We know you've been waiting for it...here's story time episode 2! Kim talks about a client who's leads have dropped by half in a month. He talks about how to find the core issue, what we would suggest and his final thoughts.
Hey guys. So I’ve got another one for you. So a few days ago, another client of ours, another friend, slash, client, let’s call her, April. April comes to us and we’re grabbing a coffee to catch up anyway. And you know when someone’s in a bit of panic, and you can start to see their kind of pupils dilate and you know they’re kind of flushed? April had that look about her, so I knew something was wrong. And we got talking and the businesses leads had essentially halved online and offline, they had halved. I think we were 10 days into the month and April was like, can you do anything, can you have a look into this? Can you see what the heck is going on? And obviously because leads had just kind of halved all the sales people talking to the CEO. They’re all putting the kind of, so much pressure onto my mate and yeah she was needing to come up with some answers pretty quickly.
Okay, so let’s outline the core issue here. Obviously leads have halved, right, that is an issue but we need to work the specifics if we’re gonna track down the reasons about, possible reasons about why that happened. Okay so number one it happened over a relatively short period of time. So two or three days you can suddenly see the leads from the website just kind of dropping off. The second thing is that it is across all channels, it’s across the business, that’s how the boss picked it up, so quickly. So short time frame, and across the business, online and offline. So this kind of narrows down our search.
All right so what are we gonna do? What could I, what can I do, what am I doing to help April out? So the first thing that we will do is obviously, we would check Ad words, or Google Ads. We will check to see if there have been any changes made, that could drastically affect the paid media. I don’t personally think this is the case, but for sanitary reasons, just kind of going through and making sure that our campaigns are kind of, there are no big changes, and there were none. There were no changes in the big history, that’s the first thing. So we’ll check out the primary channel that we’re responsible for. The second thing we’ll do is actually check the backlog of changes to the website. Sometimes changes have made the website marketing doesn’t know about it. Maybe an update’s been applied and it’s broken a form or something like that, all right? And yeah, nothing seemed to be going on there either, I had a chat with the developers. So first check your paid meter channels for any big changes. Second checking the website for any changes. The third thing we’ll look at, we’ll look at holistic factors. And for this example, for April I think this is where really where we’ll be focusing most of our time. And things that we’ll look at will be seasonality. Did the same thing happened last year, right? We’ll look at across all the online channels. Did it happen at the same rate across all the online channels? Was it limited to search, paid and organic search channels? All right, that’s another thing we’ll look at. We will look at, paid media budgets and budgets halved. You know for any activity. Online and offline marketing activity that can have a big impact on leads. And finally we will check out the competition, which in this case I think was really the cause of it. We found out that essentially one of April’s competitors had an offer out at that point in time, that was very very similar to the Lehman and they were offering at something like 60% of the price or something ridiculous like that. And yeah yeah so those are what we would go through every time we see a lead drop or actually a lead increase. We will look at those things.
Yeah so unfortunately in this case we did figure out it was the competition. There wasn’t an easy thing that we could do to kind of fix this problem. Funnily enough, now what’s happened is the competitor has stopped that, and then leads have kind of regained their normal momentum. But I think things that we could do, something that we could do is perhaps we look at how we could put out a product or a service on a new landing page, or a new part of the website that is perhaps competitive with that offer. We could of done something like that. Yeah it’s a tough one. Unfortunately we don’t always have the solutions, but you know maybe some of you out there, will have some ideas. Let us know in the comments below. Thanks guys.
