You’ve got a great blog. Your readers are loyal, and you get a few comments on your posts. Your analytics show that your website is doing well. Yet your leads keep flopping. You send out sales emails, make phone calls- nothing.
How do you solve the case of the vanishing lead?
If you want to attract warmer leads, keep reading. We’ve got some tips to help you focus your efforts on bringing in more qualified leads.
Lead Generation 101
To help your business grow, you need to be able to turn your website’s visitors into paying customers. This means your business needs a lead generation strategy.
A lead is a reader who has expressed interest in your product or service and has given you their email address, contact information, or other personal info.
To get started, keep this basic lead conversion strategy in mind:
- Draw readers in with great content.
- Use a gripping call-to-action. Try using downloadable content or an exclusive offer to attract readers' attention.
- Mind the landing page- your landing page is where your readers will fill out a form giving you their information, so it needs to be professional and informative.
- Stay relevant. You’ll need to keep producing great content and making changes to your lead conversion strategies to draw in readers who are still on the fence and haven’t converted yet.
If you’re new to the realm of lead generation and would like more information about how to draw readers in with great content, don’t miss our beginner’s' guide to blogging for leads.
When Quality Trumps Quantity
If you’ve been struggling to convert the leads you’ve already generated into customers, then you’ll need to go beyond the basics. In order to convert your leads into customers, you’ll want to target more qualified leads.
So, what exactly is a qualified lead?
A qualified lead is a lead that is more likely to convert to a customer compared to other leads. This is determined based on that particular lead’s activity on your site and their demographic info.
If that definition seems a little vague, that’s because it’s supposed to.
Different companies and different industries have different customer needs, so the type of people who will buy from a particular business will vary greatly. If you sell insurance, you’re looking for a different type of lead than someone who sells organic produce.
You and your marketing team will have to define what a qualified lead is for your specific business.
How To Spot a Qualified Lead
To determine who your qualified leads are, you’ll need to determine which qualities or events leads to sales. That will allow you to sift out the leads that meet that criteria.
This is sometimes referred to as scoring your leads.
Ask yourself a few questions to start determining what your most qualified leads have in common:
- What content (blog posts, pages, downloadables, etc.) leads to the most sales? For example, a lead who downloaded an ebook on the basics of small business insurance might be more qualified than a lead who read a post on the best small business practices of 2016.
- Which emails do your leads respond to? Which emails drive people to unsubscribe?
- What pages have your leads viewed? A lead who has viewed your product page, for example, may be warmer than one who has only viewed a couple blog posts.
- What’s their demographic information? This is where you define your ideal customer. A company’s VP will be a more valuable lead than an intern, for example. Use the form on your landing page to collect key demographic info.
Data analysis is the best way to determine which of your site’s visitors and existing leads are qualified leads. Having a good analytics program can really help with this. Analytics can show you what aspects of your website are attracting viewers, and other important information about your audience. Google, Hubspot and SalesForce all offer popular analytics programs.
This analysis benefits you two ways:
- Once you know which aspects of your website are attracting the most qualified leads, you know where you can focus on generating more qualified leads.
- Once you know which of your leads are the most qualified, your salespeople can focus on converting those individuals into customers.
Use Your Website To Target Qualified Leads
As you can see, qualified leads are much more valuable than other leads. By focusing your strategy not just on generating leads, but on generating qualified leads, you draw your best customers to you.
These tips will help you use your website to target your ideal leads:
- Make sure your readers know what your mission is. Readers who find your website through your blog may not be familiar with the product or service you offer. Have an author bio on your blog or clearly link back to a page about your company or product.
- When you’re creating your keyword strategy, focus on long-tail keywords. A long tail keyword is a keyword that addresses your service or product specifically. You want to work with long-tail keywords that indicate a readiness to take action. For example, instead of “business insurance,” aim your posts at people searching for a “general liability quote.”
- Make sure your CTAs are targeted at qualified leads. Your CTA is where you are asking your lead to take action and convert to a customer. Using copy that conveys relevance and value will increase your conversions. If your CTAs aren’t converting, perform A/B testing with different wording until you find the right balance of persuasive copy and relevance to your audience.
- Create content on popular topics. If your best leads come to your website through blog posts on one particular topic, then focus more of your efforts on that topic. For example, if you get your best leads from posts on general liability insurance, write more about that. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Explore more long-tail keywords around your topic that indicate a willingness to convert, and you will have a win-win content strategy on your hands.
1 qualified lead is better than 10 leads who will eventually lose interest.
Focusing your lead generation efforts on finding the most qualified leads is simply efficient. By defining your ideal lead, and targeting your lead generation efforts at those individuals, you better the odds that your website’s visitors will become paying customers.
