Your website should be working for you 24 hours a day, every day. It should be a nonstop lead generation tool, consistently building a sustainable sales pipeline on your behalf by not only identifying leads, but also nurturing them, ultimately moving your potential customers down the sales funnel toward conversion.
The road to perpetual website success is paved by a strategic, powerful combination of high quality content, audience intelligence, consistent customer contact and regularly measuring results.
Great content has emerged as a key component of an effective marketing strategy, because content that inspires, informs or resonates will attract and maintain visitor attention. Your website content must include a combination of tools which encourage the transformation of anonymous website visitors into leads.
Since the vast majority of website visitors do not volunteer any information about themselves, businesses must take action to persuade these people to convert. There are many possible avenues that lead to “opt in” conversions; a baby step toward turning an anonymous visitor into a lead or a lead into a customer is any form of information sharing. The more information we have about a prospect – including demographics, an email address, an indication of buying behavior or even a cursory conversation – the more likely we are to eventually close a deal with him or her.
Let’s take a quick look at a few essential tactics that will help you expand your sales pipeline over the months ahead.
1. Make Strategic Use of Forms on Your Website
Optimize your contact and email subscription forms to collect information about your website visitors. The more intelligence you can gather on your audience, the better you can personalize your content and calls to action to motivate them.
You may do well to experiment with a service like OptinMonster, which makes it easy to create gating mechanisms for premium content like eBooks or PDF reports that showcase your expertise.
Gating your premium marketing assets means that they’ll only be available to website visitors after they share their contact information, allowing you to continue marketing to them via email or their preferred social channels.
2. Collect Customer Information During the Sales Process
It is imperative to collect as much customer information as possible throughout the sales process. After all, the better you know them, the better you can sell to them. In order to achieve the ultimate goal of closing sales with clients who love you, it’s important to be able to speak intelligently to your customers during the relationship building process, providing guidance that resonates with their needs.
After that initial touch-point – the first customer conversation – make the most of your follow-up emails. Yes, answer their questions, but then give them something else to talk about. Now that they’ve reached out, enhance the relationship by projecting not only knowledge and confidence, but grace and trustworthiness as well.
3. Use Social Media to Boost Traffic and Engage with Prospects
Your social media channels should be plainly visible on your website, so that visitors who arrive there first can navigate directly to the channel of their choice to learn more about you in the environments that make them most comfortable.
Depending on your preferred channels, each social site has built-in methods to drive website traffic. On Twitter, you can use lead cards to drive your email subscriptions, and on Facebook, boosting content and optimizing your posts can go a long way toward driving traffic. Simultaneously, you should use social media to drive traffic back to your website, ultimately increasing your email subscription rates.
But even people checking out your site are alarmingly likely to leave without opting in to your email list. Only a tiny fraction will give you access to their inboxes. By using audience intelligence tools like Leadfeeder, you can acquire valuable information about the people browsing your content, including the companies they work for and the pages that they find the most interesting. Armed with this intelligence data, you’re able to re-engage with people by manually reaching out to them on LinkedIn or Twitter, getting to know them and building relationships of trust with them over time.
4. Add Lead and Conversion Tracking Tools
You can’t improve what you can’t measure. Your conversion rates, sales figures and determinations surrounding the most effective marketing methods are only as good as the numbers you’re using to calculate them. To help ensure you’re evaluating the right variables, use a lead tracking and conversion tool like Oktopost’s social media analytics. A tool like this will help you document and analyze the actions your website visitors are taking, also allowing you to attribute conversions to the social campaigns and posts that initially attracted each audience member.
Once all of the appropriate conversion tracking pixels are installed on your website, you will have the ability to track whether your visitor has reached a specified destination – including the contact page, your latest blog post or a landing page with a current offer. Your tracking tools can also determine whether your referred visitors have completed a specified event, which can be any action you designate, such as watching a video or signing up for a webinar.
Generate Quality Leads
Turning anonymous website visitors into loyal customers – and hopefully even brand ambassadors – requires not only a well-researched, strategic plan but also the right tools in place for implementation and measurement. Promote informative, resonating content. Ensure that you are capturing and nurturing leads at every touch point, and then accurately measure the effectiveness of every effort you make.