More and more businesses are reporting today that inbound or online marketing is becoming an increasingly important part of their business plan – and is taking a bigger bite out of their budget year after year. Not only does it cost 61% less to generate a lead through inbound marketing tactics than old and tired outbound marketing methods (HubSpot, 2012) but an increasing amount of money is being spent online.
Getting started online and maintaining a high level of interest in your brand can be difficult in the ever-changing online world, but here are some tips to ensure that your online biz stays on top:
Publish, Publish, Publish!
It’s been shown time and time again that the more often that a business publishes a blog, the more traffic they’ll get. In fact, a recent HubSpot survey revealed that those businesses that take the time to blog at least 20x per month will generate more than 5x the traffic of businesses that only blog 4 or fewer times each month.
There are a number of reasons for this: for starters, the more content you have, the more likely you are to rank high for related keywords in search engines. Another reason is that publishing regularly means that you’ll grow a dedicated readership who’ll eventually be more likely to trust you and your opinions (and therefore you product), as well as share you content on social media sites. Which brings us to our next point…
Use Social Media As A Content Distribution Channel
Don’t make the mistake of simply posting content to your company blog and waiting for organic traffic to trickle in from Google. Make use of your Facebook account, your Twitter, your LinkedIn and even your YouTube and Google+ account and publish your content there. Posting your content on you social media networks will not only generate more traffic and increase lead conversion, but it’ll also help build stronger and longer lasting relationships for you and your company.
Take The Time To Lead Segment Properly
Once you have a growing amount of content on your site, you really have to look at that content and determine where that piece of content belongs in the sales funnel. For example, an article about how your business began would be appropriate for brand new visitors and leads who are just familiarizing themselves with you and you product. A product specs page, however, would be more appropriate for someone further down the sales funnel.
Once you’ve segmented your content according to where leads the leads viewing it should be in the sales funnel, you can then craft appropriate CTAs (call-to-action) for that content. A big mistake that a lot of businesses make is that they create general “blanket” CTAs that aren’t really catering to a specific lead level. A CTA that delivers the message “Buy Now!” or “Contact Us!” to a brand new visitor who simply wants more information about your product or brand isn’t going to prove to be effective. A better and more fitting CTA for a lead at that introductory level may be an offer for a free eBook that offers tips on how they can solve a problem that they’re looking to solve. Once you have that email address, you can then continue to nurture that lead to the point that they convert to a customer. But again, it’s all about proper lead segmentation and creating appropriate CTAs to match where they are in the sales funnel.