A lot of our clients care deeply about the leads that they're generating and the quality of those leads. (We always say if it doesn't make money, it doesn't make sense.)
Having website traffic is great, but you want to keep pushing those users down the marketing funnel to become a lead and eventually become a paying customer. In this article, find out the true meaning of what a lead is, lead generation strategy, and proven methods to capture more leads.
One of the things that we get asked the most is what's the difference between a visitor and a lead? If you've got 1,900 people coming to your website. That's great. But what does that mean as far as marketing and sales? All in all website traffic is important, but it's not everything.
At LAIRE, we love seeing traffic increase, but if that increased traffic is not qualified, relevant traffic, it doesn't do your company any good.
As marketers, we want to make sure that the people who are coming to your website are people who are actually going to be interested and engaged. We want to also include conversion opportunities across your site so that those people — the relevant, interested people who really could benefit from your product or service — have a chance to convert and become actionable leads.
A lead is anybody who's interacted on your website and given your company more information about themselves. A website visitor is somebody who's come to the site but might not actually be interested in your product or services. Here is an example of how someone goes from being a visitor to a lead.
Example: Maybe on one of your blogs, a user sees a downloadable guide that interests them and gives them a little bit more information about whatever problem they're trying to solve. In exchange for getting the guide, they give you some high-level information. They may give you their name, email, and company name on a form on a landing page. After giving over this additional information about themselves, they will then be converted to a lead in your system.
At the heart of the inbound approach is relevant, educational content. Content is a useful tool to utilize to attract your ideal audience and convert them into leads. Let's look at a real-life example of how content is used to bring more leads to your site.
Example: If somebody you know has a problem, they will probably turn to Google for help. Do they have a bump on their arm? They've already probably thought through all the possibilities of what could have caused the bump. By giving them a helpful resource on a search engine about what could have caused the bump, you now have the opportunity to provide them with a solution to their problem after they've landed on your site. There are all kinds of different ways to bring people to your site, but having helpful, relevant content is a great place to start.
We like to use the term "lead generation strategy" when building websites and the website's foundation. But under the strategy umbrella, you should also be considering what your overall goal is.
When you're creating a website, you're not just creating it to be this beautiful website. You can have the most beautiful website in the world but if people don't find it, then it doesn't make any sense. So, how do you create a lead generation strategy?
At LAIRE, we've been working on a new company that has a fast product platform. When entering into these conversations, we know at a high level the things that we need to pull together to make our marketing efforts successful. These things include data, a content strategy, customer pain points, and understanding the business's unique definition of a qualified lead.
Now, let's talk about some tactical tips your team can use to produce successful lead generation campaigns.
Let's say you are a marketing automation platform. You can try and go after the keyword "marketing automation platform." But, that is an extremely highly competitive keyword. It's also very broad. So, instead of using the keyword "marketing automation platform," you may want to try and capitalize on some deeper, segmented searches like "marketing automation platform for technology" or "marketing automation platform that does X." Those keywords are what we call long-tail keywords. They typically have a lower search volume but the intent is a lot higher.
By capturing Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) that your customers have, you can create an FAQ page to answer the questions customers usually have about your product or service. This will help both your potential customers and sales team with answering all the necessary questions before starting a sales conversation.
The one major thing to consider with all of your marketing efforts is going to be that ugly B-word: budget. What is your marketing budget for the year? Are you setting aside enough money for marketing? Are you using that marketing budget to the best of your ability?
By collecting customer feedback, you can take customer pain points and fix problems as you're getting feedback. Instead of letting problems go unresolved for a long period of time, it's good to ask your customer base how you can do better as a company to enhance their experience and help you bring in more customers in the long run.
What you have to do in terms of competitive advantage is to make sure that you're taking as many of the opportunities as you can to nurture your prospects. Email is a great way to do that. If your competitor is doing email marketing automation and you're not, there's a gap that needs to be filled. With email marketing, you can send more relevant, educational content to prospects to help them decide if your products or services are a fit for them.
So, we've discussed the differences between a lead and a visitor, and we touched on the actionable ways you can create a lead generating strategy. Next, let's talk about the digital marketing metrics you should look at to determine if your lead generating campaigns are succeeding or not.
One of the worst things you could do is to set up a marketing campaign and forget it in hopes that it's performing. We can't tell you how many times we've started working with a company that has a live campaign, but they haven't tracked its performance. As a marketer, it's critical to go back and look at your campaign metrics. Here are some of the metrics you should and shouldn't look at to project campaign success.
Let's start by discussing vanity metrics and why they aren't an indicator of marketing success. Vanity metrics are metrics like impressions, page views, social media likes, and trial users.
They're nice numbers to have. And when they're increasing, it feels great! But it doesn't necessarily mean that your marketing is working because it doesn't necessarily give you anything you can tweak or change to improve upon. All in all, vanity metrics don't give you the kind of information you can act on. So, what KPIs should your team look at?
When you're trying to come up with KPIs, you really want to track KPIs that align with your SMART goals. SMART goals are goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely. You don't want to just say "Someday we want to have 100 contacts in our list." That goal isn't specific or timely. A better goal would be "We want to have 100 contacts from organic search by December."
After setting your SMART goals, it's time to decide what metrics will help you track those goals.
Here are some common metrics marketers track to capture website growth:
If you are having issues capturing leads, there are different tactics you can utilize to convert leads on your site. Whether you need to add more conversion opportunities or you need to tweak your website's messaging to hit on customer pain points, there is always room for improvement.
If you're ready to bring in more leads, download the "How to Run an Inbound Campaign" Checklist to create a growth-driven campaign that works.