What do I have to do to get qualified leads to my website?
How will you go from having little to no traffic to increasing numbers of qualified leads that are ready to become customers? How do I get the kind of traffic and conversions my friends are bragging about?
Attracting a growing number of ready-to-purchase customers requires a customized strategy that is developed around the specific nuances of your industry, your brand and your buyer. Because you are competing locally and nationally for business, you must create a strategy that attracts your buyer to your website.
Buyers don’t respond to your “outbound” sales efforts the way they once did. Buyers want to find you via their search queries, referrals and recommendations. Your buyer searches fully formed questions and phrases to find their answers.
Your brand and solution needs to appear where your buyer is online. By understanding where your buyer shows up on the Internet, we can place relevant brand and solution information that attracts your buyer to click through to your website.
This is called Inbound Marketing.
Inbound marketing is the practice of using a strategic and comprehensive suite of online marketing strategies to drive your ideal buyers to you. No more competing for their attention. When you create the content that meets the needs of your buyer, right where they are, you will attract qualified buyers and keep them coming back again and again. You’ll create new leads, new customers, loyal fans and more referrals.
There are over 1 billion websites on the World Wide Web today. Your competition is growing savvier by the day. If you are going to capture the eyeballs and wallets of your prospect and buyer, you’ll have to have a few things in place.
This article provides an overview of the tools and tactics used in inbound marketing. If you don’t already understand that content is the center of everything, you’ll understand it in a minute. Here’s what we cover in this article:
An effective inbound strategy requires an effective content strategy. Your content strategy relies on multiple tactics.
There are different types of media to leverage for success – earned, owned, and paid. Knowing how to combine them effectively is critical to your lead generation success.
Your owned assets are those properties your company has created. What you create, you own. Owned assets include content you create and your social channels, such as your Facebook page or Twitter feed.
Your owned assets can include:
Earned assets are media written about your brand online. You can earn positive or negative media.
Your earned assets can include:
Paid assets are the marketing tools or opportunities you pay for. You may pay for an ad or banner on your industry’s high-traffic certification site or a high-authority website. You may leverage pay per click (PPC) ads on social channel or search engine, like Google. Search engine ads allow you to appear at the top or very bottom of a search page.
Your paid assets can include:
Your conversion-driven website is the first item you must focus on. Without a well-designed, mobile-first, responsive website – nothing else really matters.
Being in business today requires that we have a customer-centric, conversion-driven website that includes landing pages and content that speak to each buyer persona you intend to attract.
Yes, Virginia. This sounds expensive.
You will have to shift your thinking about your website. When your website is developed properly, it is an investment that generates profits. It should out-sell your best sales person – in multiples.
You may have never invested money in your online presence or online marketing. That’s about to change.
“I don’t think so,” you say? Well, if you want to attract qualified leads that will turn into customers, you are going to have invest in online marketing (aka inbound marketing).
Your competition has decided they will. Unfortunately, if you want to be a viable business in today’s market you have to step up your game.
Yes. It sorta stinks. If there is any consolation, we are all in the same boat. All of us.
The good news is, if you work with the right team, your website will not only pay for itself, over and over, it will consistently outperform your best sales person. I promise.
Online Marketing, Digital Marketing and Inbound Marketing relatively have the same meaning.
Digital marketing is the umbrella for all online marketing efforts. Online or digital marketing are the cadre of tactics used to attract your ideal buyer to your website. Online marketing methods can include:
All of these tactics and more are developed and leveraged strategically to attract and drive your prospect to your website or landing page.
Working with a company that has the skill set to quantify your opportunity, quantify the value of a customized, strategic solution applied in your unique organization and quantify the return on the investment is crucial to your company’s ability to:
Because the options and applications of online marketing are vast, your ultimate approach should be driven by strategy that has been developed using the proper data – from your website design to your marketing campaigns.
Don’t let this scare you.
There really are experts who can do this for you. We are certainly one of those experts.
And remember, data in – data out. Crap in – crap out.
The data you use to make decisions needs to be sound. That data will drive your results.
The “half-price-company” cannot provide the kind of ROI you are looking for. That’s the truth.
A qualified inbound agency that possesses the capacity to align your organization’s strategic goals to your marketing goals, budget and objectives will create exponential ROI.
You’ll want your website design, development and marketing team to be able to:
The web design company that will design and develop your website for
half the price will not create a website that will deliver measurable ROI.
Neither can they help you create sustainable new client growth.
Think about it like this, when you partner with a solid, results-driven online marketing or inbound marketing agency, the money you spend will come back to you in multiples. When you do it yourself – assuming inbound marketing is not where your revenue generating skill-set is – you will lose the value of your time ($XXX what you are capable of generating when you are doing what your revenue generating skill set is) plus the value of the clients you would have gotten had you partnered with a qualified agency.
As simple as it may look, trust us – it isn’t. Performing open heart surgery may seem like a piece of cake when watching Grey’s Anatomy – but we all know that’s not the case. To be an expert you have to learn, train, try, fail, try again. Find your sweet spot and repeat it until you’ve mastered it. Inbound marketing is hugely time intensive.
Don’t waste your time. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to substantially increase your revenue and profits.
One more thought… When we suggest you “hire a professional,” we mean certified inbound marketing professionals. Your neighbor’s son who’s good at gaming isn’t one. Also, leave out those suspicious companies with unrealistically low prices promising you the No. 1 place on Google SERPs.
An incorrect or insufficiently developed buyer persona will take your content create and marketing down the wrong path. Your marketing efforts will be futile.
If you have an in-house marketing person (or you are going to try to get this going on your own), we’ve provided our professional Buyer Persona template and a workbook. Our tool will help you see exactly what you need to know about each buyer persona.
We’ve published more than a dozen step-by-step articles that address every single detail of the Buyer Persona. Go to our blog and in the search box in the right sidebar, type in “Buyer Persona” to see them all.
While your goal is to generate more traffic and qualified leads, you also want to convert visitors to buyers. Your website must look and feel attractive. It has be intuitive to the user.
Not only is your website the first impression for most of your customers, peers, competition – everyone – it is the hub of all your marketing – online and traditional. Your website’s function is more complex than it ever has been. So, how do you know if you need a website? How do you make it pay for itself – over and over? We spell it out right here.
Now, let’s get your website some traffic.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Linkedin, SnapChat… the number of social networks is huge. It is impossible – and not even appropriate – to run all these accounts.
It is important to define which social networks are most important in terms of relevant to your buyer persona.
For example, if you own a gallery, Instagram is certainly a better option for you than Twitter.
Once you’ve identified the best channels for your targeted persona, focus your efforts on those social networks.
Use social media to generate traffic to your site and also to communicate with potential client. Use it to build relationships with your followers. One of the biggest advantages of social media is the ability to receive feedback from (potential) buyers easily, quickly and cheaply. Too many entrepreneurs and small businesses tend are unaware of this opportunity.
The number of platforms available for your ads is huge. An inbound marketing agency will help you choose the best option according to your buyer person.
Most people choose Google, Bing, Facebook, and Instagram ads since these are the platforms offering a large number of filters to narrow your ad for your target group. Remain open to some alternative methods of ad placement, especially if your company has more of a local clientele and you’re mostly interested in your local market.
In this exact moment, there are millions of different companies, sellers, and entrepreneurs on the Internet who are making all sorts of promises in their ads; as a result, public trust is significantly diminished and we are becoming blind to these ads.
It doesn’t matter if you have a good-looking site, social media accounts or paid advertisements that attract people to your website, the most important thing is to be trustworthy. You must go the extra mile to build trust.
PR articles help build trust. When someone else writes about your brand in a positive way, trust is built. It is inherited from the third party who is reporting about or endorsing your brand.
On one hand, PR articles have promotional character; they can even generate some visits to your site, but even more importantly, they can help raise confidence in your brand and your solution.
Collaborate with well-known and trusted websites from your niche and in agreement with them (this may be free of charge or it could involve a financial compensation) publish an article about your company and solution on their website.
When a potential customer Googles your credibility, they will find those articles. The PR articles will inspire trust and it will influence their conversion from a visitor to lead to a customer.
Here are some email marketing tips that will improve your results:
This is one of the most important cornerstones in inbound marketing. You can create new content so that you have highly-relevant, irresistible content for every phase of the journey and you can refresh and repurpose older content. Repurposed content can be published in many different formats and it is a quick way to get power-content published.
Be sure to provide high-quality content in exchange for the visitor’s name and email address. The less information you request, the higher your conversion rates will be. When the content is for leads that are in the middle or further down the funnel and the higher the impact value of the content, the more information you can request in exchange for the download.
Some of the most popular forms of content for downloads are:
If you’re offering a web service or an app, offer them free trials. Create offers that offer low-barrier to entry so your prospect can experience your service, product or solution.
Offers have a strong psychological effect on your lead, especially when it comes to building a relationship between you and your potential customers.
These are the basic tools and tactics used to create high-impact, high-results lead generation campaigns.
Are you getting the highest value and highest volume of qualified visitors to your website?
Are your inbound campaigns converting the maximum number of new customers?
If not, perhaps it is time to re-evaluate and revamp your strategy.