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Leads and sales are what every marketer wants, and of course, you cannot generate leads or sales without traffic. However, numbers can be misleading. Even if you get a lot of traffic from, let’s say, Facebook, most of those leads may not be relevant for your business. In essence, it doesn’t matter how many visitors you attract from social networks if none of them are in your target demographic. As Steve Olenski, senior content strategist at Responsys Oracle, puts it, “not all qualified leads are created equal.”
Now, before moving on, we should try to answer the question of what is lead generation? In short, the phrase refers to a process of identifying people that would be interested in the products and services of your business. People that usually deal with lead generation are business reps and marketers. Of course, if you have a small company, there’s a good chance you will have to do it. In modern times, lead generation is more than sending out emails and doing cold calls. Nowadays, lead generation is a complicated process that requires a good range of strategies to be implemented. To create a good strategy, you need to know your ideal customer. Of course, you might not need to invest too much money into lead generation. First, you need to assess your situation.
If you want to improve leads. You need to ask yourself a couple of questions. Here’s how to get started:
Getting the wrong kind of traffic is probably the single biggest reason your high traffic site is not converting. The problem is – many marketers think that they are targeting one audience when they are targeting a very different one. To understand how people can make this mistake, let’s look at a specific example. Noemi Tasarra-Twigg runs the digital marketing agency, Disruptive Marketing, and in one October, they put out a PPC-centric blog post with tips “Even Freddy Krueger Would Love.” Sure enough, their traffic skyrocketed. The post drove more organic traffic to their site than their homepage; however, the post did not produce a single conversion even after more than two years. While the post turned up on the first page on Google, it wasn’t when people searched for “PPC” or “PPC Branding” – it simply started showing up when people were looking up the phrase “Freddy Krueger.”
It is time to abandon your post-and-sell strategy and focus on what your target audience talks about on social media instead. According to a Mention study, more than 75% of all brand conversions on Facebook and Twitter came from people looking for information, advice, or other help from users. Most of those people were not looking to buy directly, but they still learn about a brand and make a purchase down the line. As Google research clearly shows, social media platforms drive customer awareness and necessarily direct purchasing habits. Maybe you should consider hiring a professional SEO consulting agency to do some social monitoring and find out what your clients are talking about. With that insight, you can start joining meaningful conversations and offering help for all of the pain points the users are experiencing. The results could pay off big because if you amass a large following on a social media network, your sales will increase.
The simpler it is to click “Buy,” the more often it will happen. Customers these days are often impatient and harder to please than ever; according to KISSmetrics, over 40% of them will jump ship only after three seconds. I would imagine that the drop rate is well 50% if your site is loading 10 seconds. In most cases, poor navigation is responsible for the lack of conversions. If it is not instantly obvious to the users where they are supposed to go on the website, chances are, they probably will not hang around to figure it out. A broken site is perhaps the worst reason to lose sales, so have a test run through your site. You could start the testing with a little bit of role-playing – imagine that you are your target consumer, click on your homepage, time yourself and count how many clicks it takes to make a purchase.
However, don’t just stop there; test everything because you never know what your consumers are attracted to. While there is a general guideline for conversion optimization, it doesn’t mean that it will work for you. If you do not see the same sales boost with a video as most sites do, change your strategy and test a different option.
Tags: Conversion, KISSmetrics, Lead Generation, PPC, Responsys Oracle
