Inbound Marketing: Get Found, Convert, Analyze
This article is part 3 in a series on the philosophy behind effective inbound marketing. If you haven't read the previous 2 articles, please feel welcome to do so here:
Article #1: Inbound Marketing Methodology - Part 1, Get Found, Convert, Analyze.
Article #2: Inbound Marketing Fundementals - Part 2, Get Found.
Part 3
Lead Conversion:
In summary, our view of a powerful, integrated and effective inbound marketing strategy needs to include 3 main elements:
- Get Found - Have your content optimized for search engines, blog articles & social media)
- Convert - Make it easy for the traffic you created to engage and become a lead
- Analyze - Evaluate all elements and data to improve your inbound marketing
strategy and plan of action
Getting found is a critical to success and becomes the result of a good web page & blog SEO strategy and the execution of that strategy. Write articles, produce videos (creating remarkable content), develop a large database of keywords and apply SEO (optimize). Then use all the social media sites and run email and PPC campaigns (when appropriate) (Promote). At the end of the day, however, we aren't in this for fun. We're also not in this for traffic. The goal is quality sales leads and customers, so the next step is to focus on converting as much of your traffic as possible to leads and customers.
Understand that there is potentially, huge value if you can increase your conversion rate and generate more leads from existing traffic. If you only get a few hundred visits per week, increasing your conversion rate by 1% could generate 10-15 more leads per month. If you get a few thousand visits a week, you stand to increase your lead flow by 100-150 leads per month
Landing Pages
to targeted already established traffic (identified and/or isolated) can draw your audience to a specific page that has a very specific message, language & keywords. For instance, if you email everyone you met at a trade show and offer them a free trial of your product, that is a "targeted" traffic source because all the visitors have something in common - they are all from your trade show.
Converting a targeted stream of traffic requires two things:
- A well-crafted offer on a landing page that is designed specifically for the audience you will be driving to the page, and
- A stream of targeted traffic that you drive to the page.
If we compare this to the "organic" traffic from natural search (e.g., Google), social media sites, and other sources, we have learned that for "organic" traffic that finds you through SEO and social media, our conversion tactics need to be a little different because the audience is so much more diverse, and more difficult to target an offer that is designed especially for a particular visitor type.
Website & Blog:
As you produce remarkable content, optimize and promote it, you are then able to generate traffic from variety sources, like Google, social media sites, the blogosphere, etc. You will have essentially created a magnet that attracts & pulls in prospects from throughout the web.
Conversion through the main pages on most websites is challenge. When someone hits a page on your site or your blog, you don't actually know where that visitor came from or what is on her mind. Because of this, it's sometimes hard to design an offer specifically for that person. For these reasons, your approach should consider the following:
- What is the range of conversion paths on your site?
- Where might people land
- What paths through your content might they take?
- How do we put offers and calls to action along the most common paths?
- How do we gain the maximum chance of getting the "right" offers in front of a given visitor?
- What are all the methods available to maximize the chance of converting these visitors into a lead?
Article #4 in this series (Analyze) will be posted next week.
