.Desmier@leadpoint.com

 

Happy Birthday to us!

It's been two years since we traded our first lead and from nowhere, we are proud to say we are now one of the major players in the UK financial lead generation market. But we're not going to stop there. We want to become the biggest and the best lead generation company in the whole of the UK and we want to achieve this as quickly as possible. So keep watching this space to see all the upcoming developments.

To read our 2nd Birthday Press Release in full click here.

Corporate Healthcare and Lead Generation

Six months on from the launch of our individual private medical insurance product, we’ve been inundated with requests for expanding into corporate healthcare leads and the launch of this product is now imminent. Through researching the product, we have been struck by how the gloomy predictions about the fate of the health insurance industry during the credit crunch appear to differ dramatically from the reality. In fact, takeup of individual PMI in the UK now exceeds 7 million, despite reports of consumers still perceiving PMI as a ‘luxury product’, and the inclusion of corporate healthcare within core benefits packages rises year on year.

In the current economic climate, heath insurance, especially when offered by companies as an employee benefit, becomes an extremely attractive proposition.  According to the Hymans Robertson Report from earlier this year, one in three employees expects that their benefits package will be cut during the economic downturn, but in fact 95% of the employers surveyed have no plans to do this.  On the contrary, almost half of employer respondents plan to enhance their benefits offering. This makes a lot of sense at a time when corporate belt-tightening has become a part of daily life, since health insurance has been shown to increase staff retention, reduce ra­­tes of absence and generally result in a happier and healthier workforce. *

In addition to this, corporate healthcare is becoming more flexible and affordable than ever before. Gone are the days where a small to medium-sized business was left with limited options for offering healthcare to its employees – the prevalence of modular healthcare products mean that a benefits package can be as individual as the company itself.  Although factors such as public perception of the NHS and a greater focus in the media on the importance of safeguarding one’s health and family will mean the demand for individual health insurance will continue to exist, the market for corporate healthcare now seems to be catching up, and lead generators will need to rise to the challenge of ensuring that online consumers are able to find the providers to meet their needs.

Katie - Katie.Jenkins@leadpoint.com

*www.employeebenefits.co.uk survey, April 2008

Converting Leads

Converting Leads. That's what everybody who is reading this blog wants to know right? How many leads will I convert? What should I do to convert more leads? What's your conversion rate? Well all these questions are important and many of them have been discussed in other posts but there is one related issue that often doesn't get discussed.

Some lead buyers will convert 10% of their leads, some will convert 15% and some may only convert 5%. Conversion rates vary from lead buyer to lead buyer but the better your approach and the more prepared you are the more leads you will convert. What nobody can predict though is which of your leads will convert. What I mean by this is that if you buy 100 leads you may be able to roughly predict what percentage overall will convert but it is impossible to predict whether these will be the first 10 leads you receive, the last 10 or somewhere in the middle.

Although this point may seem obvious to some it is often ignored. When you are about to start your first lead generation campaign or in fact any, you should consider the above principle at all times. When a lead buyer asks how much they should spend on buying leads the lead provider will often reply something like "you need to make sure you buy a decent amount of leads over a period of a few weeks". This reply is not meant to sound vague but it is meant to help the lead buyer. If you only spend £100 for example and receive 10 leads, the performance of those leads is just pot luck. They could all convert or none of them may convert.

The point is that as a lead buyer you need to commit a budget big enough to ensure that you can make a useful analysis of your lead buying campaign. This can only be achieved if you commit to a decent volume of leads which could be anything from 30 to 100 depending on the lead product.

justin - justin.rees@leadpoint.com

Lead Generation as a Seasonal Smoother

Finally the sun is shining and for once the BBC weather forecast promises us a hot summer weekend. August is almost upon us and the school holidays are about to start.

Although our work culture seems closer aligned to our American friends across the Atlantic, there is still a very European mentality when it comes to working in the summer months. It seems that the prevailing attitude of UK businesses is that unless you sell swimming shorts, ice lollies or sun cream then you may as well write off the rest of July and August!

In the past that may have made sense but there is still plenty of business to be done and plenty of money to be made. In the internet age your potential market is infinitely larger than it used to be. Wherever you live and work, even if a certain percentage of people in your area aren't doing business, there are still hundreds of people on aggregate across the country that are!

Lead Generation enables you to harness the power of the internet and reach those hundreds of thousands of consumers still going online to buy or research products and services.

Companies use lead generaiton in many different ways but using it to smooth your flow of business at traditionally quiet times of the year such as Christmas or during the summer is one of the major of advantages that it has over other forms of marketing.

So I am sorry to say that with lead generation now you have no excuse to shut down for an extended summer holiday!

Justin - justin.rees@leadpoint.com

Can you afford not to use lead generation?

Lead generation is a form of marketing. It is the most effective way to reach your target customers.

 

Here’s proof:

 

If you don’t use lead generation, you may advertise your company in a local newspaper. For around £400 you get a ¼ page advert in a local newspaper with a circulation of around 25,000.

 

But for this price, here is what you don’t get:

 

• You have no idea how many of these readers will see your advert.

• You have no idea how many will respond to it.

• You have no idea who will respond to it.

• You have no idea when they will respond.

• You can’t get a refund even If the respondents aren’t eligible for your service.

• You also have you have to pay a designer to create your advert for you which could be another few hundred pounds.

 

With lead generation, you pay for the results of somebody else's marketing spend!

 

• You choose the customers you want to target – e.g. for mortgage leads, filter by loan amount, credit grade, postal area and Maximum LTV.

• You receive the leads in a matter of seconds after the consumer has left their information.

• You get a refund for the leads that don’t meet your predefined criteria.

 

So the question is, where do you want to spend your marketing budget?

 

Lead Generation Works!

Lead Generation is the most effective way to source new business and is a model that has proven time and time again to work. However, lead generation will only work for companies that have the right approach. This includes everything from knowing how to measure success and failure to knowing how to work the leads properly.

The most important thing for lead buyers to realise is that lead generation is a marketing activity and should be assessed in this context. The key determinant of success is the return on investment achieved from buying leads. The individual leads themselves are merely the physical delivery of the marketing spend that is lead generation. Just like if you run a newspaper advertising campaign, the physical delivery of that spend might be telephone enquiries.

In the current climate financial intermediaries are increasingly turning to lead generators to help them source new business. While lead generation can be a very useful tool to help beat the credit crunch, lead buyers in the financial sector must understand that with fewer lending products available and changing consumer behaviour online, lead generation needs to be approached in the right way to make it work.

It is the responsibility of all lead providers to set expectations at a realistic level. As a commercial enterprise, a lead provider will only be successful if lead buyers keep coming back for more and this will only happen if their lead buying is a success. However, lead providers must explain to lead buyers at the start what they can expect and what constitutes success.

Justin - justin.rees@leadpoint.com

Generating Leads On Google

I recently attended a PPC (Pay Per Click)  management conference where, over the course of a sunny afternoon, I was bombarded with pitches from software developers. Each company to take the stage insisted that their particular system was far superior at lowering costs, improving returns, organising reports, cooking breakfast and generally making me more attractive to the opposite sex. The foundation of all these systems was solid mathematics searching for trends across a multitude of campaigns - and very impressive it was too.

Now, the more astute lead sellers involved in lead generation will already have realised that simply throwing money at a website is unlikely to offer the best returns. An incredible amount of research, planning and management should always go into each campaign. So, we sit and scrutinise every minute detail – What products are strong? How can you increase conversions? What is the best combination of adwords? Where are consumers coming from? How long are they spending on the site? What are competitors doing? etc. etc. etc. This part is not an exact science but with stringent use of all of the above you can gradually evolve and improve your technique even without investing thousands of pounds in state-of-the-art PPC management software. A little more is knowledge is acquired each time - learning from mistakes, noting successes, lowering costs and improving returns.

Jon - Jonathan.Thomson@leadpoint.com

 

Social Media Explained!

If you ever wanted to know about Social Media, what it is, why it's important and what to do with it then this excellent presentation should give you more than enough to get you started.

| View | Upload your own

I came across this on the site of NixonMcInnes, who got it from Marta Kagan. The fact that you are watching it now is a testament to the very medium itself!

Lead Generation for all seasons..

I’ve had a number of conversations with our sellers recently who are bracing themselves for the ‘summer slowdown’ – August is a notoriously slow period for online advertising.

Lead Generation seasonality is one of the quirks of our business and especially in a country that see’s so little of the sunshine, it’s an accepted point that a good days weather can slow lead flow by 10-20% and a rainy weekend can increase lead flow by the same amount.

We’ve discussed the effects of consumers searching for products late at night before on this blog and the considerations buyers of leads should be aware of when calling such leads. What’s relevant for sellers not in the UK is to understand what the weather is doing – burning your Google adwords account in the middle of a heat wave, really wouldn’t be wise.

If you plan to send leads to us over the next 5 days, please bear in mind that your marketing spend will probably go that bit further because the weather for the next five days will be:

(according to the BBC)

Alain - alain.desmier@leadpoint.com