© 2024 DJRW LTD trading as The Lead Source
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Are you a Professional or Studio Photographer generating lots of leads and sending them all to your CRM system? If your conversion rate is good, let’s say around 20%, then you’re filling your precious system with 80% bad leads! In this article we’re going to go over why separating good and bad leads is good marketing practice and bring you a solution to better manage your leads before sending them to your system as bookings.
This might come with some controversy but we’re only speaking from experience and the reactions of our clients when they start using our solutions. There are some really good CRM systems out there specially developed for photographers and we’d absolutely recommend checking them out. The trouble is, we’ve seen lots of these systems get clogged up by rubbish leads that were never going to convert, and they just sit there getting in the way. Here’s why we suggest managing your leads outside of your main CRM system.
Some of our clients are achieving over 100 leads every week or per campaign. That’s a lot of leads to manage. We recommend a visual way to manage your leads and we’ll get onto that in a bit.
Imagine you get 100 leads in a week and you know you convert 20% into bookings. If you’re like our clients, that could generate you £30,000 in business! But that’s also 80 leads who didn’t convert, sitting in your system getting in the way.
By managing your leads outside of your system you can choose to send only bookings or your strongest leads into your CRM.
Your system already sounds more organised right?
Most photography CRMs do allow you to make custom workflows for both new leads and for when someone has booked. Some aren’t as visual as others and that’s why we’re going to be making our suggestion further down this article.
Rather than just categorising a lead it would be much better to have a system that allows you to track where they are in your workflow, monitor how and when they were contacted, and leave notes about the quality of the lead, but also in a system that you can customise to exactly how you like to work.
Your current CRM might allow you to do this but often you have to go into each lead one at a time. Our method lists all the leads within a campaign, so you can manage them on one screen, and allows you to make very quick changes and notes.
Another reason to separate your leads from your CRM is to identify your ideal customer profile or target audience. By filling your CRM with only good leads and bookings you’ll be able to build a stronger profile and from this produce marketing materials that better suit your perfect clients.
Similar to understanding your target audience, by collecting the data of your strong leads and bookings you’ll be able to produce a list of individuals that fit your ideal customer profile. With this list, you can build stronger lookalike audiences when working on more advanced Facebook Ad campaigns, meaning your ads can be delivered to people more likely to become good leads.
Much like lookalike audiences, by separating your good and bad leads you’ll be able to build a list of dedicated customers, people who love what you do and are willing to pay for it.
Whilst there are things you can do in terms of email marketing with bad leads, it can be more effective to continue marketing to your previous clients. These people won’t mind that you’re still contacting them and, so long as they’re happy customers, they’re much more likely to send referrals to you – and referrals are always the strongest leads!
If you’re running Facebook Ads and using Lead Forms you’ll probably notice that just because someone has submitted your form, doesn’t mean they’re going to book. There are plenty of options out there but our favourite place to send leads is into a Monday.com* system, you’ll need to using an integration platform such as Zapier to do this.
A very basic explanation of Monday.com is an advanced and very flexible Excel spreadsheet. They describe themselves as a ‘Work OS’ meaning their system can help with all kinds of processes within a business, including lead management.
What makes Monday.com even more powerful is its capability to integrate with other platforms and automate tasks. We won’t go into that in this article.
Imagine a spreadsheet where each row counts for a new lead. Your columns include what you’d expect, name, email, phone number, etc. In addition to that you can have columns that will help you identify someone’s stage in your workflow. For example, you can mark them as ‘Booked,’ ‘No Booking, ‘Call back,’ ‘Send chase email,’ and anything else that you think will help you track the progress of a lead becoming a booking.
Hopefully, we’ve done some kind of justice to explain it but just in case we completely butchered it, the best way to understand is to watch the video at the bottom of this post.
Unfortunately, you can’t just connect Facebook to Monday. Instead, you’ll need to use a third-party integration software such as Zapier, you’ll find it easily with a quick Google search.
Zapier makes it easy to set up the connection.
Please note that Facebook Leads Ads connection in Zapier requires a premium account.
We’ve created a very short introduction to Monday.com and a simple lead management layout. This is just a basic example, you’ll be able to customise your Monday.com boards to however you like to work.
If Monday.com looks like something you could work with click the button below and take a look!
If you’re keen to try Monday the button is above our video. When you click the link you’ll be given the chance to tick some boxes, these are optional, however, the screenshot below shows you which ones you could begin with.
It’s FREE to get started so why not!
*Some links on this page are affiliate links and we may be paid a small commission if you sign up for their services. Please note, we absolutely love Monday.com and that is why we recommend it.
© 2024 DJRW LTD trading as The Lead Source
