Lead Generation is About Location, Location, Location

Much like real estate, making money and getting results on the Internet is all about location, location, location. Where your web forms and offers are located is a significant determinate of not only submit rate, but also sales conversion.

Conversion

• Awareness: Is the consumer aware they are entering into a buying process?
• Intent: Is the consumer really considering a purchase?
• Match: Is the consumer a match for my product or service?

Web Site

Many marketers will build the foundation of their lead generation platform around one or more web sites . This generally implies a domain name and rich content focused on topics relevant to the consumers you want to sell to.

The advantage in this strategy is you are building a deep and trusted relationship with the consumer. A relationship that often results in multiple transactions.

Web Page

Other lead generation relies more on the immediacy and flexibility of acquiring premium location(s).

This offers advantages for niche or cyclical lead generation. Buying strategic placement on popular web sites can often allow you to react to market events and news that effect your product. For example, gaining placement on Wall Street Journal Online when the Federal Reserve announces rate changes or on Yahoo!Finance as new FHA Secure legislation is passed.

However, most of these techniques are used to simply to generate high lead volumes sustained by buying placement within established consumer destination sites like MSN, Yahoo!, and major online news venues.

Page Position

Once you have established one or more locations it becomes about position. It is well documented that Internet consumers do not read or linearly follow a page. They skip and browse based on reinforced patterns and attractors.

Eye-focus heat maps are a typical method of assessing the premium page position on any web page. These heat maps track and record a user's eye location and time focused on a location. Although this only one example, it is a very typical pattern. Consumers are conditioned to expect the most important information in the upper left-hand corner, scan for detail down and left to right, and seek potential special interest items in the right sidebar.

Consequently, you will see most publishers and advertisers set up their lead generation efforts to capitalize on this predictable behavior.

Intent from location

As we discussed location, most of the conversation was about gaining consumers' attention. This attention is a significant factor to lead generators' volume, but not necessarily to your conversion. Gaging consumer intent is far more useful in buying the right leads and creating an effective sales process to convert them.

This intent can largely be surmised from the content and the depth of navigation.

Context

The content and copy on a page is largely what attracts a consumer to a particular location. Consequently, if you are looking for professionals seeking higher education opportunities then it follows you want your lead to have been generated from a page about finding a college or new career.

Context can also be valuable in filtering your leads to more closely match programs you offer. If you have just been approved as a FHA lender you would rather get a lead from the FHA website/page, like the one on the right, than a website that attracts general subprime, refinance consumers.

Likewise, a borrower that is generated on a specific research site like bankrate.com or a vertical real estate search engine like zillow.com are more likely to have done their research and are now approaching a buying decision.

Depth

Much like context, the depth of the consumers visit can give you clues to the consumer's intent to buy. Leads generated from a banner on the front page of MSN or Yahoo! are much less likely to be immediate buyers or borrowers compared to ones generated within the Finance or Mortgage section of the same website.

The same level of depth can somewhat be achieved by filtering these high-level page location submits (i.e., front page of Yahoo!) through a segmentation banner. Unfortunately, each click endangers the final submittal and each step that requests more information, without adding value, can be frustrating to the consumer. This is why content relevant destination web sites like lendingtree.com or bankrate.com often yield much more productive leads.