How Generating Leads with Effective Digital Marketing Strategies Can Help Grow Your Business

Great Digital Marketers will always tell their success with their customers. Customers (this is you, in this case) will often measure in leads/conversions or financial outcome. Doing this enables customers to track how effect their marketers digital marketing strategies are. While this is a great short term gauge, it is not one you can use for the long term. Identifying and valuing opportunities, both missed and taken, is just as important. It can make a huge difference to your bottom line in the short term and long term.

What is Lead Generation?

Lead Generation (Lead Gen) is a series of steps taken to help get leads for you and your sales team. Getting great quality leads that you and your team can follow up is a factor to consider when measuring your digital marketing strategies success. By getting these great quality leads you and your team should be able to convert them in to a sale. There is 3 steps to Lead Gen that marketers will generally use. These include the following:

1. Lead Magnets – Entice a visitor to view an offer. Make it compelling enough to get them on to the page.
2. Lead Qualification – This is a process where visitors will self qualify themselves. It is effective because they will either go on to lead capture section or they will leave. Although they may disqualify themselves there is almost always, an opportunity to cross sell them.
3. Lead Capture – This is the last stage of the lead gen process before you and your team get the lead.

While lead generation is what you may need for your business, you should focus on getting the landing page right first. By optimizing it a bit before sending traffic to it can save you money. The aim is to keep costs down and conversion rates up. Unfortunately a lot of marketers and website owners cannot achieve this. The reason is they go for a scatter gun approach. It can be a game of patience, trial and error. Here is a few of the following things that will help with lead generation.

User Experience (UX)

Who would have guessed that User Experience was so important? Well, really it is a no brainer for any marketing person. If the user loves your site and what is on offer, they will buy. Don’t be fooled though, some say it is more important than the content you present. This is wrong, it is important, for sure, It isn’t however the deal breaker for lead generation. Some of the more important aspects around UX include these things:

Design

Your site design needs to be visually appealing. It needs to keep the visitor interested. Ensuring the design looks modern, clean and up to date will help you keep them interested. You should make sure your branding is strong, but not overwhelming or over the top. This is one thing people will use as a way to remember your site and your business.

Navigation

The site looking pretty is one thing, making it easy to get from point A to point B is just as important. The easier to navigate, the better for the user.

Page Speed

The ever elussive page speed that people keep going on about. It is true, page speed will either keep a visitor or lose one in a lot of cases. For some of the world’s largest e-commerce websites it is estimated that 1 millisecond costs them about $1m in sales per year. Insane right? Well it does make sense when every customer wants immediate response. Don’t let this one thing though determine how your site will look. It is important but not always a deal breaker.

Accessibility

Until recently, search engines and a like have said it is good to have. Now it is at the point that no matter what type of device a user has, your site should load on it. This does have cost implications and will not be viable for most small businesses. Catering for users who are visually or audably impaired is very important. You should cater for their needs as best as possible. They want the same as others, and that is to work with you as well.

Split Testing (some call this A/B testing)

A time consuming but rewarding task is split testing. It is basically where testing design a vs design b with users visiting your website. Changing colours or font sizes can have a massive impact on your site visitors. It will often determine the outcome of a user. It can be very helpful in working out how you should market in other mediums as well.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is amongst the most common method to generate traffic. This is a technique used to target particular keyword phrases that you want your site to rank under in major search engines. It is VERY effective in online marketing providing it is done right. There is a lot of individuals offering this service but have no runs on the board. It is based on labour for the most part. The less they charge the less they will do and the longer it will take to get results.

The flip side to SEO is that it can take time to rank but once it is performing, typically you will find organic traffic will out perform paid for traffic. Here is some important things you should maked sure your SEO professional is doing as a part of their service offering:

Keyword Selection

When creating your SEO strategy, make sure you get to choose the keywords to target. If you can’t at least make it clear that these are the sorts of ones you believe clients would use to find your site. Listing these keywords for your digital marketer will ensure you point them in the right direction to get results.

On-Page Optimization

On-Page Optimization is not only valuable to the user, it is also as valuable to the search engines you are marketing to. If you want users to find your site by searching on a given topic, you need to make sure that the page, its content, images and headings etc are all on point. Ensuring all of the website has the correct schema markup in place will ensure your sites success when ranking in search engines. Search engines LOVE schema and easy to read pages.

Off-Page Optimization

You will hear of terms like “Blackhat” or “Whitehat”. No, it is not just the colour of a hat. It is also the type of off page marketing SEO professionals use to help get your website ranking. Whitehat is always the preferred method as it is the ethical way of doing SEO and getting rankings. Blackhat is seen as cheating the search engines, the methods are clever and sometimes elaborate.

At the end of the day the best way is to build links back to your site ethically. More to the point though, you want to do this in a way that will help improve your reputation. It is almost like “guilt by association”. Hangout with the best crew and get the best results. This applies to links back to your website as well. Get a link from a highly reputable site on the internet and ranking will improve providing it is relevant etc.

Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC)

PPC is most commonly referred to as AdWords by non technical people. It is because it was the best branded product that worked. Ultimately most search engines offer PPC services. Most businesses look for instant ROI. This will give you the best chance of achieving that goal. It is based on a bidding system. The winning bid will get the ad displayed towards the top of the advertising area thats being bidded on.

We have seen many Pay Per Click solutions turn businesses around. Quite literally going from being almost broke to turning over some huge figures monthly. There are many factors that will change the costs as well that a advertiser (you) can do to help keep costs down. Keep in mind though that PPC will generate traffic, it won’t however guarantee a sale unless of course you are selling a product on the site/landing page(s) themselves. The sales / conversion process is on you as a site owner, and of course, your trusty digital marketer.

Content Marketing

Bill Gates once said “Content is King and will be the currency of the future.” While it may not be word for word the first 3 certainly were. Anyway, content marketing in the last 20 years has become one of the best ways to market online. It helps build credibility, improve your online visibility and educate your potential customers on why your product and/or service is the one to go for.

Content marketing is flexible in the method of delivery as it is not limited to one method. It can be in the form of infographics, videos, podcasts right through to articles, just like this one. The idea is to provide as much information about a given set of topics in a variety of formats. There are also different levels of content available online as well. There is open, public available content and then there is membership based content as well. You will see some of the membership based content in the likes of courses, guides, e-books and sometimes even industry based publications.

Newsletters can be a great source of traffic generation and also a fantastic way to get repeat business. More times than not, newsletters will have a great long term ROI over that of many other mediums. There is value in it and by adding exclusive content that only newsletter subscribers get will mean that you can increase your rate of conversions and interest in the content you post in the newsletter.

Social Media Optimization

As we know, given the right opportunity, social media is the go to place to get attention by many. This can also apply to your business. The big struggle for most business owners is working out what needs to go up on to their social pages. Content is the shortest and quickest answer. Educational content that is of value to your potential and existing customers is crucial. Developing the content as we said can be painful but this is a service that some agencies like ours do offer.

Don’t take for granted though that your content will ALWAYS grab the right type of customers. You need to plan it, understand your target market using each platform and build your campaign around that. You will certainly want to consider both paid and organic posts for your business to be boosted on social media. Video content, particularly live video content is one of the best ways to get your customers engaging with you and your team.

Email Marketing

The new world version of direct mail marketing is just as impressive online as it is offline. That is right, people still love to be directly marketed to. Gone are they days of traditional direct marketing, via postal mail anyway. Email Marketing has taken its place, and so has the results it can achieve. As crazy as this will sound some marketers claim returns as high as 4400%. What makes this so high is the fact that most of the readers are subscribers to newsletters etc. The sources of such lists are usually ecommerce websites or similar.

Potential Outcomes from the right Digital Marketing Strategy

Successful lead generation will vary, depending on the owner and their markets. Generating new leads will not happen right away. Most new sites for example can take 6-12 months nowadays to rank organically and get their first lead. Paid search of course is quicker, and the remaining 3 will vary in success and the time required to perform. The rewards online though could change your business. Some businesses promote online when their competitors aren’t. They are often very successful and have a lot of success as a result.

We have seen results where businesses have gone from almost being broke to thriving once again. It is totally possible, it takes some commitment and a willingness to follow systems. Dipping your toes in for a month or 2 will not do your site or your business any good. You need to look at a minimum of 6-12 month commitment.

If you would like to grow your business, generate some high quality traffic and generate some leads. Contact the team at Suncoast Web Solutions today on 07 5479 3888 or contact us through the form below. One of our team members would love to organise a discussion with you about generating traffic and leads.