How to Find and Generate Sales Leads Using the Internet

October 29th 2005

Your best leads are on the Internet – and they’re searching for you  The latest tool for sales lead generation and search engine marketing is an optimized press release. 

The Internet is now the number one choice for news as well as for information. Just think about it – where do you go when you want to find something?  Search engine marketing is a must for sales lead generation today.

88 percent of economically active Americans are online today and 77 percent of them get their news online. Yahoo! News and Google News combined have the largest audience - even more than CNN or the BBC.

People who use the Internet daily, and go online for news, are heavily engaged in multi-channel shopping.  Even if they purchase offline they use the Net to research the company, compare features and prices and chat with other owners to get their opinions about the product and the company.

This applies to business to business buyers too. A study of industry buyers showed that on-line procurement is on the rise. Business buyers like e-business for its convenience, 24/7 availability, and reduced susceptibility to errors.

34% of business buyers surveyed said e-buying makes the key procurement steps such as order, confirm, track, and deliver, faster and more certain than before. The biggest plus for e-buying is the way it improves the efficiency of their workday, said respondents.

At the Marketing Sherpa Business to Business Lead Generation Summit in San Francisco held last month, the emphasis was firmly on Internet marketing. Many presenters made the point that the people searching online are ready to buy.

One of the best ways to reach these qualified leads is with an optimized press release. The News Engines treat your press release just like another news source and they index it like a web page. There are no journalists or editors to make changes to your text. You reach a lead who is in the right frame of mind when they read your release – after all they searched for it using a keyword relevant to the subject matter.

Future Industrial Technologies is a case in point.  Their optimized press release about their workplace safety and ergonomic training program, Backsafe TM was read by almost 150 000 people who accessed it on keywords like workplace safety, ergonomics training and worker compensation costs.

The release was #1 on Yahoo! and Google News for a couple of weeks.  It was picked up and published by many other websites and media outlets. The result?  A marked increase in very qualified leads calling them.

By Sally Falkow
Sally is a Marketing Specialist Contact Sally

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