In today’s competitive environment, many small businesses are looking for ways to generate new leads. Ezine advertising is often overlooked as a simple way to reach your target audience.
All you need is a little bit of work and a small budget and new leads can be yours. The strategy is quite simple. Find ezines that your customers are receiving and then place an ad in the content directing readers to your website. Voila, new leads.
Indentify Popular Ezines Your Customers Read.
Your first step is to identify ezines that your prospects and customers are reading. You might already know of some and may be on their list already, but if not, you might have to do a bit of legwork to find some candidates.
Do some Google searches popular industry search terms combined with the word ezine and see what you come up with. Send an email to some of your key clients and ask who they follow as thought leaders in your industry. You could send an email to your list and ask outright or you might run a survey.
Evaluate Rates and Readership.
Once you have your ezine candidates you need to find out if they could work for you. You’ll need to read a few issues and see if your ad would fit into their content.
Watch for competitors and see if they are advertising. You’ll see competitors that might be long term advertisers. That’s a clue that the ezine advertising might be working for them.
Contact the ezine and find out how large their current list is. Find out their rates for single issue mailings, multiple issue discounts and which positions command the highest rates. Make sure they know their open and clickthrough rates and are willing to share them with you.
Plan A Lead Generation Campaign For Your Ads.
Plan your campaign with an eye to get readers out of the ezine in their inbox and onto a landing page. You’ll have the best success if you treat this like running a Pay Per Click or Banner campaign. Your first goal is to get your ad noticed. That comes from a good ad headline.
Your next step is to give the reader to click from your ad to your website. That comes from a good offer. Once your new visitor clicks from your ad to your site you should have a good reason for them to leave an email address or submit a lead form.
Then let your sales process do it’s thing to convert this new stranger to a friend and this new friend to a customer.
Three simple steps and now you have a new lead source. And who doesn’t want more leads?
