Unless you’ve seriously sandbagged your forecast, an AdWords program will not deliver all the sales leads you’ll need to make it. Here’s why.
- Most Internet users do not click on ads at all. According to the comScore study released October 1, 2009, the percentage of users who click on display ads in a month has fallen to just 16%. This means that the great majority of your potential customers will never click on your ad, because they just don’t click on ads at all. They won’t click, and they won’t convert.
- The small percentage of Internet users that do click on ads are younger members of the base with lower (less than $40K) incomes. Say what you like about academic salaries, but this demographic does not correlate well with buyers of biotech lab systems.
- AdWords campaigns are suitable for relatively simple, transactional sales. Not so much for the consultative selling process and months-long sales cycles of lab systems. You can hack around this by pulling out a small element of your consultative process and remodeling it as an Internet transaction. However, the “leads” you get using this strategy are as raw and unqualified as they come.
With AdWords campaigns, it is possible to collect the names and contact information of people who 1) are of the sort that click on ads, and 2) who have some kind of interest (possibly technical, or competitive) in your product. Keep in mind that a contact record thus produced is not yet an actual sales lead and might never become one. Your sales force, if composed of good, strong closers, will recognize as noise any AdWords conversions you add directly to their database, and will not follow up on them. There’s plenty of sifting, sorting, prospecting, and nurturing yet to be done before your AdWords conversions reach the qualification level of an actual sales lead.
For help generating and developing sales leads for biotech lab systems, contact Matthew Wygant at matthew@wygant.net.
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