In this post we’ll teach you 35 ways to generate more inbound leads. These tactics have helped us grow one client’s website traffic sixfold, increase online revenue by 33% and consistently improve their online marketing results month-over-month.
As you’ll come to learn, there’s no silver bullet to our inbound marketing success. Instead we look to optimize several areas of our client’s marketing strategies that collectively produce huge results.
The following tips and tricks will work for both B2B and B2C organizations. In fact, these theories apply for almost every website. In order to generate more leads from your website you’ll need to do at least one of two things:
These are just a few of the ways we would attract more traffic and convert more leads if we were working on your site:
- Customer profiling and targeting
- Conversion centred design
- Quality content creation
- Search engine optimization
- Pay per click advertising
- Conversion rate optimization
Here are 35 proven tips and tricks to help you attract more traffic and convert more leads.
Customer Profiling and Targeting
When we start working with new clients the first exercise we conduct is a buyer persona development session. The objective is to develop a very detailed profile of our client’s ideal customers.
If you haven’t done so already you should begin by creating formal buyer persona profiles for your organization. Here is a helpful template.
This upfront customer profiling work will pay dividends in the long run. After all, you should be aiming to not only generate more leads, but also to improve traffic and lead quality in the process.
Conversion Focused Design
The difference between a poor performing website and an effective sales focused site is the ability to turn anonymous website visitors into qualified sales leads. This is known as the “visitor to lead conversion rate”.
If you want to generate more inbound leads on your website the first thing to address is your website’s conversion rate. When someone visits your website how do they become a lead?
The goal of conversion centered design is to focus the visitor’s attention on the conversion areas and encourage them to complete your desired action. Depending on the goal of your website the desired conversion action could be filling out a form, signing up for an account or entering the shopping cart.
When conversion centered web design is coupled with a well executed inbound marketing strategy, websites become lead generation machines.
Here are 5 things you can do to make your website more conversion focused:
1. Gate your premium content – visitors should be required to give you their name and email address to access your premium content like whitepapers, ebooks, brochures and webinars. Keep in mind that organizations doing business in Canada now need to ensure that landing pages and conversion processes are CASL compliant.
2. Integrate calls-to-action across your site - calls-to-action are images or lines of text that encourage users to take an action like downloading an ebook or signing up for a webinar. Each page on your website should funnel website visitors towards a point of conversion.
3. Benefits-driven copywriting – tell visitors exactly what you want them to do and how they will benefit by completing your desired action.
4. Align calls-to-action with on-page content – each page on your website should have a distinct message and purpose – make sure that your calls-to-action are aligned with the on-page content and that your gated content helps to answer visitors common questions.
5. Ensure your website is mobile friendly – last but certainly not least, ensure your website is responsively designed. Mobile traffic now accounts for approximately ⅓ of all internet traffic.
Creating Premium Content
The conversion goal for most websites is to capture visitor’s contact information. Once you know a website visitors name and email address you can begin to market to them in a much more personalized and on-going manner.
To motivate site visitors to go to a landing page, fill out a form, and give you their contact information you have to offer them something of value in exchange.
Here are five types of premium content you can offer website visitors:
6. Whitepapers and ebooks – long form content can help to demonstrate your expertise and position your firm as an industry thought leader. This is by far the most popular form of inbound content.
7. Webinars or Google Hangouts- webinars offer a relatively low cost opportunity to get virtual facetime with a crowd of targeted sales prospects. Recordings of live audio and video can also be repurposed to generate leads in perpetuity.
8. SlideShare presentations – SlideShare is great for digestible, highly searchable content. It is also worth noting that SlideShare offers ways to integrate lead generation forms right into presentations.
9. Infographics – infographics are used to illustrate data or process-based information. Graphical content also tends to be an effective way to build inbound links.
10. Interactive tools & widgets – as whitepapers and ebooks become rather ubiquitous savvy marketers are now building interactive cost calculators, simulators and widgets that provide value to the user while further qualifying inbound leads.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) remains the most critical factor in attracting traffic to your website. The structure your website, the format of your page title tags and the quality of content on your site are just a few of the approximately 200 factors that determine the organic search ranking of your website.
If you keep tabs on SEO you may be aware that quite frequently there are major updates to Google’s search engine algorithms. While these frequent updates certainly make search engine optimization a bit of moving target, the fundamental elements of SEO are unlikely to change.
Here are the 5 most important areas of your site you should be optimizing in order to attract more traffic and convert more leads:
11. Title tags – each page on your website should have a primary and secondary keyword and these keywords should be reflected in your title tags as follows: Primary Keyword – Secondary Keyword | Company Name
12. Content length – while the ideal page content length is a hotly debated topic, research suggests that pages with up to 1500 words will rank better than shorter pages. The goal here is not to make pages longer for SEO purposes, but to create richly descriptive content that fully addresses the specific goals of the page.
13. Page load speed – page load speed not only impacts your search rank and bounce rate but also is an indication of how well your website has been designed and developed.
14. Keyword positioning – your target keywords should be used in the page title, in your H1 and H2 tags, as well as in the body copy of the page.
15. Duplicate content – Google penalizes sites for duplicate content – ensure that each page on your site presents original and unique content.
Email Marketing
Email marketing plays an integral role in the inbound marketing process. After someone comes to your website and gives you their name and email address you can then begin to nurture them through the customer lifecycle with automated email marketing workflows.
Marketing automation tools like HubSpot provide marketers the ability to create automated email workflows that engage contacts at the exact right time and place based on their actions and interests.
Simply put, marketing automation helps yours sales team to act when its most relevant.
Here are 5 tips to help you get better results from your email marketing efforts:
16. Optimize for multiple devices – more than 65% of all email gets opened first on a mobile device
17. Strategic copywriting – certain words result in higher engagement. Be aware of how your titles, headlines and body copy can impact engagement rates
18. Use direct calls-to-action – extraneous text in emails can cause the recipient to lose focus the call-to-action. Keep your emails to the point.
19. Keep email length short – in general shorter emails tend to produce better results. As a rule of thumb you should keep the length of your emails under 500 words to get the best click-through-rates.
20. Make it personal – it should comes as no surprise that personalized emails get better open and click-through-rates.
Social Media
Social media has become a mainstay in almost every marketing strategy. No matter if you’re a B2B or B2C organization, your prospects, leads and customers are on social media. The challenge is identifying, growing and engaging with your target audience in a meaningful way.
To be successful on social media you can’t sit back and wait. Instead you need to proactively seek out social media users who meet your buyer persona description, and begin to build a relationship with them.
Here are a five tips to help to you accelerate the success of your social media efforts:
21. Focus your efforts – Consider how/where/why your buyer personas use social media. Don’t try and be active on every social media channel, instead focus your efforts on the social networks that are a good fit your business model and that your buyer personas use most frequently
22. Be proactive – Organically attracting a large following on twitter can be a slow burn, to accelerate your growth be proactive and follow your buyer personas, leads and customers on Twitter
23. Monitor keywords, topics and trends & drive engagement – tools like HubSpot’s Social Inbox or HootSuite are great for monitoring keywords, relevant topics and social shares, as well as for focusing your social media efforts on real leads and customers.
24. Share blog posts & landing pages – it may sound obvious, but if you want to generate more inbound leads try sharing engaging messages that include the direct URLs of your landing pages and blog posts
25. Reshare old content – just because a blog post or landing page is old it doesn’t mean that it can’t drive new traffic and leads. Reshare your old content to give it a new life.
Paid Search
In many ways pay per click (PPC) ads are an inbound marketer’s swiss army knife. Unlike search engine optimization which can take several months to produce significant results, PPC produces results almost immediately.
PPC can also can be used to test the effectiveness of new website pages, supplement organic traffic during slow months, and can even help reveal valuable keyword and search volume insight.
No matter if you’re looking for ways to optimize your current PPC campaign or to launch a campaign from scratch these tips will help you get more return on investment from your PPC efforts:
26. Action oriented ad copy – the goal of action oriented copy is to encourage the viewer to click on your ad and visit your website. Incorporating direct calls-to-action, like “Buy Now!” or “Download Your Free eBook Now!” in your ad copy will increase your click through rate.
27. PPC specific landing pages – creating specific landing pages for PPC campaigns can improve user experience and relevancy of your campaign. Doing so will help to increase conversion rates and decrease your cost per lead.
28. Broad match keyword data – you may be aware that Google recently started encrypting keyword search data, luckily PPC broad match data still provides invaluable keyword and search volume data to help guide your keyword optimization efforts.
29. Drive targeted traffic to existing content – sometimes when great content doesn’t get the attention it deserves, PPC can be used to direct targeted traffic to under visited pages, or towards old content.
30. Target specific geographic areas – one of the greatest strengths of PPC is it’s ability to target specific geographic markets. Geographic targeting can be used in a number of ways to surface ads only to people in markets that your organization serves, to build demand in new areas or to target high growth markets.
Conversion Rate Optimization
Once you’ve launched a new website, landing page, or paid ad campaign the focus then becomes conversion rate optimization (CRO). CRO is a structured and systematic approach to improving the performance of a website, landing page or marketing campaign through statistical testing. The end goal of CRO is to increase revenue by optimizing the number of people who “convert” into leads and customers.
While every CRO project should be treated on a case by case basis, these are a few of the testing and optimization tasks that we employ to optimize our client’s websites:
31. A / B testing – A/B testing is a simple randomized experiment that tests two variants against each other to identify which performs more favorably.
32. Multivariate testing – this form of testing is slightly more advanced version of A/B testing where many components are compared simultaneously.
33. User testing – this form of testing involves gaining feedback from real website visitors as they progress through your website.
34. Funnel flow analysis – funnel analysis help to identify exactly when and why leads entry and exit the marketing funnel and how your lead nurturing strategy can be improve
35. Site surveys – there are a number of survey tools available that allow marketers to survey real visitors as they are interactive with a website. Site surveys are often used on pricing pages to gain invaluable feedback about page content and clarity.
This post originally appeared on the Kula Partners blog. Kula Partners is a HubSpot Partner located in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Originally published Aug 26, 2014 10:00:00 AM, updated January 18 2023