How to Grow More Leads and Sales on the Web
Ready to grow your leads and sales via your online marketing this year?
The beginning of a season provides a natural opportunity for every company to review, evaluate, and plan needed innovations for the year ahead. This is even more critical to do with a company’s online presence and technologies because the web changes and advances so quickly.
Grow More Leads and Sales Online:
Step 1: Attraction Phase Foundations
Below is Part 1 of a three part series on key areas that marketers should review and evaluate to maximize the digital business opportunities in the year ahead. We’ll first look at the ATTRACTION portion and the keys that serve as the building blocks for all other components.
Web
Central to a company’s online presence is their website.
Website’s for today need to take a few keys into consideration. First, have you evaluated a mobile user experience to your site?
Depending upon your industry, mobile traffic to your site can account for 25-55% or higher of all traffic! With the massive ongoing growth of mobile Internet users, businesses need to either have a mobile site solution or a responsive website. A mobile site is a alternative, unique website that is displayed to the user when it is detected they are using a mobile device. Often this is at a sub-domain such as m.yourdomain.com. The other option is a “responsive site” where the behind-the-scenes programming adapts the site display according to the browser of the visitor. So if the visitor is determined to be on a mobile, they see a mobile friendly view of the site, if on a tablet, a site maximized for the tablet screen, and the same for a full site.
The key is offering the visitor the best possible experience no matter what device they use to come to the site. If a user arrives to your site and is not easily able to read content or navigate, studies show they leave abruptly, and in business this means a lost opportunity. Maximize the opportunities by implementing a site strategy that works well for different devices. It’s simply good business, both for marketing and sales.
Content Marketing
Related to the web presence offered to visitors, is the actual content offered to those coming to your site. As I have outlined in past articles on content marketing, a content strategy needs to encompass three primary types of content.
1. Top of Funnel Content – Engaging & Attracting
2. Mid-Funnel Content – Content offering resources for Lead Capture
3. Closure Content – Specific offers and Sales opportunities
Content for the top of the funnel is first. This needs to be broad, searchable, and relevant content. This is “planting seed and watering” or put another way it is “chumming the waters” to attract your desired audience.
It is content that is helpful and serves to expand and grow your audience. Think of it as the “chumming the waters” prior to fishing for sharks. It draws in a crowd and gets them excited about your site, prior to the actual fishing with baited hooks.
The second area of content is mid-funnel content which serves to move visitors into leads. This type of content offers something useful in value in exchange for a simple name and email sign-up. It can be access to a eBook, a video, a podcast, or something or resource related to your products and services that that those interested in your offering would find of value. The opportunity it provides a business is the ability to grow their email list, through which nurture campaigns to educate and ultimately offer a opportunity to buy can occur. The value is that these can be setup once and then run continuously to reach hundreds and even thousands of visitors. I’ll outline more on the lead capture tool specifics in the next article.
The final area of content strategy to plan for is the “closure content” or specific sales offer content. This will likely be only 15-20% of your overall content plan (top of funnel is 35-50% while mid-funnel lead capture content is 20-35% of the overall mix of blog posts and topics on your site). If it is more than that, your audience can get turned off from continual sales pitches but if you are offering content that is largely of great value to them in educating and resourcing them mixed in with timely offers, then it all works together.
So as you begin to look ahead to how to grow your business in the months ahead, a key will be your digital strategies. Start now with evaluating the changes needing to be made to your website, and begin to plan the topics for your content strategy.
In the next post I’ll continue with more on the specifics of lead capture technologies, getting your message out via social media distribution, and lead nurture campaigns via email. The overall plan I outline fits within my 6 Key Areas for Digital Marketing outlined in the infographic below:
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