It’s never too early to start planning for new ways to increase lead generation in 2018. In fact, having a digital marketing strategy ready and waiting is the best way to start off the new year. 2017 has given you the opportunity to identify what’s worked, what hasn’t and what needs improvement. You have the data, the analytics and the metrics to decide where to focus your efforts. Now it’s just a matter of revamping your inbound marketing strategy with a combination of proven strategies and new approaches to increase lead conversion.
Don’t get stuck with the same tired approaches. Expand your horizons. Think outside the box and investigate some of the new lead generation approaches. There will always be a place for proven strategies like email marketing, content marketing and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
However, increasing PageRank isn’t merely a question of increasing organic and paid traffic. It’s about improving your customer’s experience, increasing customer engagement and about using a customer-centric digital marketing mindset, one where your inbound marketing strategy is driven by your customers. Knowing what they like, dislike, and the technologies they prefer will go a long way to ensuring 2018 is a success. So, how should you get started?
Review Your Marketing Technology (Martech) Stack
How do your customers communicate with the outside world? What technologies do your customers prefer? Knowing the type of tools your customers use and rely upon is vital to ensuring your inbound marketing strategy is optimized. Maybe your customers prefer to communicate via the apps on their smartphones. Maybe they prefer real-time options like Twitter. Maybe they’re gravitating to your competitors because they offer live chat. Understanding the gap in your martech stack goes a long way to ensuring that your entire digital strategy is optimized for your customers and market. This is the critical first step to making sure your company is adopting a customer-centric digital strategy.
Focus on Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
No, CRO is not an outdated approach, and no, it’s not something that will put your company in direct conflict with a customer-centric mindset. All CRO implies is that you’ll continue to raise the bar and identify new ways to improve your conversion rates. It means you’re willing to deep dive into what works, what isn’t working but should, what should be abandoned altogether and replaced, and what you can’t optimize any further. While it sounds involved, it’s really just a matter of applying some common sense. Here are some strategies to help you make CRO a goal in 2018.
1. A/B Split Testing: Test everything. Test your call-to-action, your PPC campaigns, your content, your email marketing campaigns and every digital strategy you use. The more you test, the more likely you are to optimize that specific strategy. If you’ve segmented your customer base into buyer personas, then you’ll be able to do A/B split testing across all your personas. Take the analysis all the way to your conversion rates. Don’t stop at the individual strategy. Make it a point to test all the way to the end of the line.
2. Speed of Response: Somewhere along the way digital marketing teams have forgotten about the importance of speed. It’s not just about your speed of response but also about the speed of your website and mobile platforms. As lead conversion becomes more complex, and the company’s martech stack more complete, it’s common to lose sight of the importance of a speedy platform. Be sure to check the page load times for each of your landing pages. Website performance monitoring sites like Pingdom can track your landing page’s performance by providing an in-depth review of the gaps in page load times.
3. Know your audience: One of the tools we like to use at Connection Model is a software program that heatmaps the "user experience". It provides us with insight on how each visitor intereacts with your site, what they feel is relevant or pertinent to their visit and then we reprioritize the layout, menu or options based upon aggregated user feedback
4. Simplicity, Clarity, and Purpose: Think about why some of your digital marketing strategies under-performed in 2017. Focus on some of the landing pages that failed to capture your audience’s attention. More than likely they missed the mark because of a lack of clarity and purpose. Landing pages with too many offers confuse visitors and lack clarity. Redundant messages distract prospects. Another issue can be summarized by too many links and a page that’s simply too busy to keep your audience engaged.
Focus on simplicity. Identify whom you’re targeting and why. Make sure your entire solution is centered around a single solution. Cut down on the redundancy of your offer and the overselling of your product or service. Keep it simple, to-the-point and focused on what your buyer personas want, need and value. Take that analysis beyond your landing page and use it with all your digital strategies. This means using simplicity, clarity, and purpose when producing content, email campaigns and when putting together your digital advertisements.
5. Back to Basics: It’s easy to get sidetracked and ignore the basics when you’re managing multiple channels and trying to appeal to different buyer personas. Now’s the time to take a step back. Review your sales copy. Revamp your calls to action. Revisit some of your content pieces and eliminate redundant and repetitive content. Recommit yourself to originality by using your own videos and images.
Leverage customer testimonials and focus on how you can reconnect with specific buyer personas. Determine where conversion rates on specific landing pages are less than acceptable and why. Did you clearly convey your product’s value? Did you fail to create a sense of urgency with your offers? Were your special discounts, rebates, and promotions not enticing enough? Did you ignore the importance of social media? Did you employ too much of a sales pitch and not enough of a branding strategy?
Understanding where you went wrong allows you to itemize the strategies you must improve in 2018 and beyond. Now is that time.
Increasing conversion rates doesn't merely involve scrapping your entire inbound marketing strategy and starting from scratch. It means identifying what's working. It means backtracking results and seeing where you went wrong and it means having the martech stack to keep up with your customer's communication demands.
If you need help upgrading or revamping your inbound marketing strategy, then call us and request an assessment. Find out how we can help your business grow in 2018.
Written By: Doug Milnor
