A lot of our clients care deeply about the leads that they're generating and the quality of those leads. (We always say if it doesn't make money, it doesn't make sense.)
Having website traffic is great, but you want to keep pushing those users down the marketing funnel to become a lead and eventually become a paying customer. In this article, find out the true meaning of what a lead is, lead generation strategy, and proven methods to capturing more leads.
So let's dive right in here first with the true meaning of what a lead is and why they are important for your business.
Watch our webinar here on "How to Capture More Leads", or keep reading below:
The True Meaning of a Lead
One of the things that we get asked the most is what's the difference between a visitor and a lead? If you've got 1,900 people coming to your website. That's great. But what does that mean as far as marketing and sales? All in all website traffic is important, but it's not everything.
At LAIRE, we love seeing traffic increases, but if that increased traffic is not qualified, relevant traffic, it doesn't do your company any good. As marketers, we want to make sure that the people that are coming to your website are people who are actually going to be interested and engaged, and we want to also include conversion opportunities across your site so that those people - the relevant, interested people that really could benefit from your product or service - have a chance to convert and become actionable leads.
What's the Difference? Lead vs. Visitor
A lead is anybody who's interacted on your website and given your company more information about themselves. A website visitor is somebody who's come to the site, but they might not actually be interested in your product or services. Here is an example of how someone goes from being a visitor to a lead.
Example: Maybe on one of your blogs, a user sees a downloadable guide that interests them and gives them a little bit more information about whatever problem they're trying to solve. In exchange for getting the guide, they give you some high-level information. They may give you their name, email, and company name on a form on a landing page. After giving over this additional information about themselves, they will then be converted to a lead in your system.
Lead Generation Through the Inbound Methodology
At the heart of the inbound approach is relevant, educational content. Content is a useful tool to utilize in order to attract your ideal audience and convert them into leads. Let's look at a real-life example of how content is used to bring more leads to your site.
Example: If somebody you know has a problem, they will probably turn to Google for help. Do they have a bump on their arm? They've already probably thought through all the possibilities of what could have caused the bump. By giving them a helpful resource on a search engine about what could have caused the bump, you now have the opportunity to provide them with a solution to their problem after they've landed on your site. There are all kinds of different ways to bring people into your site, but having helpful, relevant content is a great place to start.
Lead Generation Strategy
We like to use the term "lead generation strategy" when building websites and the website's foundation. But under the strategy umbrella, you should also be considering what your overall goal is.
When you're creating a website, you're not just creating it to be this beautiful website. You can have the most beautiful website in the world but if people don't find it, then it doesn't make any sense. So, how do you create a lead generation strategy?
How to Create a Lead Generation Strategy
- Look at the analytics. Start by looking to see how much traffic is getting to the site. What are the keywords that the site is already ranking for? Are there gaps? Are there holes in content that need to be filled?
- Create a content plan. To come up with content ideas, target relevant keywords that will get your site good, qualified traffic. As you are starting out, you may want to capitalize on keywords that have lower monthly volume and difficulty score in order for your content to pick up steam. After you have had a steady traffic for a while, then you can begin to target those more difficult keywords. Remember: Marketing efforts take time. Sometimes it takes a while for blogs, content offers, and website pages to "catch fire."
- Identify conversion opportunities. If you're not converting, that's a problem. Start by looking at areas on the website that we can add conversion opportunities. Now, taking a step back from that, do you have any content for people to convert with? If you don't have any downloadable content or anything that we could what we call a gated offer on the website, we would want to start there first. You will want to give visitors something of value that people would want to exchange for their personal information in order to allow them to convert into leads.
- Execute your strategy. Having a strategy is great, but at the end of the day, you have to execute. If you don't execute as a marketer, you won't be able to reap the benefits of your marketing strategy.
Example of a Lead Generation Strategy in Action
At LAIRE, we've been working on a new company that has a fast product platform. When entering into these conversations, we know at a high-level the things that we need to pull together to make our marketing efforts successful. These things include: data, a content strategy, customer pain points, and understanding the business's unique definition of a qualified lead.
The Journey to Creating a Lead Generation Strategy
- When creating a lead generation strategy, we always start out by looking at the data for content ideas. (The numbers don't lie, and it is a good baseline to look at before jumping into any marketing initiatives.) What are the questions your ideal customers have about your products or services? Can you convert that into a blog or a content offer?
- Then, we ask ourselves about the customer's pain points. What are they looking for? What are their problems? What do they need? What do you need to help you be more successful in your sales?
- After that, we partner with the sales team to figure out what a qualified lead looks like for their business. What qualities do those potential buyers have? What do they come in struggling with? Oftentimes businesses think, "Oh! We can serve anyone and everyone. Everybody's a good customer!" But at the end of the day, that's not true. And, the businesses that are really successful know exactly who their end target is.
Now, let's talk about some tactical tips your team can use to produce a successful lead generation campaigns.
Tactical Tips for Lead Generation
1. Perform Keyword Research
Let's say you are a marketing automation platform. You can try and go after the keyword "marketing automation platform." But, that is an extremely highly competitive keyword. It's also very broad. So, instead of using the keyword "marketing automation platform," you may want to try and capitalize on some deeper, segmented searches like "marketing automation platform for technology" or "marketing automation platform that does X." Those keywords are what we call long-tail keywords. They typically have a lower search volume but the intent is a lot higher.
2. Utilize FAQ Pages
By capturing Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) that your customers have, you can create an FAQ page to answer the questions customers usually have about your product or service. This will help both your potential customers and sales team with answering all the necessary questions before starting a sales conversation.
3. Know Your Marketing Budget
The one major thing to consider with all of your marketing efforts is going to be that ugly B-word: budget. What is your marketing budget for the year? Are you setting aside enough money for marketing? Are you using that marketing budget to the best of your ability?
4. Get Customer Feedback
By collecting customer feedback, you can take customer pain points and fix problems as you're getting feedback. Instead of letting problems go unresolved for a long period of time, it's good to ask your customer base how you can do better as a company to enhance their experience and help you bring in more customers in the long-run.
5. Use Email Marketing
What you have to do in terms of competitive advantage is to make sure that you're taking as many of the opportunities as you can to nurture your prospects. Email is a great way to do that. If your competitor is doing email marketing automation and you're not, there's a gap that needs to be filled. With email marketing, you can send more relevant, educational content to prospects to help them decide if your products or services is a fit for them.
So, we've discussed the differences between a lead and visitor, and we touched on the actionable ways you can create a lead generating strategy. Next, let's talk about the digital marketing metrics you should look at to determine if your lead generating campaigns are succeeding or not.
Digital Marketing Reporting & ROI
One of the worst things you could do is to set up a marketing campaign and forget it in hopes that it's performing. We can't tell you how many times we've started working with a company that has live campaign, but they haven't tracked its performance. As a marketer, it's critical to go back and look at your campaign metrics. Here are some of the metrics you should and shouldn't look at to project campaign success.
What Marketing Metrics Should You NOT Look At?
Let's start by discussing vanity metrics and why they aren't an indicator of marketing success. Vanity metrics are metrics like impressions, page views, social media likes, and trial users.
They're nice numbers to have. And when they're increasing, it feels great! But it doesn't necessarily mean that your marketing is working because it doesn't necessarily give you anything you can tweak or change to improve upon. All in all, vanity metrics don't give you the kind of information you can act on. So, what KPI's should your team look at?
Marketing KPIs You Need to Track
When you're trying to come up with KPI's, you really want to track KPI's that align with your SMART goals. SMART goals are goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely. You don't want to just say "someday we want to have 100 contacts in our list." That goal isn't specific or timely. A better goal would be " we want to have 100 contacts from organic search by December."
After setting your SMART goals, it's time to decide what metrics will help you track those goals.
Here are some common metrics marketers track to capture website growth:
- Lead to Customer Ratio - If your marketing team is bringing in leads but the sales team isn't closing them or believes that the leads are unqualified, we should change the messaging that we're using or add in other layers to qualify them better. As marketers, we don't want the sales team to waste their time with unqualified leads. Aligning your sales and marketing effort is essential for business success, and having those ongoing conversations with your sales team will enable more revenue for your business.
- Organic Traffic Sessions - Organic traffic is the kind of traffic that you get organically through searches. We sometimes like to call it free traffic because you're not paying Google or Facebook to get that traffic. If your site is ranking higher in Google search, you will in turn be more likely to have more sessions. You can increase your organic sessions by writing relevant, long-form content that meet search intent.
- Landing Page Conversion Rate - You want to make sure that your landing pages are converting. If you're doing paid ads and you're sending the visitor to a landing page to download a content offer for your product or service, you want to make sure that your audience is actually converting on the page. If there are many landing page sessions but you have a low conversion rate, you may need to optimize the ad or landing page messaging to be cohesive with the content offer you are providing.
- Cost per Lead - How much is a lead costing your business? By calculating the average lead cost, your team will be able to present C-level executives with information about their Return on Investment and the value of marketing.
Capture More Leads with Inbound Marketing
If you are having issues capturing leads, there are different tactics you can utilize to convert leads on your site. Whether you need to add more conversion opportunities or you need to tweak your website's messaging to hit on customer pain points, there is always room for improvement. So if you are ready to bring in more leads, download the "How to Run an Inbound Campaign" Checklist to create a growth-driven campaign that works.
Speaker 1 [00:00:01] OK, welcome to this month's edition of the LAIRE webinar. I'm Josh Horton alongside Kristen Cahill, and we're a couple of account executives here at LAIRE, and we love to talk about capturing more leads. That's a big part of our jobs. And a lot of our clients care deeply about the leads and the you know, that they're generating and the quality of those leads and turning them into business. And ultimately, we always say if it doesn't make money, it doesn't really make sense. So sorry for the technical difficulties that we had with our link today. Unfortunately, YouTube Live didn't like us today. But we're recording this over Zoom today and making sure we get it out to those of you who did in fact register ahead of time. So, Kristen, this is a big thing that a lot of our clients talk about, capturing more leads, generating more leads. You know, a lot of times we're talking to our clients about, OK, website traffic is important and leads are important and all of these things are important. So with kind of our webinar strategy going month by month, I'm talking about things that we get asked a lot about. So we're we're excited to dove in a lot. And I know you care deeply about leads too.
Speaker 2 [00:01:14] Yeah, absolutely. Visitors are one thing, but leads are what's really important. So let's go ahead and dive in.
Speaker 1 [00:01:22] And then just to give you all a little update of what we are going to cover here today. First of all, jump into a high level overview of the true meaning of a lead. So there is marketing qualified leads, sales qualified leads, disqualified leads, all of those. And we'll we'll talk about those first, then we'll jump into the actual lead gen strategy, you know, figure out who you need to involve, what you need to do, when you need to do it, and all that. And then the third part will cover in this webinar is actually generating. So talking about the leads first and then diving into how we can actually generate those through different tactics that we use and that we've seen have been successful for our clients here. And the last thing that's important is how to tell if it's working. So the the nice thing about inbound marketing in general is you can really understand whether or not your strategies and tactics are working based on the data that is is readily available to you through those different KPIs. And Christine's got a ton of KPIs to talk about. So that is a big part of this overall strategy and one that really the decision makers need to know at all times to justify the amount of money they're spending on their marketing efforts. So, dive right in here first with the, you know, the true meaning of a website, traffic is important. We love to see traffic go up. We love to see new visitors especially coming to the site. But there is some sort of vanity metric component to that where, yeah, your website traffic is going up great. But why is it going up? Is it relevant? Are people bouncing right away? Different things like that. So we need to make sure that the website is generating that right kind of traffic. And Kristen, I know in your experience you've seen a lot of instances where website traffic is going up, but the new contacts aren't necessarily going up. So we took a screenshot here today to kind of show a scenario there. Can you talk the viewers through and what's happening here on the slide show? Here's what's happening here on the screenshot and what it means.
Speaker 2 [00:03:28] Absolutely. So, as you said, one of the things that we get asked the most is what's the difference between a visitor and a lead? I've got nineteen hundred people coming to our website. That's great. But what does that mean as far as marketing and sales? So, as you mentioned, vanity metrics will definitely talk more about this and we get to KPIs, but we do want to keep seeing traffic increase. But if that increased traffic is not relevant traffic, if it's not people who are actually interested in your product or service, then that really doesn't do any good. We want to make sure that the people that are coming to your website are people who are actually going to be interested and engaged. And we want to also include conversion opportunities across your site so that those people, the relevant, interested people that really could benefit from your product or service to convert and become actual leads. A lead from our perspective, is just anybody who's interacted on your website and given us information of visitors to somebody who's come to the site, they made a click the blog through social media or, you know, search for something and come up with a post that you guys have that's relevant to them, but they might not actually be interested in you. A lead, on the other hand, is someone who engages further. Maybe on that blog they see a downloadable ebook that interests them that kind of helps give them a little bit more information about whatever problem they're trying to solve. And so in exchange for that great relevant content that you have on your website. They're going to give you some information like their name, their email, maybe what company or industry that they're in. Typically, you don't want to ask a whole lot of information, I believe, because they're just somebody who's starting to get to know who you are. But that's kind of a great starting point.
Speaker 1 [00:05:15] And just at a high level, can you kind of explain to the viewers here what the inbound methodology is? I know we talk a lot about that attract, convert, delight, and also the awareness consideration decision.
Speaker 2 [00:05:29] Absolutely. So the inbound approach is one of generating really helpful, relevant context. So if somebody has a problem and they're Google searching what that problem is, they have a bump on my arm. I'm not sure if it's a bug bite or if I just banged myself into a table. They're going to start by searching, hey, you know, bump on my arm. Looks like a big red, a knot, what would that be? And then they're going to start diving in and looking to see what that might be. So by giving them helpful, relevant content, you might say, OK, yeah, that looks like a spider bite. You should probably go to the doctor or just keep an eye on it for a little bit and see if it changes. You know, there's different solutions to that problem. If you're a doctor, for example, you could say, hey, here's an appointment scheduler, go ahead and get scheduled for our doctor to come in and for you to come in and check it out. So there's all kinds of different ways to bring people in. But having that helpful, relevant content to start is a great place to go.
Speaker 1 [00:06:39] And I think to when we're looking at keywords that we're trying to optimize for the kind of website traffic that we want, the biggest proponent of that is knowing who your buyer is. And we'll talk a little bit more about buyer personas later in the webinar. But that's a big deal. You know, if you're if you are seeing website traffic increase at high rates without relevant new or new contacts coming in as well, then, you know, there might be a problem with your messaging or you might be seeing, you know, you really want to monitor where most of your traffic is coming from. So if you've got, let's to say, in this example, here are two thousand new visitors and that's a 50 percent increase month over month. You should ideally see contacts go in line with that. There's all sorts of different variables that can go into it. So you might have had a popular social media post or popular blog post that is relevant to your current customers or people who are currently leads already or people just familiar with your brand. So that might be why they did so, not just taking a look at this and saying, oh, no, my sessions are up, my new contacts are down. You know, no need to panic right away, really just looking in further at the data. And that'll be a big part of what we talk about later in the in the webinar is understanding how to look at your data and those KPIs that you should be tracking and how to make decisions based on those as a as an important influencer. So the the next question that I have or the next portion of this webinar, so to speak, is that lead generation strategy. So this truly is the first step in turning your website into a lead generation machine, we like to use that term a lot. We build a lot of websites and the website is the foundation, but you should also be considering what your overall goal is. So when you're creating a website, you're not just creating it to be this beautiful website that you can have the most beautiful website in the world. But if people don't find it, then it doesn't make any sense. So what are your most important things to consider in a lead generation strategy?
Speaker 2 [00:08:51] Sure. So the place that I always start is by looking at your analytics to your point, you can have an amazing site that with the right amount of traffic converts ninety-five percent of your visitors to leave. But if nobody finds it, then it's not going to do any good. So I would start by looking to see how much traffic is getting to the site. What are the keywords that the sites already ranking for? Are there gaps? Are there obvious holes of content that we don't have that people are searching for? So typically that's where I would start. And then with that in mind, looking at those keywords and looking at the type of content you have already, I would say let's fill in those gaps. Let's create a content plan. Let's target relevant keywords that get good traffic and that we can try and rank for. Maybe they're not as difficult that that would be the first place as far as getting people to your website. While you're building that, because that unfortunately doesn't happen overnight, every new blog and every new web page that you put out is great. It helps increase the value for your site, but it doesn't necessarily bring in thousands of new people in a day or even a week or even six months. Sometimes it takes a while for those posts and those blogs to kind of catch catch fire, so to speak. And so in the background, even if you start with one hundred visitors a month, even if you're starting very small, looking at your website, it could be beautiful. But is it converting? If you're not converting, that's a problem. That that means that we have a lot of work to do. So start by looking at areas on the website that we can add conversion opportunities. Now, taking a step back from that, do you have any content for people to convert with if you don't have any downloadable content or any thing that we could what we call gate on the website through a form. We would want to start there first so that we have something that's valuable that people want to exchange their precious, precious data for. So creating a content strategy from that perspective, it's not just blogs. It's not just website pages. It also includes white papers or case studies or awareness level checklists, things like that that can just get people started. There's different content. You mentioned the awareness levels. There's different types of content for each stage of the buyer's journey. So, you know, that example I used earlier with the doctor's visit, if I've got a bite on my arm, there might be some some different checklist items that I might want to look for. What does it look like? Is it swelling, were you recently in the woods and things like that that could help narrow down what your actual ailment is. For another industry, it might be getting started with crowd migration. What are the things they need to keep in mind as I'm starting to think about this? So that could be really great awareness level contact. A case study could be more consideration that people that have kind of figured out that they know they have a specific solution they're looking for, but they haven't quite figured out who they want to work with. So if you have a case study that depicts a time that your company did something really well for a customer, that helps people to learn how you work with customers and the success that they could have if they partnered with you, and then decision level content would be something like a demo or a consultation. At that point, they're very heavily considering working with you and they're just kind of at that that tipping point of making that final decision. So having that consultation with your sales team could be that final step in bringing them fully on board. So really, making sure that you have a well-rounded content plan is incredibly important as far as Legion strategy.
Speaker 1 [00:12:59] Sure. And one of the things, too, that we see a lot in the onboarding process is, you know, if we come across a new client, oftentimes when we're explaining that inbound methodology and the buyer's journey, if there is concern that the company usually has content to start with, most of that content usually falls in that decision stage. So just thinking of manufacturers, for example, you can go to a manufacturer site and probably that homepage will feel like, oh, well, that's a metal manufacturer based on their, you know, their home page or whatever. And then you go and you say, OK, well, I can do I can submit a quote or that's about it. So one of the things that we try to do is, is fill in those gaps. What is what is the journey that that buyer takes from the moment they realize they have a problem or an opportunity until the moment they solve that problem or opportunity. And another great thing too, that HubSpot really did in the past years. They've really changed that mindset from a funnel to a flywheel. And also keeping in mind that the delight stage is a pretty big part of that. Now, it's always cheaper to go out and have a repeat customer than it is to generate a new business. So make sure in your strategy you're optimizing for all of those things. And there are some great ideas there that the Kristen had for the awareness stage. You know, those checklists that we talk about. And if you're on a lot of accounts and you've got a ton of experience in marketing, so what is it what would be an example of a client that you've seen kind of come in and they didn't really have much content along the lines of that awareness stage or that consideration stage, and then you've implemented some strategies and tactics to then solve for that and really fill the top of that.
Speaker 2 [00:14:50] Sure. So I've worked with, as you said, a lot of different clients. Specific example is this company that that we've worked with where they do equipment financing. And so, again, they were a perfect example of they came in, they had a lot of stick to our sales team apply for a loan, that kind of thing. But not everybody's ready. The first time they come to your site, they don't know you necessarily. They don't trust you. Not that they don't like you necessarily, but they just don't know you at all. And you really need to build that trust, especially if you're a company where your your price point is very high. You really need to to know, like and trust the people that you're working with. And, you know, we see it all the time with the big brands. Doritos spends a lot of money at the Super Bowl just to make sure that people are thinking of them. They're gaining that trust just by repetitive nature of kind of putting those commercials that will not every business can put out a five million dollar commercial. So we need to be a little bit more tactical in our approach. And so creating content like steps to get ready for for applying for a loan or what are all of the what's all the paperwork that you need to gather those kinds of checklists. We put together a guide for people, all of the things you need to think about when you're, you know, starting an equipment financing opportunity, and why you might want to do that and all of this. It helps just kind of bridge that gap between, you know, I really want to buy a new piece of equipment and I really want to take this company to be my partner. It makes you buy that company by us putting out that information. It puts that company as the authority it shows. And we know what we're talking about. And we're also here to help you. We're not just trying to take your money. And that's really important.
Speaker 1 [00:16:45] I think that that's a great example, which kind of leads us right into the you know, that those tactical steps that we're talking about, you know, having that strategy is great. But at the end of the day, you have to you don't execute as a marketer. There's going to be people who are going to be upset or there's going to be you know, they're going to be consequences. People invest in marketing so they can make money. And that's that's something where having that strategy and having that website that set up correctly is important, but then going through and actually executing is another thing. So I think you brought up a great point from an equipment financing standpoint and Doritos. You think of Doritos, everybody likes Doritos. But I can forget that I like Doritos. But if I see a Super Bowl commercial, I will remember. Oh, those are pretty great. I'm going to go out and buy some. Whereas, you know, the to bring that over to the manufacturing side or the financing or any other industry that has a longer sales process that really, I think solidifies the importance for consistent content and relevant content over time. Because if I'm if I'm running a construction company, I might know that I need three new bulldozers. So I might be researching in July because I've got so many jobs and I know that it's been a tough year. So I'm going to need new equipment the following year. But then when I might research it kind of high level and dry and then come back to it when the seasons. Not as not as busy and let's say January, but where the this company comes in is they can be creating relevant content every month, every week, every month, every quarter, and pushing it to, you know, that that person who's actively searching for their product. So I think that's a great opportunity. And that also stresses the importance of that top of the funnel opportunity where somebody can say, OK, I want this equipment financing checklist or preventative maintenance checklist for my bulldozer. So they might download that. And if they download in July, you nurture them all the way until they're ready to go out and seek that new solution. So is that something that you've done in terms of a tactic? But it just kind of walk our viewers here through through the process of, you know, from putting together that strategy for the whole buyer's journey to actually.
Speaker 2 [00:19:05] Absolutely. So another example that we've actually been working on recently is a new company that has a SaaS product platform. And, you know, we know at a high level the things that we need to put together in order to make that marketing effort successful. You know, optimizing the website, as I mentioned earlier, you want to start there blogging and putting out relevant, helpful content is great. But this is a company where they might have a new product. You might not know it. So the best place and this is something that HubSpot says and lots of people say sales and marketing, a lot of times they don't talk to each other all that often. And that makes our job very difficult. At the end of the day, we're not the ones talking to the customers directly and having those one on one really great conversation. So the place I always like to start when trying to brainstorm content, you can look at the analytics, you can look at the data, but really going straight to the source. And what are these people's pain points? What are they looking for? What are their problems? What do they need? What do you need to help you be more successful in your sales? We'll talk a little bit more about KPIs, but this leads into that. So I'm really asking we talked a little bit about what a what a lead is and what a qualified lead is. What qualities do those people have? What what do they come in struggling with? Oftentimes, businesses think, oh, we can serve everybody, we can. Everybody is a good customer. At the end of the day, that's not true. And the businesses that are really successful, they know that they know exactly who their end target is. They know those buyers personas. They know exactly what their demographic is. They know what roles they're in. They know what exactly they need. And they also know the pain points that their product or service score. So having that information, armed with that information, we can take that, turn it into great content and then build out that that strategy. We can also, FAQs is huge. If if I have a question that I've been trying to figure out and you're the person who can answer it, I'm automatically have more faith in you.
Speaker 1 [00:21:30] And you talk about I think is real quick to jump in. That's a great place to start. You don't have any concerns and it's also a nice way to align sales marketing in your in your organization, because the marketing team is going to have to talk to the sales team and the talks are going to be, you know, they're not going to be screaming matches. This talk is going to be OK. Sales guy, I'm the marketer. I want to go and I want to create content that I know your people, the people are prospects that you're working with are asking you. So if I'm a salesperson, I'll say, yeah, here are the 20 questions I get the most and here's how I answer them. And then the marketing person goes and they create content for all of that. And then you talk about the advantage from an SEO perspective of having that FAQ section and how having enough FAQ ties will launch keywords and ultimately more context.
Speaker 2 [00:22:18] Absolutely. So we talked about doing keyword research earlier. If you are, let's just say a marketing automation platform, you can try and go after the keyword marketing automation platform. But that is a really, really highly competitive keyword. It's also very broad. So a way to try and capitalize on some deeper, more segmented searches is marketing automation platform for technology or marketing automation platform that does X and those kinds of keywords are what we call longtail keywords, and they typically have a lower search volume, but the intent is a lot higher. It's clearer. How do I set up my marketing email automation? That is a very clear question. And the content that would pop up would be helpful, hopefully helpful, relevant answers to that question. So by using those ethical questions that your sales team has, you can create an ethical page. You can create a blog post. You can do a lot of times people do comparison, contrast, HubSpot versus Marquito and things like that, that people are just looking for information. You can capitalize on that. But if you don't know what it is that people are asking when they get to the sales team, it's hard to know what content to create around this. So, yeah, definitely a great, great place to start.
Speaker 1 [00:23:47] And the one major thing to consider with all of your marketing efforts is going to be that that ugly B word, a budget. So talking about budget and where what is your marketing budget for the year? Are you setting aside enough money for marketing? Are you using that marketing budget to the best of your ability? So it all on one platform like HubSpot might not be a great fit for everybody, but depending on what you're trying to accomplish, what the size of your company is and what you what your end goal is, you know, there are plenty of companies out there right now who have a marketing budget that supports or supports HubSpot, but they might be using all sorts of different platforms.
Speaker 2 [00:24:28] And they might be.
Speaker 1 [00:24:31] Yeah, exactly. They could be using a spreadsheet as their CRM and using MailChimp as their marketing automation platform. They could be using something like Opt In Monster to get some leads. You know what something like HubSpot does. And in a lot of cases and pretty much every case for all our clients is a they'll have their website on HubSpot, they'll have the marketing on HubSpot, you know, blog on HubSpot. Anything that they do that is related to marketing and sales for the most part can all go into HubSpot, which is really great. But on that same token, you know, not everybody tuning into this webinar is HubSpot. It's not going to be in their budget range or, you know, they might be a one man show or a one woman show. So the the tactics that we're talking through here, they're relevant. You can do them across many different platforms in many different ways. We just talk about HubSpot because it's a great way to put it all into one place. But we certainly understand if you're a one person show and you're running a smaller business, you still want to practice office. Definitely do it. You're going to get the advantages know as you grow. That's when you grow into something like HubSpot or, you know, the really, really big companies using CRM like Salesforce. So there is a great way to think about all the tactics and, you know, something like HubSpot, just not to keep talking about HubSpot, but basically not do it for you. But there are some great templates in there and it really HubSpot is a program where you kind of follow the bouncing ball. And I think that's why they've been so successful once they've made the user experience really, really easy for their customers.
Speaker 2 [00:26:14] Absolutely. And one last thing before we transition off of that is they also take speaking of taking people's pain points and turning into relevant content, they take pain points and go ahead and fix problems or add new features as they're there getting that feedback, which is really helpful. One thing we didn't touch on yet that I do want to kind of circle back on is email and automation. We kind of talked at a high level. But the example that you spoke about earlier with the, you know, the business owner who wanted to buy some new equipment, that's where email automation really comes into play. If somebody searches in July, as you said, they find your company and they think, oh, this could be a great, great company that could help me. But they're not quite ready for that next step. I do this all the time. I think, oh, I want to maybe get my hair cut in a few weeks. Let me do some research. Let me look around at hair salons. But I'm not necessarily going to go ahead and put that appointment today. I'll circle back and I'll do it at a later time. The people who are going to keep you know, I'm going to keep top of mind are the people who are going to continue to reach out. They're going to continue to give me helpful, relevant content. So that gentleman who's searching for an equipment loan, if he never hears from your company again, you might do another Google search. And maybe this time he finds somebody else. He goes with that company. If you're able to continue to reach out and give helpful, useful contact via email, he's much more likely than to choose your business when it comes time to actually make
Speaker 1 [00:27:48] that next step. Or he may have also downloaded another offer from another company and maybe it's some sort of loan calculator from a competitor. So, you know, certainly competition is great for the end product for us as consumers. But where you have to do in terms of competitive advantage is making sure that you are taking as much of the opportunities you can to nurture your prospects and doing that through marketing automation, and email is a great way to do that, because if your competitor is doing marketing automation and you're not, there's going to be there's no no chance for them to forget about email. But certainly human error, you know people get busy.
Speaker 2 [00:28:29] It happens. And the last thing on this list is marketing analytics. And I know we touched a little bit on that and we'll be diving into this. But you know the worst thing. Well, not the worst thing, but one of the worst things you could do is to set up that email automation, set it and forget it, never look at it again and just hope that it's performing. I can't tell you how many times I've started working with a company who's had an email like that where they had an email automation and they wrote it. They put it out there in it. Every time somebody downloads that shopping guide, cool, they're getting an email. But is it performing? Are people engaging with it or are they even clicking on the email to open it? Is your subject line engaging
Speaker 1 [00:29:09] and what do you want them to do after
Speaker 2 [00:29:10] that? Right. What's the next step? Are you driving them to an end goal rather than just sending them emails for the sake of sending emails? So that's something that we always want to do, is go back and look. And if you set out a campaign, let's give it a little time, maybe six weeks to kind of marinate and get you some data, but then look back and see how is it performing? Are there emails that are open? Rates are better. How can we change this content to copy to make people convert or click through at a higher rate? So all of these tactics that we're talking about are really important, but making sure that you're monitoring their performance is also very important.
Speaker 1 [00:29:54] Yeah. One quick final thing to kind of wrap up the tactics and also to tie it back to the strategy is, you know, you can't do all of the tactics all at once and for certain tactics might work better for other industries and all that. So it's all about figuring out what works for you. So say we have a client, for example, who were blogging for them once a week. We're doing a conversion offer for them once a quarter. We're setting up a marketing automation workflow in an email like that. That's all great. And then that all works, but it's really finding what works for you. And the only way to do that is by monitoring your team, which is where we're going next. And I know this is a big talking point for Kristen. She is a marketing analytics guru who is obsessed with making sure our customers know how to monitor their ROIs. So, you know, like this now that you've done the work and stuff to see if it's working or not, know where to double down on that.
Speaker 2 [00:30:53] Absolutely. And so before I dive into what we're looking at here, I want to talk a little bit about vanity metrics. You mentioned this earlier. These are things that can kind of trip you up. There are things that you can measure. Absolutely. But they really don't tell you a whole lot and they really don't give you anything actionable. These are things like impressions, page views, social media likes, trial users. They're nice numbers. And when they're going off, when they're increasing, that's fabulous. We love that. It makes us feel good. But it doesn't necessarily mean that your marketing is working, doesn't necessarily give you anything you can tweak or change to improve upon. And yeah, they really just don't give you the kind of information you can act on. So when you're trying to come up with KPIs, really want to look at things that align with your smart goals and as a marketer, you should always have smart goals, those are goals that are specific, measurable, they're achievable, they're not pie in the sky. You know, someday maybe we can achieve them. They're realistic and they're also timely. You don't want to just say, you know, someday we want to have one hundred contacts in our list. And I say, OK, in three months time, we'd love to have twenty five leads coming in or we want to have 50 new blog subscribers, whatever that metric is. You want to give it time, but you want to also be specific and you want it to be something you can actually track. So with that in mind, you want to make sure that these KPIs. You have again, you can adjust them, you can change them, you can use them to tweak your budget, let's say maybe you have an increased budget and you want to know where should I put this extra marketing dollars or maybe, unfortunately, your budget's gone down. You want to know what areas can you cut that will have a really drastic effect. So really good marketing KPIs that you can track are things like traffic to lead ratio. So again, sessions visitors to your site going up awesome. Great. Doesn't mean anything if we're not converting them into leads. So we want to really focus in on that traffic to lead or new contact ratio. That would be your overall site conversion. You also want to measure your lead to customer ratio if your marketing team is bringing a whole bunch of people in, but they're getting to the sales team and the sales team isn't closing them. Or maybe the sales team actually thinks they're all terrible. We should know that as marketers and be able to change the messaging that we're using or adding other layers to qualify them better so that the sales team isn't wasting their time, but that they're also able to close. I can't say how many times I've had that disconnect where I didn't have that close connection with the sales team. And on our side, we're thinking, hey, we brought you guys one hundred new leads and on their side they're like, well, seventy five of them don't have the right budget and the rest of them just weren't ready. So really didn't do us any good for this month. So again, that sales and marketing alignment and having those conversations is really important. And with that that KPI, if you are in sync, you can have those conversations if you're measuring it, landing page conversion rates. We didn't actually really talk a whole lot about landing pages specifically, but earlier when we talked about getting those content offers as checklists, as case studies, typically they're housed on a landing page that gives some beneficial information about what the content is. It talks about the value of why you should even want to read it. And so that would be on a landing page with the form you want to make sure that landing page is converting. Well, if you're spending, let's say you have a Google ad campaign and you're sending them to a landing page to download a pricing sheet for your product or service, but you're sending a hundred people there and only five of them download. That's a problem. And it's not necessarily just a landing page problem. It could be an ad problem that the ad in the landing page aren't matched up. But clearly there's an issue and some changes need to happen. If you're tracking those things, that's where you can start diving in and making some of those changes. Some other things you can look at are organic traffic, organic traffic is the kind of traffic that you get organically through searches, making sure that you have increased keyword value and SEO. And that's what we like to call free traffic. It's not you're not paying Google or Facebook to get that traffic is literally just the content that you're pushing out, bringing in new people, social media. Again, you can look at engagement, you can look at impressions. But if people aren't clicking through, branding is really good for their social media. It's really good for branding and making sure people are aware of who you are. But if you want to use it for actual conversion, then you should be tracking those conversion rates and seeing what kinds of posts are leading more people to your website. Because, you know, it can be great for branding and awareness, but it also can be used as a as a leading driver, for sure. Yeah. And then some other things like sales revenue. If your sales team has sales goals that they want to hit, it's really great for the marketing team to know what those goals are so that, again, you're in sync. And also you can tie back that revenue to your marketing efforts. As I mentioned earlier, if you're doing a Google campaign, you're spending five thousand dollars for a month of the campaign. But your return on that investment is only a thousand dollars. Well, you're probably not going to continue having that five thousand dollar budget very long. But if your campaign can be tied to ten thousand dollars or one hundred thousand dollars in revenue, that would be a good place to put a little bit more of your marketing. So, again, really looking at what these metrics are, but then also using those metrics to give you a clear path for your next steps or optimizations, things like that.
Speaker 1 [00:37:14] And to piggyback on all of that, too, there are going to be certain people in your organization who care about certain things. So, for example, if you're dealing with the CEO at your company, the things that he's going to care about is net new revenue cost per. And things like that, so in order to know what KPIs you should be tracking and really what marketing efforts you should be pursuing, you have to know the economics of your customer. So if you know that every new lead cost you on average, let's say, 11 dollars and it's based on what you're doing right now, you could then say, OK, do all or are all of these efforts bringing that cost per acquisition down or is it increasing my cost per acquisition? So really understanding the economics of your customer is going to be very important at the end of the day. All the things that we talk about are great and all those marketing tactics and the marketing strategy, all that is all awesome. But at the end of the day, if you're not driving net new revenue, you can't tie it back to anything. And it's kind of the blessing and the curse of inbound marketing. Inbound marketing or content marketing is all trackable. So we know exactly how many dollars we're generating from even one blog post that we want to get down to it. So to sum up the analytics to there is a way you know, there are certain softwares out there like data box here that we're showing you could bring in all of your KPIs onto one dashboard. And one thing I know that Kristen, you do this, too, but with my clients all have different dashboards for, let's say, a C-level employee than I would for marketing select or even a CMO is going to care differently or want to see different metrics than the CEO might care about, you know, leads and new customers and revenue. Whereas the marketing person might care about a lot of those marketing metrics. We talk about them as vanity metrics. But at the end of the day, you can look at all of those and those can tell a marketer story. So if we know that things are going up or down, we know we need to make adjustments. So and just to to to kind of end this webinar here on how to capture more leads, what is your you know, a couple of takeaways that if you are listening to this webinar that you would want to really take back to your team and implement.
Speaker 2 [00:39:35] I think the biggest thing, again, is to align with sales and marketing and can't stress that enough. At the end of the day, as a marketer, it's just going to make your job a lot easier and it's going to make your job a lot more effective. And I know that's sometimes difficult to get your sales team on board with some of the great new brilliant ideas that you have. But it's really a conversation that needs to happen. And if it has to come from the top down, then that's that's kind of what needs to happen. You need to get your CEO, your CMO. Everyone should be on board and get buy in and get people excited, because at the end of the day, marketing is meant to increase sales. So you guys should be on the same team. I think the other thing to take away are a lot of these tactics. If you're not doing some of them, take a look at your metrics. Take a look at these analytics, see where there are gaps. Are you putting out a lot of decision level content? Do you maybe need some more awareness level content across your site? You know, what keywords are you ranking for? Do you need to create new blogs and expand in that area? Are you blogging? And it's doing great, but you're not leading anybody back through those blogs. Maybe you've got a post that gets a thousand hits per month, but it doesn't have any conversion points on it. There's so many different pieces to the puzzle. I think just having that strategic starting point kind of helps you build out the ideas of what your next steps need to be.
Speaker 1 [00:41:08] Yeah, I think that's all great information. And, you know, certainly not to plug ourselves, but we live and breathe this stuff every single day. We're in all the platforms, write ups about our daily business data box. And honestly, this webinar could have been 48 hours long. So all the tactics out there and the strategy, things that, you know, that we could have talked about. So can't stress this enough. If you have any questions about anything that we talked about here or things that we didn't cover that you may have wanted us to cover, definitely reach out, reach out to us, and we'll be happy to answer any questions. Absolutely. And yeah, stay tuned. Our next webinar will be in March. We're going to go through a little bit about CRM systems and seeing, you know, going through different CRM and how to figure out what CRM is, make sense for certain companies and really present some opportunities and then to go through different CRM and see how they're all different. So check it out. Yeah, that's about all I had. Have a great rest of your month and also check out our blogs. We're blogging all the time. There's blogs from Kristen, blogs from me. There's blogs from anybody on our team. And they'll really dive into those tactics and get everybody all excited about. Generation, so, yeah, have a great day, everyone. Thank you.
