Sales and marketing constitute an ongoing dance between you and your prospects. It can get exhausting, overwhelming, and sometimes plain discouraging, especially when you see your efforts go in vain. However, cue the right set of moves, and you can tango to the top. And the trophy you win in the process will be a loyal string of customers advocating for your brand!
Have you got your eyes on this prize? Here are nine strategies to help you generate, nurture, and convert leads.
9 Strategies to Help You Generate, Nurture and Close More Leads
1. Optimize Your Website
The plan is to increase the stickiness of your website so that the prospect stays a while. However, many things can come in the way of a seamless surfing experience. Your website may take too long to load, the design may be obsolete, it fails to inspire trust, the navigation could be unintuitive, there are too many ads, or it cannot display across varied platforms and devices. As a result, you could lose as much as 50% of your traffic!
Use the right set of tools to identify such drop-off points and patch them up so that those who visit your website at least leave enough breadcrumbs for you to pursue them at later stages. Ensure you have good hosting to provide speed and fast load, as such is VPS windows 10. You have to minimize the cognitive load, exploit negative spaces, and make content easily digestible to maintain peak engagement. Also, embed the page with the right set of call-to-action buttons (CTAs) This can be a button, message, call widget, icon, QR code (which can be created quickly using a QR code generator), or image that encourages the visitor to take advantage of the offer. And remember to protect your website domain with dmarc report!
If you want to get your content seen by more people and improve your chances of ranking higher in search engine results, then you need to optimize your content for SEO. For instance, if you have an eCommerce store and a blog where you have articles about a punch out catalog guide or eCommerce trends, make sure to optimize them for SEO. There are a number of different ways to do this. Read here a great SurferSEO review that covers all the basics. Also, you can consider moving your store to other platforms to see which fits your business the best (e.g., do you require headless commerce capabilities), such as from Shopify to WooCommerce or vice versa.
You should also ensure elements of the user experience such as the checkout process are fully optimized to minimize drop-off and convert leads to paying customers. For instance, your checkout should be optimized for mobile devices, allow a guest checkout option, use a clean and uncluttered design with minimal distractions, and offer a range of flexible payment options — for a SaaS business, for example, it’s important to enable seamless recurring payments in addition to a offering a transparent pricing model.
It’s even worth considering the type of database you’re using to underpin your site, as different setups can deliver varied results in terms of visitor engagement and user satisfaction. If you’re on the fence, this MariaDB and MySQL comparison will clear things up.
2. Launch Paid Campaigns
Sure, search engine optimization (SEO) (including mobile SEO) and content marketing will help your business grow organically and sustainably. However, if you are looking for immediate results, then paid ads are where your leads are at. Typical examples of paid lead generation campaigns include pay-per-click (PPC) ads, sponsored posts or ads on social media, banner ads, influencer marketing, etc. You could consult an agency like Amplifyed to improve the technical SEO of your website to further improve conversion rates.
Albeit they cost you money, such campaigns grant you accelerated exposure and help you connect with your target audience. However, this is a high-stakes market. Improper optimization or incorrect linking could significantly erode this strategy’s impressive return on investment (ROI). So, practice prudence before venturing down this path.
3. Bank on Word-of-Mouth Marketing
Whether lead generation or conversion, word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing remains relevant. Influencers, micro-influencers, and nano-influencers are testament to this fact as they thrive by building a successful brand community. And the popularity enjoyed by these influencers doesn’t come at the cost of trust. In fact, online reputation management is the need of the hour as 70% of consumers trust influencer recommendations just as much as real-world friends’!
Against this backdrop, it would help if you had an official referral program to amplify lead generation through WOM marketing. Offer incentives in the form of discounts, cashback, gift cards, corporate gifts, and more to truly get the word out on the innovation that you’ve got brewing.
4. Deploy Targeted Content
When it comes to lead-nurturing, targeted content can be your trusted friend at every step of the way. However, the keyword here is ‘targeted content,’ that is, content aligned with your audiences’ needs.
You may already have an idea of the different stages of the marketing funnel – awareness, interest, desire, and action. And there is no one-size-fits-all policy for luring prospects with content. For instance, blog posts and articles are more suitable for those in the awareness stage, whereas you can Post to Instagram from PC and on social media channels and email for maintaining interest. As for emails, make sure to craft them in the form of sequences. Avoid being too promotional in your email sequences, and try to provide your prospects with content that gives value and explains why they need your products/services. Similarly, case studies and whitepapers would whet desire, and webinars and product demos can trigger action.
Devise a robust content marketing strategy that caters to the audience’s interests, goals, and objectives, and you will have them moving through the funnel like a hot knife through butter!
Assaf Cohen, who runs the gaming platform Solitaire Bliss, explains, “When we launched our suite of solitaire and card games, we found that no one was discovering them. Then we started adding comprehensive guides on how to play our games. It turns out there were a lot of people searching for the rules for card games and those people end up playing our games.”
5. Omnichannel Engagement
The content delivery channel also matters as much as the type and format of content. Some people prefer to use email marketing and send cold emails to their prospects by using cold email outreach software like NotifyVisitors, Hunter.io, Mailshake, outreach.io or alternatives, while others use the power of social media and chat and sms marketing. Others prefer Whatsapp as their main communication channel, and utilize Whatsapp marketing strategies to generate leads. While drip campaigns through emails were one of the commonest lead-nurturing strategies, social media and SMS marketing campaigns are not unheard of either. Marketers must capitalize on every opportunity in this highly connected world with multiple touchpoints through omnichannel engagement. For inspiration for your next SMS marketing campaign, check out theses sales text message examples from Open Phone. To optimize their outreach efforts, marketers can leverage an SMS gateway to seamlessly integrate text messages into their omnichannel engagement strategy.
Omnichannel engagement combines the different online and offline channels to offer a singular, unified, and consistent buyer experience. This borderless system uses data-driven insights to leverage the highly effective marketing channels and their corresponding content mix to delight the customer in every possible way. Such a holistic lead-nurturing strategy will keep the prospects coming back for more!
6. Follow Up on Time
Once you have set up an omnichannel outreach system, whether it includes emails that you found through a LinkedIn email finder or social media, you need to calibrate it to connect and engage with customers at key milestones. It could be the point where the prospect has clearly intended to make the purchase or is showing signs of imminent churn.
Say, they have added items to the cart or are browsing your competitor’s website. Timely intervention at this point could play a clinching role in how things pan out.
Of course, it is not possible to manually monitor such trends or events and respond instantly. You would have to seek help from marketing automation tools or platforms to play out this part. Timely, well-planned communication with an inbound lead could be the fine line separating a lost lead from a sale. In this stage, think about offering your employees to send a referral email to the professionals who can take your marketing campaigns to the next level.
7. Retarget Cool Leads
The lead-nurturing strategies discussed so far talk about leads that are interested or disinterested in you. But what about those leads that started great only to fizzle out later? Is there hope for converting them still?
Yes, such leads can be salvaged – or even converted – through effective retargeting.
They say that 60% of customers say no four times before finally conceding with a yes. And so, you have to stay persistent and remarket to prospects who may be slipping through the cracks. Such an attempt will not only nurture existing leads that are turning cold, but also inch towards conversion as you overcome objections and push the prospect to the next stage!
8. Practice Lead Scoring
While perseverance is mission-critical to making it as a marketer, part of the art lies in knowing when to stop. After all, aggressively pursuing a lead and hounding them through cold calls using dialler software, or intrusive ads will only tarnish your brand image and do the opposite of what you wish to achieve!
Lead scoring is a wonderful science that can prevent you from falling prey to this overzealousness. It involves ranking the prospect on a scale that depicts the perceived value of each lead from an organizational perspective. The numerical value denoting the conversion probability is determined by factoring in several demographic, psychographic, and behavioral parameters. It equips marketers with a laser-sharp focus on the leads that are worth their time.
9. Measure, Track, and Optimize
As it goes for all marketing strategies, lead generation, nurturing, and conversion strategies need to undergo iterative refinement and periodic fine-tuning. After all, it is one of the most daunting tasks for any marketer. And so, you need to start by defining the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that will be used to peg the performance.
Then, you need to track them diligently for some time to set realistic benchmarks and averages. Meanwhile, you need to keep an eye on the SERP position with a rank tracker. After laying this foundation, you can perform split testing, to compare the growth trajectory to changes in the marketing strategy. Cherry-pick the ones that work to formulate the best strategy that works as the ultimate lead magnet. Rinse and repeat for exponential growth.
Conclusion
A healthy marketing funnel is a sign of a healthy business. So, don’t shy from putting in the efforts to add leads to the pipeline and keep them moving to attain accelerated profitability. While doing so, focus on the quality of leads rather than solely going for quantity.
And once everything is set in motion, use the strategies described above to capture, nurture, and convert leads. To recapitulate, here is a quick preview of the nine techniques for lead generation, nurture, and conversion:
- Optimize your website and make it user-friendly.
- Infuse long-term marketing strategies with short-term fixes like paid campaigns.
- Formulate a rewarding referral policy to incentivize WOM marketing.
- Leverage high-value, meaningful content to engage prospects across stages.
- Capitalize on omnichannel engagement to make your business accessible and approachable.
- Follow up with prospects regularly, especially when they display behavioral cues of attrition.
- Retarget cool leads through re-engagement strategies.
- Use lead scoring software to prioritize leads that are worth your time and effort.
- Measure, track, and optimize the lead generation, nurturing, and conversion strategies to improve it.
The strategies above will have you sashaying confidently to the dance floor as you wow your customers with your elegant moves!
