Conversion marketing and lead generation marketing are not the same things.
In the digital selling space, `conversion marketing’ is a phrase that describes the action a prospect takes that meets your sales objective. In other words, they buy something from you. `Lead generation marketing’, on the other hand, is the process of cultivating prospective customers to buy your product or service in the future.
Naturally, the end goal for every business is sales, but unless you fully understand the purpose of both marketing strategies and why they’re equally important for your brand, you won’t be able to allocate resources in the most optimal way.
In this article, we will focus on lead generation marketing, and 7 things you can do right now to improve your awareness and interest-building efforts and drive more traffic to your website:
# 1: Social Media: Reduce And Recommit
If you have already embraced social media as a marketing tool, it’s time to hug it even more tightly. In the first flush of anticipation, a lot of small and medium-sized brands get onto as many social platforms as they can, and then find it impossible to do anything constructive on any of them because their time and budget is limited.
It is easier to tend to a few potted plants than a whole garden, and that is exactly what you should do to overhaul your under-performing social channels. Choose the platforms that are best suited for your products and services and put all your efforts in building a following on those. For example, you may choose Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. Fair enough. Or you may choose Facebook, Snapchat and Youtube. That’s good too. Or just Facebook. No problem.
It isn’t how many platforms you show up on. It’s locating where your potential leads are mostly to be found at, and then making sure you’re always there, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, engaging with them, answering their questions/comments, posting interesting content and keeping the conversation going about your brand. The more consistent you are in your social media presence, the more consistent and credible your brand image will appear to be, so re-embrace your chosen platforms and make socializing a top priority to generate high-quality leads.
# 2: Give Your Leads Something To Enjoy: Free Stuff!
One of the most common traits among humans, materialistically speaking, is their love of getting something for nothing. Giveaways and contests are the lifeblood of marketing engagement on social platforms for this very good reason. Potential leads will crawl out of the woodwork as soon as they hear there’s something free onbeing offered and they have an equal shot at winning it. So don’t scrimp on discounts, coupons, free products, prizes etc. Just make sure your call-to-action involves some manner of engagement off your social business page and on your website because your objective is to bring in more traffic where your products and services can be purchased. Also, use the same giveaway events to achieve extra lead generation goals like email address collection, newsletter distribution, message marketing etc.
# 3: Offer Tutorials With The Passion Of A Schoolmaster
No matter what product or service you sell, there is always something teachable in your field that people are looking to learn. So if you’re out there in the forefront, offering tutorials on those subjects, you are basically promoting engagement with high-quality leads who are very likely to convert in the short run.
Youtube videos are an excellent way to do this. Do a research on Youtube first to make a list of tutorial topics in your field that have attracted the maximum number of visitors over a particular period of time. This will clearly show what people are interested in learning. Now you create your own videos on those topics, making sure yours offer a more satisfying experience with the material you cover.
Let’s look at an example. Imagine you’re in the collision repair business and you want to make tutorial videos. A casual search on Youtube pulls up plenty of tutorials on the subject. While researching, you notice that the use of Bondo putty draws a lot of visitors. One video titled “DIY How To Bondo Auto Body Repair” has had 8,65,000 visitors in six months. Fair assumption then that `Bondo’ is a popular subject. Now look at other Bondo tutorials and see how much engagement they have got. If the potential is good, go ahead and make your own Bondo tutorial that offers more value than the others because you can see what they have covered and what they have left out.
Make these tutorial videos a consistent piece of your lead gen marketing efforts and soon your Youtube presence should take off with your brand showing itself as a credible subject expert.
# 4: Use Blogs To Help More, Promote Less
Businesses, both large and small, make the mistake of thinking that their story is something that people are tripping over themselves to hear about. And so they spend all their blog resources on writing self-praising articles about their achievements, awards, products and services that nobody wants to read.
This is a wonderful exercise in vanity which probably makes the business owners feel good, but what a tragic waste of a valuable opportunity to engage with potential customers!
Take the focus off yourself for a minute and think about helping people instead. Write a high proportion of blogs that do nothing but explain, educate, solve problems and answer questions for people who are looking for it.
The more they engage with your blog, the more they are stepping off the social platform and spending time on your website – where you want them to be.
It’s a short jump now, from your blog page to your products page.
# 5: Remove Frictions From Your Opt-In Forms
A majority of potential leads who choose to fill out your opt-in forms are not 100% committed to follow through, so don’t give them a chance to hesitate with an opt-in form that is a mile long. Keep it as quick and simple as possible. Just a name and email address should suffice in plenty of cases. Unless you’re a medical concern or a real estate agency or something else that requires a lot of customer information input before you can assist them in any meaningful way. Even then, break up the opt-in form into 2 or 3 parts – to make it look less daunting for people.
# 6: Don’t Demand Passwords If It’s Not Necessary
Unless there is sensitive information being passed on, don’t ask new prospects to sign up with a password that should be at least 8 characters long, with 3 capital letters, 2 punctuation marks and some numbers for good measure. People are tired of making and remembering passwords, and if you stop visitors right at the gate and compel them to make a password for products they may not even like, they’re not going to bother engaging with you. They’ll simply bounce off and go somewhere else.
# 7: Finally, Focus On SEO
Some swear by social media these days and ignore the fact that they have to keep up with SEO tactics that are always changing. Big mistake – because social optimization and search engine optimization go hand-in-hand. Placing all your eggs in the social basket means you’re closing the door on a huge traffic base that could have found your website organically.
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