Getting potential customers in and through your sales funnel is crucial to succeed in today’s business environment. Lead generation tactics allow you to capture the information of interested members within your targeted audience, while nurturing techniques guides those leads through the sales funnel and nudges them toward becoming customers.
To inexperienced marketers, both of those processes may seem to complicated to be realistic. But fortunately, a variety of tools and software can help you achieve both goals and optimize your strategy. So without further ado, here are 9 website tools that will help you drive conversions, organized in 3 sections: content marketing, lead capturing, and lead nurturing.
Content Marketing Tools
Content marketing plays a crucial part in the inbound marketing philosophy: by generating valuable and relevant content on your website, you invite users to visit your site and subscribe to become lead. That content can help your SEO, or be the basis of promotions via social media and other digital methods. Here are three tools to help you generate content:
1. HubSpot
Industry leader HubSpot offers an all-in-one inbound marketing suite, aiming to be your company’s one-stop shop for content marketing along with lead capturing and nurturing. But for the purposes of this post, we will focus on its content marketing features, which are among the best in the industry.
HubSpot’s blogging system integrates seamlessly into your website, allowing you to create regular, high-quality content without an ounce of developer know-how. It even comes with a dynamic SEO checklist that enables marketers to ensure their individual posts are optimized for specific keywords. Meanwhile, a social media scheduling and monitoring tool helps you promote your blog posts and remain in the conversation about your brand and industry.
2. Marketo
A direct competitor of HubSpot, the Marketo marketing automation software offers many similar features. The software is more customizable, enabling you to adjust it to your unique industry and business need. That ability, however, comes with a need for knowledge: unlike HubSpot, you will need to have a member on your team with at least some IT knowledge to get the most out of the software.
Crucially, Marketo does not offer the same blogging capabilities as HubSpot. It does, however, go a step further than its competitor in integrating social media into your campaign with in-depth scheduling, monitoring, and analytics tools. If you already have a company blog and are looking for ways to integrate it into your content marketing strategy, this could be your software.
3. ClearVoice
If you need guidance in strategically setting up your content marketing strategy, ClearVoice could be the tool for you. Through its workflows and intelligence gathering tools, you can both generate regular fresh content ideas for your business, and plan out the creation and distribution of those ideas.
ClearVoice does not give you the platform necessary to publish your content. It does, however, integrate with popular content management systems like WordPress to help ease the transition. You can even hire copywriters and other content creators through the platform, and measure the success of your efforts in its analytics system.
Lead Capturing Tools
Content marketing gets visitors to your website. But what happens when they get there? Lead capturing tools enable you to grab the most interested portion of your audience for future nurturing efforts. These three tools can help you get those leads.
4. LeadIn
Powered by HubSpot, LeadIn is a free tool that helps you generate leads via dynamic popup capture forms. These leads then enter the LeadIn database, where you can analyze how they are interacting with your website and discover conversion trends as well as traffic sources.
The tool’s lead capture forms are available both as a standalone app, and as a plugin if your website runs on WordPress. Integration with lead nurturing tools like MailChimp and ConstantContact (more on those below) ensures that as soon as contacts enter your database, you can begin to follow up.
5. Gravity Forms
Speaking of WordPress: the formerly exclusive content management system is becoming an increasingly powerful website infrastructure, with more and more businesses using it as the backbone of their entire site. If your website is powered by WordPress, you may want to check out Gravity Forms.
While LeadIn thrives with short, pop up capturing forms, Gravity Forms shows its power in more complex solution. Users can create multi-step forms to increase conversion rates, contest forms that limit entry, conditional logic to keep forms short, and even order forms that include pricing options. All of these are specifically designed to optimize your lead conversion rates on a WordPress site.
6. Zuant
Of course, depending on your industry, not all of your lead capturing efforts may occur online. If you supplement your digital efforts with in-person visits at conferences or trade shows, you will need a lead generation tool that does not depend on users opening up your website. Zuant aims to accomplish that.
This app, designed exclusively for iOS, lets its users create lead capturing forms that are available online as well as offline. As soon as your device is connected to the internet, all entered leads will sync with the cloud-based database to begin the nurturing process. Zuant integrates with Salesforce and Eloqua to help marketers keep the communication going after the lead initially enters the database.
Lead Nurturing Tools
Capturing your leads means you now have a database full of contacts who have expressed their interest in your business. Now, it’s time to begin nudging them toward becoming customers! As we mentioned above, lead nurturing should be a crucial part of your inbound marketing efforts. And with the below three tools, you can accomplish just that.
7. MailChimp
In many ways, MailChimp pursues a similar strategy to HubSpot: the email service aims to appeal to marketers without a developer background, enabling them to create, schedule, send, and analyze emails with simple drag-and-drop mechanisms.
Many businesses use MailChimp for regular email newsletters, but the platform’s capabilities reach further. Marketers can create pre-built or customized workflows to create a ‘drip’ nurturing campaign of regular emails, designed to move leads through the funnel and nudge them toward becoming customers. You can also segment your leads and personalize your emails based on contact attributes to ensure your contacts receive only relevant messages
8. ConstantContact
Like MailChimp, ConstantContact is an email marketing platform that integrates with many of the lead capturing tools we mentioned above. Both services are similar, with MailChimp winning points in its intuitive creation and reporting structure while ConstantContact offers better customer service.
Whether you prefer MailChimp or ConstantContact ultimately depends on your individual business needs. Marketers across industries seem split on the issue, but both services receive high grades in usability, functionality, and effectiveness. Both will help you generate effective nurturing campaigns that maximize your customer conversions.
9. AWeber
Often lost in the battle between MailChimp and ConstantContact is AWeber, an email automation solution that just won’t go away. And we mean that in the best possible way: its minimalistic interface allows you to focus on what matters most, creating beautiful, automated emails for your leads.
Among AWeber’s greatest strengths is its delivery rate: more than 99% of your emails will reach their destination, which consistently leads or is among the top of the email marketing industry. But the service is not as novice-friendly as its competitors, meaning you will need some knowledge of email marketing to succeed.
Each of these tools can play a crucial part in maximizing your conversions from visitor to lead and lead to customer. But of course, getting the right tools is only half the battle; to truly optimize your inbound marketing efforts, what you put into them – from high-quality blog posts to engaging emails – matters at least as much.
So if you need help in that department, contact us! We’d love to help you optimize your inbound marketing for conversion and get you started in using the right tools, the right way.
