You created the offer. You built the site. You bought the ads. There’s just one problem: The phone’s not ringing.

All those efforts are wasted. All that creativity, time and expense. In return, you’ve got nothing to show for it. The marketing campaign is a failure. So frustrating.

However, let me suggest an alternative reality with the same circumstances:

You create the offer, build the site, buy the ads and the phone doesn’t ring. But…you check your Google Analytics. You learn a few things. Pageviews are up 40 percent. The ads are driving the traffic to site. Also, a lot of people are getting to the offer page.

Question: Is the marketing campaign a failure? Let me ruin this with the correct answer: no.

I know what it’s like to be in a company that can’t afford to make many errors with a marketing budget, and I understand the need to make sales happen. Marketing efforts should lead to sales. But not making an instant one is not a marketing failure.

If you owned a car dealership, ran ads and tons of people showed up on your lot, I doubt you would view that as a marketing failure. Or if you invited people to an event to demo a new product and hundreds of people tried it out, you would not walk away bemoaning the inefficiencies of marketing.

Pageviews are sales leads. There is a human on the other side of that click, and your ability to engage that person in a meaningful way is the full measure the success of your marketing efforts. They may not pick up the phone and call, but they did not wonder onto your site without some degree of interest (even if that initial interest is boredom).

Here are four ways to make the most of pageviews (or any sales leads for that matter):

1. Have meaningful content. Novel, I know. Have something worth reading or learning that has value in and of itself. If you need ideas on what that content should be listen to the customers as they call in. What are their questions? What is it you wish they understood? Write about it. Make videos about it. Create and share.
2. Stop asking for marriage. Maybe there is a woman out there to whom a proposal was made on the first date and she accepted. Maybe. More likely there are drinks, dinners and picnics before marriage, though. So stop proposing to your prospect when they just landed on a page. It’s annoying and desperate and all-around no good. Love at first sight? Sure. But love at first site visit? Not so much. Love them first and they will love you back.
3. Create something of value for your visitors. An email newsletter is a nice start. But I’m certain there is a white paper or manifesto or something of value that you can offer in return for their information.
4. Get to know more about the people interested in you. Why do they like what you say? What do they like? What do they want to see more on the site or from you? Offer a nonthreatening way to learn more about your following. Ask them questions in blogs, email, social media, etc. Most are not used to someone listening to them, so it starts with genuinely giving a damn and then asking.

For extra credit, read this post on “marketing to the maybes” by my good friend Tom Ruwitch, the brain behind MarketVolt.