In the business world, leads can be everything. They can be the difference between a bad month, a good month or a great month. You need leads to make sales, and you need sales to make money. And because of the nature of lead conversion, you’re going to need plenty of leads in order to have success. Most companies have a lead conversion rate that hovers around 2.35 percent – anything above 5 percent is considered exemplary. Think about that for a second: what other competition or field considers a 90+ percent failure rate to be a resounding success?
If you’re struggling to generate leads online, here are four ways to help bolster your efforts:
Produce more content
Opinions may vary in this regard, but nothing is more important than content for effective inbound marketing. Content is what draws the visitors in, and if you’re not bringing in ample visitors, you’re not going to get many leads. We’ll talk about content offers in a moment, but this tip refers to blogs. However many blogs you’re producing on a weekly basis, it’s probably not enough. You should be posting 2-3 blogs a week at minimum, but blogging daily is really ideal. And those blogs need to be relevant to the market/field you’re in. Which carries us into the next tip…
Evaluate your keywords
When you started the inbound marketing process, you should have determined which keywords are used most often in searches for your market/field. Choosing the right keywords is essential, because you need to appear often in Google search results in order to have success. Take a long, hard look at your keywords. Are they the most common search terms in your market/field? Are they the words your potential customer is going to use to find your products/services?
If you’re happy with your keywords, then evaluate how you’re using them. Every blog headline should have 1-2 keywords, and you should be sprinkling them liberally throughout blog articles.
Improve your content offers
If you’ll indulge a baseball analogy for a moment, your content offers are the closers – the flame-throwing pitchers that come in to slam the door and clinch the victory.
Your blogs are going to bring the people in, but great content offers are what seal the deal. These content offers need to appear valuable enough to convince a visitor to provide their contact information in exchange for them. A good way to determine the strength of your content offers is to compare your traffic numbers to your lead numbers. The ratio is going to look bad regardless, but if less than 2 percent of your visitors are becoming leads, then your content offers simply aren’t good enough.
Cross promote
This is going to boost your traffic above all else, but remember, the higher your traffic is, the more lead opportunities you’ll have. Make sure you’re providing links to your content regularly on social media. Not only will this bolster your social media following, it will also bring more traffic to your website. Additionally, provide social media sharing buttons on your website. This allows visitors to do some of the heavy lifting for you, by promoting your content to their friends and family.
Topics: Inbound Marketing
