Far too many companies invest heavily in creating a honey-trap – with fancy websites, lead magnets, compelling visual or written content – and far too little into converting visitors into loyal, paying clients.
Insight & Segmentation
Conversion starts with an understanding and segmenting your audience, their behaviour, demographics, and the market you are operating in and the common issues, pain points and challenges faced by companies in this space.
Engage and offer value
Once you have established the segments you will be targeting, create quality content (posts, articles, ebooks, interactive or visual content) to build trust, establish yourself as a credible authority within your industry and nurture a relationship with them.
Ensure your on-page SEO is optimised and keep up to date with changes in Google’s ranking algorithm and changes to the common web browsers – there are many tools that will check SEO site elements and identify any weak points e.g., page header, alt tags etc.
Collect contact information
Next, create a user-friendly landing page – many landing builders or hosts offer a range of tracking options so you can test the effectiveness of any elements on the page and pinpoint areas that require work. Consider using and adapting pre-made templates that are build on best design and user experience practices – the landing page and, in particular, the form they fill out to subscribe, access gated content etc., is absolutely crucial as it will make or break the conversion process – an overly complex or confusing form or CTA will kill the process flat.
Use social media to both publish content and drive traffic to your landing pages. This will create awareness and directly engage with potential buyers and partners. Building a network of qualified prospects on LinkedIn then leveraging this network to push out content and create interest in your solution. Contact data can be scraped from LinkedIn and used across other channels in marketing drives e.g., email outreach or Facebook or retargeting campaigns.
Dealing with leads
It is important to implement a way to segregate leads by conducting research on their intention, interactions with your website and company, recent sales activities – this makes best use of your sales team’s time so they can focus on those most likely to buy.
Best practices include lead scoring/weighting to determine the value and priority attached to leads e.g., stage in the buyer’s journey, and an automated follow-up with leads as soon as they enter your sales funnel and ongoing contact until they become a customer.
Keeping tabs on all the inbound leads, their stage in the buyer’s journey and reminding them to take action is time consumer – automation is the key with reminders to follow-up or set up and track an automated campaign.
Timing is key and the slightest delay can make or break the deal with a prospective client. Set up a round-robin system to ensure leads are acted on fast – if one salesperson is unavailable, the lead should automatically be transferred to the next. The impact that a prompt response to inbound query has on the ultimate conversion rate to new clients cannot be overestimated. Stay on top of your pipeline and automate and calendarize as much as possible.
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