Are you responsible for your company’s digital marketing efforts?
Maybe you own your own business and, like all busy entrepreneurs or marketing managers, you just can’t find the time to crank out social media posts, blog content, or even consider running an SEO campaign on your own.
We like to call this “wearing too many hats” or just plain swamped. The great news is there’s help out there.
As a business owner, marketing director at a digital agency, or an intern interested in learning about digital marketing, you know the importance of raising traffic to your website. It seems simple – increased traffic to your site should equate to the phone ringing off the hook and leads overflowing your inbox, right? Not necessarily. Your website may have great traffic volume, but if your visitors are not converting into leads, there’s room for improvement. Where do you start? Follow these tips and you’ll be on your way to transforming your website into an inbound lead generation machine.
Identify your Target Audience
Identifying your target audience the first step in formulating a lead generation strategy for your website. If you have a strong understanding of your target audience(s), where they get their information, what resonates with their way of thinking, and what pain-points they are hoping to resolve, you will be better ablt to target these individuals and be active where they seek solutions most frequently. But where can you go to find this information? If you’re a marketing director, get in touch with your sales team. They should have a pulse on your customer base and have the data needed to lay your lead generation foundation. Start with your current customer base to have a stronger understanding of those audiences who already identify with your brand.
Other great sources for data are your social media accounts. If you have access to your company’s Facebook page, click to Insights»People to gain a better understanding of your current audience. Facebook does a great job at providing useful and detailed information about your target audience and other social media platforms have similar insights.
Once you’ve nailed down your target audience, it’s important to craft your buyer personas to help get a better understanding of how your target audience behaves.
Craft Great Content
Once you’ve determined your target audience, it’s time to write. Crafting content that fits your audience is the foundation for driving qualified web traffic that will convert into leads for your company.
Let’s say you’re the Chief Marketing Officer at a software company. Your job is to bring in leads for your sales team. How can you first bring in qualified traffic to your company’s website? Produce targeted content that will resonant with your customer. Since you’ve developed your personas, now it’s time to identify why your customers will call you in the first place.
Next, specify the primary pain points that may be keeping your customers up at night. These pain points could be anything from time management to efficiently on-boarding a new customer. Let’s use the client on-boarding pain point as an example. Your customer is having trouble efficiently on-boarding new clients into your CRM system. A great way to drive lead-focused traffic to your site would be to write a blog post with the title: “6 Most Effective Ways to On-Board a New Client”. The title alone is appealing to a someone looking for a possible solutions to the on-boarding problem. The information you provide in this post can go a long way to establishing you and your company as a trusted resource, and therefore someone with whom to do business.
Capture then Nurture
One fantastic way to nurture a lead is through email. Don’t give away all of your valuable content via your blog and pages on your site but create opportunities to gather information from your target audience so that you can market to them at a later date, while providing insightful information to them in exchange. Construct a new tool, whitepaper, checklist, or e-book that provides in-depth information into a topic that you know will resinate with your personas. Once your audience (represented by the traffic on your site) sees the offer, require them to engage your brand via a form requesting their name and email prior to receiving your “special offer”. Be careful not to ask too many questions in your form. Research shows, while on the internet, humans have a shorter attention span than goldfish and your give needs to appear aligned with the information you get.
Digital Strategy is Key
As the saying goes, if “content is King” then digital strategy is Queen. If you don’t plan your lead generation strategy, you will miss opportunities while wasting precious time and marketing budgets while figuring out your system. Plan your strategies, map out your program, create your workflows, and design your content offers to create a strong sales funnel for your prospects. Then create support strategies via a unified social media and blogging calendar to help you stay on track and execute your messages with precision.
Now it’s Time to Implement
Follow these simple and straightforward elements to ensure that you’re capturing the opportunities that lie within your web traffic. At the end of the day, your website is the epicenter for your business. These tips will help you capture the leads necessary to make your website work for your business and help promote positive growth.
