Growing Online Leads and Sales

Stop! Review. Plan Changes. Then proceed!

Your Digital presence cannot be static. It’s time to review your digital marketing and make changes to succeed. This is the last post in the series of “how to advance your business online in 2014.” The first two posts are available here:

Mobile User Experience:

Full Infographic Below

To quickly summarize what I’ve covered before, I’ll review the highlights here: As businesses look to be effective online in the year ahead they need to first ensure they are providing a good mobile user experience on their website.

This means ensuring your site has either a mobile version of your site or a “responsive site” that adapts to the display size of the visitor’s device (computer, tablet, or mobile). Mobile use on the web simply continues to grow rapidly. Without this, a business can be missing out or causing 20-50% of their users to have a less than positive experience on their site, so having a mobile website solution is very important to a company’s web presence today.

Content Strategy:

Once a company has implemented a good mobile visitor experience on their website, a second key area is the content on the site itself. I’m a big proponent of having a blog, and that blog having content that is strategic and accomplishes three key purposes. These purposes include content that attracts and engages; content that helps gain opt-ins and leads; and content that helps finalize sales and motivates consumers to make a purchase. This is all a part of a content marketing strategy where a company gains influence and grows their audience through the sharing of continually new, relevant, and helpful content that meets these three objectives.

By having a treasure trove of content online, the company can be found more often in searches of various topics.

Social Media Engagement and Optimization:

In Part 2, I covered the need for social media participation as a key part of advancing your business online in 2014.

Social Media is not a “if we should” but a ” we must”.

There is no need to go “all in” and try to be on every social network. Your company social priorities should be defined by the most used social networks of your customers and potential customers. It simply makes sense to prioritize being where your key audience is at. As well, a company needs to “socialize their website”, meaning to include social media buttons to enable visitors to further amplify your company content to others by enabling visitors to easily and freely share your blog posts and other web content on social media networks. Lastly, in the social media realm, a company needs to have a set plan to share their own content socially, and give focused time to interact with, engage, and network with their broader community on these platforms. Social media use by companies offers the opportunity to build trust, answer questions, and provide support that can lead to loyalty and business growth.

PART 3

This week, in Part 3, the key is focusing on lead capture and lead nurture. These two items mean the difference between merely growing your site traffic and having site traffic that converts and helps to grow company sales.

Lead Capture:

Lead capture involves either blog posts with a form included to access more information, or key landing pages on the site that solely exist to give an offer of value that a user would want to sign-up for.

These simple offers can be items such as a product brochure download, an eBook resource, or a coupon; whatever would be of enough value to move a visitor to enter their name and email address to be able to access it. This moves the person from a visitor to a potential lead for the business.

Often, businesses finish their website and overlook this key strategy for growing sales online. They simply finish their content and merely have a “brochure” on the web that informs but doesn’t help grow sales or identify visitors. It is very important to have a lead capture method to move visitors into the lead nurture funnel and a simple offer that requires the user to opt-in with their email address can work great. Another lead capture tool that can work well is an opt-in box that appears on the site. Often this type of tool is set to appear after a certain amount of time, inviting the user to sign-up and receive the offer. The key is to plan out the offer and the strategy to gain the opt-in.

One final note on lead capture, it’s best to have your form be simple (the more fields the fewer people complete it) and to integrate your form with your Email Marketing Software. Most email marketing platforms provide you the code to use so that when a user enters, they are automatically added to a specified list in your email marketing platform. Set up your lists intelligently and with a specific focus because that helps us in the next step….

Lead Nurture:

Once the visitor opts-in and your company has the name and email address, the key is to follow-up with an automatic e-mail nurture campaign. Email nurture campaigns can be implemented by using an email marketing service such as GetResponse, Constant Contact, Aweber, MailChimp or other providers. It’s a way to further educate and build rapport with a web visitor over time automatically.

For example, if a user signs up to download a brochure from your website, there would be the opportunity to send an email to thank them and give them a link to the download. Then 24 hours later an email could automatically go out that says, “since you had an interest in this, you might also like to learn about this..” Two days after this another email in the sequence could go out, and so on. Since it can take 6-8 positive connections with a business to help a new customer be comfortable and ready to make a purchase, a lead capture with lead nurture automatic campaign can help that process.

The key in lead nurture via email drip is to ensure the offer and the email follow-up sequence are cohesive and intentional.

They should NOT be direct sales pitches but informational and educational, addressing key questions that would-be buyers have so that trust is built. An important thing to do is to ask questions! If you can get them to interact, the relationship can go to new heights! These nurture campaigns can be created once for a specific list in your email platform and then used multiple times when the lead capture page fits the nurture campaign email drip series.

For a great review on creating email nurture campaigns and the specifics of a sequential drip series, see this great post by John Haydon: How to Create an Email Drip Campaign

The final two steps in the Digital Marketing Funnel are Convert and Measure. Obviously, all the work done to this point is intended to help grow sales, i.e. convert leads to customers. One way to do this is to end the 6-8 step email nurture sequence with a specific offer. Another way is to follow-up with those who have received the email nurture campaign but never bought with a follow-up that invites them to share why and offers a special price for them to try.

The key in specific sales conversion offers is to answer their final questions, demonstrate the ROI potential to them clearly, and remove final barriers and distractions. This can be as simple as having a clear call-to-action button on your website, or a concise offer in an email. Don’t discount all the time or no one will ever buy at regular price! As well, too many offers turn the visitor off to your product.

How can you evaluate all of this? Measure. You need to take the time to review metrics at each phase. Your Google Analytics can tell you how many mobile users are visiting your website and you can track if they stay on the site longer over time. Obviously for your content you can measure unique page views and traffic over time, as well was social shares. For your social media, you can measure engagement and clicks to your web content. For lead capture, you can measure sign-ups, or get even more detail by using A/B tests on landing pages to test variations. With Lead Nurture, you can measure opens and click through on different items and of course, tracking sales conversions to specific ads, offers, or URL’s needs to be done!

Note, it may not all work well the first time, that why you measure. You evaluate and then make tweaks to things to test again!

Bringing it all Together:

By implementing a digital review for your company and addressing these key areas, businesses can ensure that they are giving visitors a great experience on their site, offering content that is valuable and which attracts the right audience and then moves visitors into the lead nurture funnel. When done well, this empowers a company to have a 24/7/365 automatic sales mechanism in place that helps grow sales and positions the company as a leader in their arena!

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