If you ask any small business owner what is stunting the growth of their business, they are going to tell you that it’s not enough leads coming in their door. If you ask them how to solve that problem, most think running ads – whether on Facebook or Google – is the answer to their problems. Digital marketing has its strong points, but there’s a time and a place. If you’re going to run ads in your business, it’s important to have the other pieces of the funnel operating first. Otherwise, you might just be using a fishing net with holes to try and catch your new leads.

Here’s how to tell if you are ready to be adding digital marketing to your small business.

Is Your Offer Air Tight?

If you are going to turn on ads and bring in a pile of new leads, you want to make sure the offer you have to give them is irresistible to them. The key to making irresistible offers is that they need to be a problem that your audience wants to solve. Bonus points if that problem has urgency attached to it.

Do You Have Bandwidth?

Turning on ads is great to increase your lead flow volume. One of the first questions that small business owners neglect to ask is if they can handle the influx of lead flow. If you have not adjusted your expectations, it can catch you by surprise at how quickly people start flowing in.

While this is exciting and thrilling at first, it can get lost on you really quickly. Since you are investing money behind your ads, leads could get left behind, forgotten about, and not followed-up with. The investment is not eliciting the true ROI that it has the potential to create.

To make sure that you’re ready to handle the influx of leads that will soon come your way, the things you should consider are:

• Do you have a clear sales process for how leads progress through your pipeline?
• Is there someone delegated to following up and nurturing them?
• Do you have automations in place for the long-term nurturing of the leads who do not choose to book with you?
• Do you have a way to track all of the leads who are entering your system and what their progress is?
• Do you have the capacity yourself or amongst your team to onboard any leads that turn into clients?

This is just a short list of considerations before beginning to look deeper into the details of each of the systems required to nurture your new leads effectively.

Can You Retain Them?

While a handful of new leads is exciting, it’s even more exciting when they become paying customers. It’s easy to get addicted to the dopamine hit of making a new sale (numerous times!), but it’s equally as easy to have those new customers get lost in the mix and forgotten about. Getting new clients is valuable, but it’s even more valuable to keep those clients for as long as possible.

If clients are exiting your system because your services aren’t up to par, you have a bigger problem at hand. The cost of acquiring that lead becomes even more expensive, as you’ll now have to go out and find a replacement client to replace that revenue.

Having a projected pathway for your clients to progress through is an important retention tool you can implement. Having checkpoints along the way where your team checks in with each client, reviews their progress, and keeps tabs on important milestones are just small touches you can add to your customer’s experience. These small touchpoints can increase the time they spend buying your services. Building a Client Journey is only one tool we use with our PDBM clients to work on more effective retention within their small business.

Ads are a great tool. They’re a necessary part of the funnel, but they’re not the only branch that should be relied on. You can get equally effective leads coming in through your organic marketing efforts, and referrals. If you do choose to use ads as one of your marketing funnels, ensure that you have the right supportive systems in place, you and your team have the bandwidth to service these new leads, and you have retention systems in place to get the most ROI out of your digital ad investments.

If you’d like to learn how our team can help you build digital ads into your marketing funnel, book a call here.