The Internet is playing a growing role in the marketing of broadband services as the low-end commercial telecom services become more of a commodity. As prices drop, business customers are taking to the Internet to find the cheapest deals. So how does an agent get a share of that low-hanging fruit?
Knowing your audience is key to any type of marketing, including Internet marketing. Knowing what businesses are searching for online and getting your site in front of that user is your ticket to easy orders. To that end, it's rare to find Fortune 1000 companies searching for MPLS prices on Google. Instead, online shoppers tend to favor simpler, cheaper product offers, such as T1 lines, DS3 lines and wireless DIA.
So how do you generate leads online? As difficult as it may appear, Internet marketing is fairly simple. With some basic training and a little bit of time, anyone can harness the power of the Internet. Whether it’s through paid advertising or organic search engine ranking, the logic is the same: attract potential customers to your site (click through), entice them to give you their contact information (conversion), and close the sale. Before this process can take place though, one must follow and understand the realities of Internet marketing.
Internet marketing is not for everyone. Internet referrals sometimes have a significantly lower close ratio and may not be worth your time to call. Many times you will spend countless hours generating quotes for clients that are only price shopping — “tire kickers” as we like to call them. To be truly successful at Internet leads, you need a “scrubbing” mechanism, such as an automated quoting engine to eliminate the time-consuming process of quoting Internet leads — not to mention weeding out consumers looking for $30 Internet access with $399 T1 quotes.
Your Web site is the front door to your business. Even with a good search engine ranking, a bad Web site will produce limited results. You will find there are multiple methods of capturing leads such as Web forms, direct e-mail addresses, phone numbers, etc. You will want to use each of these methods on your Web site in order to account for the different contact preferences of each customer.
Internet leads are time sensitive. Fast follow-up is crucial. After an instant quote is generated on your Web site, make sure it automatically populates into a CRM of some sort and program it to provide you with multiple notifications (e.g., SMS to a cell phone, e-mail to a PDA) in case you are away from the office when the lead comes in. Responding quickly is the key to increased conversion, not to mention creating a tremendous first impression, setting the tone for a great future relationship with that prospect.
After you create a method to capture and follow up with leads, the next step is to position yourself in the search engines. There are two options when it comes to online lead generation: paid advertising and organic search engine listings.
Paid Advertising. Pay-per-click advertising with search engines can be very fruitful if you know what you’re doing. Some hints for success are:
The Internet is playing a growing role in the marketing of broadband services as the low-end commercial telecom services become more of a commodity. As prices drop, business customers are taking to the Internet to find the cheapest deals. So how does an agent get a share of that low-hanging fruit? 
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