Marketers today wear a lot of hats. You need to be a writer, analyst, copy editor, designer, and social media strategist, all before your morning coffee. And lead generation? It’s not getting any easier. Growing and converting an audience still remains a top concern for marketers.
If you are marketing in 2017, you’re likely working with a website. Not all websites, however, perform the same.
One reason for this is that not all industries perform the same online. A paper clip company in Minnesota will likely have a very different online audience Monday morning than a corporate travel company based in New York. This, admittedly, is a little outside your control.
Another major reason is that not all websites are optimized the same. These three elements can help any company set the foundation for long- term success:
- Diversifying your conversion channels
- A contact database
- Lead analytics
HubSpot Marketing Free gives you the toolbox you need to get started.
Diversifying Your Conversion Channels
What type of experience is your website currently creating? When trying to create a conversion path to qualify and turn visitors into leads, what tools are you using to do so?
Are you using the traditional inbound call-to-action > landing page > form > thank you page flow to drive visitors toward the content they want while capturing their information? While this may be effective for certain content offers, there may be other opportunities to convert on your website.
Enter lead flows. As part of HubSpot’s freemium marketing package, the lead flows tool gives you the opportunity to deliver relevant and interesting content offers without interrupting visitors and requiring them to leave a page that interests them.
Lead flows allow you to turn your site into a more diversified series of conversion paths that can create a great user experience. And as this tool is available to all free or paid HubSpot users at any level, anyone can start delighting their website visitors and generating leads this way.
Interested in boosting your social media presence? You can build and track Facebook lead ads with the HubSpot Marketing Free integration. The ad you create directly in HubSpot will show in Facebook and Instagram newsfeeds and on mobile and desktop.
Visitors that click on the ad will be brought to a form that autopopulates their Facebook information. When they submit the form, they will be added as a contact in HubSpot. This can help you increase your conversion rates for mobile as well as your Facebook reach.
A Contact Database
If generating leads is the end goal of your marketing strategy, you’ll need somewhere to consolidate and store their information. While you could collect these details and organize them in a variety of ways, it’s important to remember your leads are real people interacting with your company.
Having a contact management strategy and a centralized database for your marketing and sales help ensure that these people have the best and most consistent experience as they move through your funnel.
Why? It ensures that everyone from your company who is interacting with your leads, from marketing to sales, has the same information. No working with messy spreadsheets and cluttered inboxes that just slow you down.
HubSpot Marketing Free starts you off with a basic database that allows you to sort, search, and filter to find the contacts you need. If your teams are only working with a specific segment of leads, the contact database allows you to filter out contacts that you may not need to see. This helps you accelerate your productivity and fly through the contacts that need attention now, rather than sifting through those that may need a bit more time to qualify.
Lead Analytics
Once you start generating leads, there are still ways that you, as a marketer, can further optimize your website’s experience. First ask yourself the following questions:
- What channels are generating the most traffic?
- What areas or pages of your site are creating the most engagement?
- What’s the problem that visitors are coming to your site to answer?
If the answers to these questions seem a little gray, there may be holes in your reporting data. This is where lead analytics, the hidden gem of HubSpot Marketing Free, comes in.
By adding lead analytics to your website, the process of qualifying your leads is made that much easier. Lead analytics allow you to see quick insights on what channels your contacts are coming from, what pages they are viewing, what forms they are filling out, and what content keeps them coming back for more for up to seven days for free.
How does this make your job easier?
On a high level, lead analytics allows you to qualify your leads. Knowing how your leads are coming to your site allows you to double down on that channel as a potential source of new traffic. Alternatively, this feature helps you identify what channels may not be performing as expected so your team can focus on where your buyer personas tend to create traffic.
The power of this lead insight doesn’t stop at knowing their source. With HubSpot lead analytics, you can see what pages your contacts are looking at and revisiting. Seeing what content contacts are engaging with allows you to start piecing together which buyer persona they are and what comprises their individual needs.
This information is key to prioritizing and optimizing outreach for your sales team. According to Josh Harcus, author of Closing Culture, calling a visitor five minutes after they become a lead can increase the chances of them closing as a customer by a thousand times. In this way, lead analytics can help spark conversations regarding alignment to help tie your company’s marketing and sales efforts together. Pretty cool for a free tool, right?
