Converting Visitors into Leads

Inbound marketing is about using marketing to bring potential customers to you, rather than having your marketing efforts fight for their attention. It’s about creating and sharing content with the world.

By creating content specifically designed to appeal to your ideal customers, inbound marketing attracts qualified prospects to your business and keeps them coming back.

Inbound marketing is a strategy that utilizes many forms of pull marketing – content marketing, blogs, events, SEO, social media and more – to create brand awareness and attract new business.

So, what’s the best way to turn strangers into customers and promoters of your business?

Let’s find out!

1) Attract

You don’t just want any traffic to your site, you want the right traffic, i.e. people who are most likely to become leads, and, ultimately, happy customers. To find your ideal customers, you need to known your buyer personas.

Personas encompass the goals, challenges, pain points, common objections to products, as well as personal and demographic information shared among all members of that particular customer type.

Some of the most important tools to attract the right users to your site are:

– Blogging: A blog is the single best way to attract new visitors to your website. In order to get found by the right prospective customers, you must create content that speaks to them and answers their questions.

– SEO: Your customers begin their buying process online, usually by using a search engine. So, you need to make sure you’re appearing prominently when and where they search.

– Website Pages: Your website pages are your digital storefront. Optimize your website to appeal to your ideal buyers and transform your website into a provider of helpful content to entice the right people to visit your pages.

– Social Publishing: This allows you to share valuable information, engage with your prospects, and put a human face to your brand. Interact on the networks where your ideal buyers spend their time.

2) Convert

Once you’ve attracted website visitors, the next step is to convert those visitors into leads by gathering their contact information. At the very least, you’ll need their email addresses. Contact information is the most valuable asset there is to the online marketer.

So in order for your visitors to offer it willingly, you need to offer them something in return! That “payment” comes in the form of content, like e-books or whitepapers – whatever information would be interesting and valuable to each of your personas.

Some of the most important tools in converting visitors to leads include: 

– Forms: In order for visitors to become leads, they must fill out a form and submit their information. Optimize your form to make this step of the conversion process as easy as possible.

– Calls-to-Action: These are buttons or links that encourage your visitors to take action, like “Attend a Webinar.” If you don’t have enough calls-to-action or they aren’t enticing enough, you won’t generate leads.

– Landing Pages: When a website visitor clicks on a call-to-action, they should then be sent to a landing page. This is where the offer is fulfilled, and where the prospect submits information that you can use to begin a conversation with them.

– Contacts: Keep track of the leads you’re converting in a centralized marketing database. Having all your data in one place helps you make sense out of every interaction you’ve had with your contacts – be it through email, a landing page, social media, or otherwise.

3) Close

You’ve attracted the right visitors and converted the right leads, but now you need to transform those leads into customers.

How can you most effectively accomplish this? Certain marketing tools can be used at this stage to make sure that you’re closing the right leads at the right times.

Closing tools include:

– Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Keep track of the details about all the contacts and companies in your pipeline, and easily get in touch with the right prospects at the right time. CRM systems facilitate sales by making sure you have the right information available to better engage with prospects.

– Closed-Loop Reporting: How do you know which marketing efforts are bringing in the best leads? Is your sales team effectively closing those leads into customers? Integration with your CRM system allows you to analyze just how well your marketing and sales teams are playing together.

– Email: What do you do if a visitor clicks on your call-to-action or fills out a form, but still isn’t ready to become a customer? A series of emails focused on useful, relevant content can build trust with a prospect and help them become ready to buy.

– Marketing Automation: This process involves creating email marketing and lead nurturing tailored to the needs and lifecycle stage of each lead.

4) Delight

Just because someone has already become a customer, doesn’t mean you can forget about them! Companies continue to engage with, delight, and (hopefully) upsell their current customer base into happy promoters of the organizations and products that they use.

Tools used to delight customers include:

– Surveys: The best way to figure out what your users want is by asking them. Use feedback from surveys to ensure you’re providing customers with what they’re looking for.

– Smart Calls-to-Action: These present different users with offers that change based on buyer persona and lifecycle stage.

– Smart Text: Provide your existing customers with content tailored to them. Help them achieve their own goals, as well as introduce new products or features that might be of interest.

– Social Monitoring: Keep track of the social conversations that matter to you most. Listen out for your customers’ questions, comments, likes, and dislikes – and reach out to them with relevant content.