One of the most important tasks that a business needs to master is the constant generation of leads that potentially turn into sales. Not only since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, this has been a discipline that was heavily pushed by online marketing. I have been working in this industry since 2008, and even before that, I was curious about everything that had to do with the internet.
I still remember the day, when my father had gotten us an ISDN modem which made strange sounds, when it connected to the internet. It took ages to load one webpage, you could literally count all the pixels while the page was rendered in the browser, probably Netscape Communicator back in the 90s.
First steps with HTML in 1998
I was curious about this new medium and wanted to find out more about how it worked. Luckily, I was able to attend an HTML course after regular school lessons and learned more about Tim Berners-Lee and his world wide web. At this time, the hosting expenses were too expensive, so we had to run our scripts on a local computer – I was fascinated.
But still, it took me about 8 more years, until I had started with blogging and publishing content. I had bought some online courses before about how to build an internet business but again, I basically had no money to run ads in order to get traffic to my homepage-builder website that looked really crappy and had nothing to offer anyway.
First online marketing agency in 2008
Finally, ten years after my first steps with HTML, I got an e-mail by an online marketing agency in Munich, my home-city in Bavaria, Germany. They had found one of my blogs that I had started with my father and my brother, it was a travel blog about the Philippines. I learned a lot about search engine optimization (SEO), content writing, search engine advertising (SEA), and related topics.
Our travel blog about the Philippines eventually turned into two specialized tour companies, exceeding a 5 million PHP turnover in some months, and they were dynamically growing companies with a great team. Until Covd-19 hit.
Anyway, the discipline that we were mastering was lead generation. We had created a system which was giving us the opportunity to scale leads and sales. Out of nowhere, we were able to create business where there was none. It was a combination of content marketing (we were writing about our passion which was traveling the Philippines), online marketing (SEO and SEA strategies combined with some Facebook action), then tweaking the whole system to get the conversion rates right, keep clients more than happy, grow the team, and revenues.
Leading agency for lead generation
Nowadays, my team and I are striving to build one of the leading online marketing agencies in the Philippines, probably even in the whole SEA region, and further. We will try to apply the best SEO and SEA strategies to our partners, and our own projects of course, and only during the last days I was clearer about what it really is about: lead generation to help businesses receive enough leads to further grow.
Leslie, who recently wrote about one of my favourite books the Little Prince, just published a great article on SEO trends 2021. You should definitely have a read of it, in case you are interested in lead generation via online marketing.