This blog post is part of “The Ultimate Guide to Lead Generation” blog series.
How do you ensure that you hit your leads goal every month, instead of experiencing intermittent (and often random) success? There are many moving parts, but it all comes down to a recipe for success that is well within your reach.
Ingredients for success
The ingredients for success for sustainable lead generation are:
- Getting found
- Converting traffic into leads
- Analyzing the effectiveness of your lead generation
When time and resources are dedicated to these three things, your ongoing and sustainable results become much more predictable.
Getting found
Getting found includes all the things that we recommend for all small businesses: blogging, keeping your web pages up-to-date, creating content people care about, using keywords effectively, and optimizing your content for organic search (search engines). Read more about each of these in our article, “Recipes for Effective Lead Generation.”
Converting traffic into leads
- Create downloadable content and other offers. Blogs drive traffic, and you want to convert that traffic into leads. One way to do that is to offer downloadable content like whitepapers, ebooks, webinars, slideshows, etc, that your web visitors can get for free by completing a simple form.
- Create targeted calls-to-action. Insert calls-to-action throughout your website and at the bottom of every blog post that drive visitors to landing pages with forms to convert them into a lead. For example, if a visitor reads a how-to article on your website, they may be interested in a free checklist as a tool for taking these actions themselves.
- Create optimized landing pages. Creating a landing page to convert your visitors into leads is important, but it’s crucial that it’s laid out correctly. Use best practices for landing pages to avoid quick abandonment by your visitor.
- Improve landing pages with A/B testing. Once your landing pages are setup and converting, you can make them more effective with some A/B testing. Be sure to only test one change at a time. Then show each landing page 50% of the time and see if the results differ. Implement any positive changes and do further testing.
- Add paid search for your successful landing pages. Once you’ve got a landing page that is generating tons of leads, leverage it further with paid search. Focus the keywords on the offer associated with that landing page, and watch your leads come pouring in.
- Continue to nurture your leads with drip email campaigns. Decisions nowadays are researched thoroughly before being made, so you need to nurture your leads to move them through your sales cycle. Space these emails out appropriately, and be sure to follow lead nurturing best practices in creating each of these messages. You should have a lead nurturing campaign for every landing page.
Analyzing the effectiveness of your lead generation process
- Analyze where your traffic is coming from. Is the bulk of your traffic coming from social media? If so, which platforms? Or is it coming from organic search? If so, which keywords? How much of your traffic comes from referrals? From marketing events? If you know where your traffic is coming from, you can analyze the effectiveness of your lead generation efforts and measure your ROI.
- Analyze where your site traffic lands. Know which pages and offers drive the most traffic, as those are the things people are interested in. Focus your attention on these pages and assets, and write more similar content. Also, use this information to boost up pages that aren’t performing as well.
- Analyze which offers convert the most. Create more content around these offers, and offer them more frequently to generate more leads. Any offers that are not doing so well would be prime targets for further testing. Is the problem a function of the landing page or of the design of the call-to-action?
- Analyze the quality of the leads. Track how long leads are in the sales funnel, how many leads turn into move-ins, and how much it costs to acquire these leads and customers. If you find that some leads perform better than others, sort out the lead behaviors that your best leads exhibit.
These steps will help make your lead generation success more constant and predictable. Interested in learning more? Download our free ebook about traffic, leads and sales.
This blog post is part of “The Ultimate Guide to Lead Generation” blog series.
