Know Your Inbound Marketing & Conversion Objectives.

The first stage of creating a productive inbound marketing or attraction marketing website is to clearly understand the inbound marketing formula or blueprint as a whole. When you consider your goals from a high level, it's quite simple really. Most attraction marketing formulas employ the following components:

Download our comprehensive eBook detailing all elements of attracting new visitors and converting them into leads and prospects! This guide to lead generation fundamentals will walk you through the critical steps that require your marketing attention.

Attracting strangers that are researching your products or services in general, onto your specific landing pages, blog posts or social media contributions. This is accomplished through the creation of "remarkable content", interesting content or content that directly addresses the challenges that your target market is experiencing. These website researchers will find your content using many different methods and become visitors of your site as you supply solutions to your target market's common challenges. This guide to the best lead generation fundamentals provides the following and more:

1. Effectively convert these website strangers (visitors) into leads and prospects. There are two types of conversions when we discuss attracting visitors with the goal of converting them to leads. The first is the "micro-conversion" where you have created enough compelling content for the visitor to join a newsletter, mailing list or webinar. Think of the micro conversion as successfully getting the visitor to take another step towards a purchase. Second, the "macro conversion" is the selling of the product or service. This of course is the primary goal but it is important to understand that most online shoppers are not willing to go from a first visit, right into a macro close. They need to be nurtured down a sales funnel where they have the opportunity to learn more about the product or service, the competition, engage in a micro conversion, then make the decision to purchase.
2. Once you have successfully created the content, design, navigation and configuration to secure traffic (visitors), it is time to actively test various conversion strategies. AND, you must be sure that you have the ability to measure every aspect as these strategies unfold. I wise man once said the "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it". So be sure to have the right analytics package attached to every page on your website. We use and recommend HubSpot but you can also use Google Analytics as well. It is the testing that will ultimately dictate success or failure. You will test the strategies you are using to attract your initial traffic by evaluating the usage of keywords, primary pages, landing pages, referral traffic, competition and overall volume of quality content.
3. Once you feel that you have a steady stream of traffic, it is time to apply testing to the micro and macro conversion process, data and results.

As you generate your methods to accomplish all of the steps above, it then becomes easier to develop your specific systems for evaluating, measuring and adjusting conversion tactics. Although the many steps involved in a successful inbound marketing strategy may seem a little overwhelming, the more time you spend planning, applying and testing, the more you will understand the basic principles of attracting your target market into your website through:

1. Your primary pages
2. Your landing pages
3. Your social media platforms
4. Your blog posts
5. Search engines
6. Referrals from other websites
7. Direct traffic
8. Press releases

As you continuously perfect these lead generation fundamentals and attraction marketing formulas, test them accurately, you will then be able to apply similar principles of measurement and testing to the micro and macro components of the conversion process. Although there are many, many additional inbound marketing components that are a part of a comprehensive inbound marketing strategy, these are the two areas that need to be perfected first. Without understanding who and why your visitors and entering your website, then understanding what they are doing once inside your website, it is difficult to determine if this traffic has any value at all.

The conversion process is just as important because when executed correctly, you can see that your content is truly offering solutions that are in demand. The more you measure your conversions on each page, each form, each social media post, each article or press release, the more you will understand how your solution addresses the demands of the traffic that has found it's way to your website. In this blog post, we are paying attention to the two initial steps in the image below:

You can see that column number one represents the attraction process while column number two represents the conversion process. Even in this simple diagram you can see the different components that are used in each of these stages of good inbound marketing, attraction marketing and the conversion process.

Download our comprehensive eBook detailing all elements of attracting new visitors and converting them into leads and prospects!