Lead generation in Newcastle, NSW: a steady flow of enquiries.

It is everything turning somebody interested into somebody who has contacted you. It covers the channels bringing people in, and the path between arriving and enquiring.

Most people use it as another word for advertising, and that is half of it. The other half is the path from somebody landing on a website to somebody actually getting in touch, which is where most of the losses happen.

What it covers

• The channels that bring people in.

  Search, advertising, social, referrals, the Google listing. Each has its own page here and its own economics behind it.

• The destination those people land on.

  What somebody actually sees when they arrive, and whether any of it asks them for anything at all.

• The ask the page actually makes.

  The form, the phone number, and how much a business demands before somebody is allowed to talk to it.

• What happens after somebody asks.

  How fast anybody answers, and what happens to the ones who never got an answer back at all.

Businesses spend nearly all of their attention on the first item, and most of the money leaks out of the last two without anybody noticing.

Somebody making an enquiry has usually contacted more than one business. The one that gets the job is often the one that came back first.

Whether paid search is worth it on a small ad budget comes down to what one job is worth, which is arithmetic that can be done before anything is set up.

Watch how somebody actually hires a service. They open the map, they ring two or three, and they book with whoever answered or called back while it was still on their mind.

That is not a criticism of anybody's effort. It is a description of a business with no free hands between eight and five, which describes most businesses busy enough to be worth ringing.

It is also why an automatic reply to a missed call or a form is usually the cheapest improvement available. It does not have to answer the question, it only has to hold the place until somebody can.

A form that goes nowhere, a number nobody answers, an ask demanding too much, and the enquiries nobody ever followed up. All four are free to fix and all four are common.

Before anything gets spent on more traffic, these are worth checking. Each one of them makes every channel look worse than it actually is.

Where the enquiries go

• The form quietly goes nowhere at all.

  Rebuilt at some point, never tested afterwards, and silently failing. It is the most common fault of all on a small business website.

• Nobody ever answers the phone.

  And there is no text back either, so the caller is gone without leaving any trace that they rang.

• The ask demands far too much.

  Six fields and a preferred contact time, put in front of somebody who only wanted a rough price.

• Nothing ever follows any of it up.

  A quote sent and never chased is pricing work already done and then abandoned halfway through.

Every one of those is an afternoon of work, and the whole list runs on time rather than a media budget. That is exactly why they come before any spending.

Bought leads are usually sold to several businesses at once, so you are paying to be one of four people ringing the same person. Buying lists of strangers is a different thing again, and there are rules about it.

Lead sellers are a real part of some trades and it is worth being clear about what is being bought. In most cases the same enquiry goes to several businesses, which makes speed the whole game.

It also makes the price per job considerably higher than the price per lead suggests. It is worth knowing which kind you are buying before the money goes out.

Buying a list of contacts and messaging them is a different thing entirely, and it is governed by law. The ACMA spam rules set out what consent means and what a message has to carry, and the penalties are real.

No lists get bought or sent to here, which is worth saying plainly on a page carrying this title.

Test the form first, then count what arrives and where it came from. Shorten the ask, answer faster, chase the quotes, and only then buy any traffic.

Every step before the last one costs time rather than money, which is why they come first.

1. Send an enquiry through your own form

From a phone, with a real address behind it. Then the business's own number gets rung, to see what happens when nobody picks up.

2. Count what arrives, and where it came from

A single column on a spreadsheet is enough to start. Without it, no decision about channels can be made on anything except a feeling.

3. Shorten the ask

A name, a number, and what the job is. Everything else can be asked on the phone when somebody rings them back.

4. The answering gets faster

A text back within a minute on a missed call or a form. It does not have to answer the question, it has to hold the place.

5. Chase the quotes

Two polite follow ups on work already priced. This is the single most commonly skipped job in a small business.

6. Then the traffic gets bought

Once the path works, every channel returns more than it did, and it becomes possible to tell which one returns what.

The leaks are all afternoon jobs. The counting takes a month before it says anything useful, and the channels themselves run on their own timelines afterwards.

The order it happens in

• First the path is tested and fixed.

  Form, phone, and the length of the ask. None of it needs a budget, and all of it makes the rest worth more.

• Then the counting starts running.

  It records where each enquiry came from. It takes a month before it says anything, and it never stops being useful.

• Then the channels themselves get chosen.

  With real numbers on the table instead of an argument about which one of them works.

The order comes before the speed. Spending on traffic before the path works is the most expensive sequence available, and it is the usual one.

Ask what they would fix before spending anything, who owns the enquiries and the accounts, what is being counted, and whether any leads are bought. The first answer tells you most of it.

These are worth asking of any agency, including this one, so the answers given here are underneath each question.

• What would you fix before spending anything?

  There is nearly always something to fix. An answer starting with a media budget has skipped the cheap half entirely.

• Who ends up owning the enquiries?

  The business does, arriving in its own accounts. Leads held inside an agency's system leave when the agency does.

• What is being counted, exactly?

  Enquiries by source, and what happened to each of them afterwards. Clicks and impressions only describe traffic.

• Are any of these leads bought?

  Not one of them is bought here. Where any are, it is worth knowing how many businesses each one was sold to.

A business already getting more enquiries than it can answer does not have a lead generation problem. That is worth saying plainly rather than selling into it.