Toronto-based cloud computing company ThinDesk had a superior product but they weren’t reaching enough people with their message and their Web site wasn’t turning visitors into customers. Fruition Interactive revamped their online content marketing strategy and Web site design to turn their site into a lead generation machine and then drove traffic to it with SEO services and Google AdWords PPC advertising.
Lead nurturing via email is an essential part of inbound marketing. Connecting with your current customer base is one of the most rewarding investments. The question is are you maximizing that opportunity?
Here’s a 5-point check list for dedicated email sends:
When you want your target audience to click a button, subscribe via email, or purchase an item, what do you do? You call them to action. In inbound marketing, what you use is a call to action (CTA) element. ‘Click Here’ is probably the most generic CTA.
CTAs are designed to drive traffic from one part of the web to another – usually a landing page. These elements are typically graphical: buttons, images, and other interactive links. The text within these graphical elements however are also part of the CTA. While CTAs lead to both mirco- and macro-conversions, the most effective CTAs are used for macro-conversions that impact the bottom-line, such as lead data capture or actual closed sales.
Do you have a social media strategy in place that bolsters your inbound marketing plan?
You might have some social pages and accounts meant for brand communities, but what is your social strategy doing to actually generate some leads and lure target audiences into your sales funnel? You need a winning social media strategy to take full advantage of your network for your inbound marketing. Here are a few helpful reminders of what that strategy should look like.
Like any other type of communication, content marketing is based on what you say and how you say it. People want concrete information they can apply to their own lives, delivered in a straightforward, entertaining way.
If you get your content strategy right, you’ll enjoy great conversion rates and long-term customer relationships. If not, your efforts will fall flat — or worse, turn people off to your brand. You don’t want your content marketing campaign to flatline so before getting started, take the time to create great content that does exactly what you want it to. These tips will help.
An Introduction to Lead Generation
A lead is someone who has indicated interest in your company’s product or service. Online, an inbound lead is usually defined as a person that completes a form on a landing page.
A landing page is simply a webpage with a form through which a person supplies contact and business information in exchange for free information they feel is valuable (i.e. white paper, product demonstration, etc.)
If you want to generate inbound leads online for your business you’ll need a few things in place. From a tactical level, there are 3 crucial elements required to make inbound lead generation happen.
1. Landing pages
Again, landing pages are website pages that have one distinct purpose: lead generation. This page contains a form that captures contact information from a visitor in exchange for an offer.
Below is an example of one of our Landing Pages.
2. Offer
An offer, in the context of lead generation, is either content or a product that has enough perceived value, a person is willing to give their contact information in exchange for access to it. Typical offers include: e-books, white papers, webinars, free consultations, and demonstrations.
Below is an example of a content offer. Click here to download it now.
3. Call–to–action
Landing pages and offers are useless if you know one sees them. To send people to a landing page from your website, you’ll need a strong call-to-action (often abbreviated as CTA). A call-to-action is text, an image or button that links directly to a landing page.
Below is an example of a call-to-action.
A visitor comes to your homepage.
Once there, they see and click a call to action. The CTA takes the visitor to a landing page where they see a description of your offer and have an option to complete and submit a form.
Once the visitor submits the form, they receive your offer and now have a new contact who could be a potential lead.
Once a lead arrives in your database (via your website), the real work begins.
Your job is now to quickly assess and qualify the contact to determine if they’re a legit lead. If they’re not, you’ll save yourself some time, while in return, provided some value via your offer. If they have potential, they need to be nurtured with specific content and additional offers until they become ” sales ready” (or not).
Remember, lead generation isn’t the end goal, generating revenue and keeping your customers or clients happy is. Lead nurturing–using an automated system to send personalized and relevant messages to leads–is probably the most underutilized step of the inbound marketing process.
But if you haven’t already, start with the above.
Build a landing page, create an offer and put calls-to-action on the key areas of your website. But once you have inbound leads coming in, start looking at ways to nurture those leads in order to move them further down the buying cycle.
For example, a lead at the top of the buying cycle might be more interested in an informational piece like a guide or eBook, whereas a lead who is “sales-ready,” and therefore at the bottom of the cycle, is probably more interested in a free trial or demo.
The good news is you don’t need to pick and choose; create offers for each phase and include calls-to-action to these offers on various pages of your site.
Most important, continue to tweak and test each step of your inbound lead generation process in an effort to improve the quality and reduce your cost per lead.
If you’re like most marketers, you’re always looking for ways to improve the value of your lead generation efforts. While there are a variety of ways to do this, one of the most effective approaches is to nurture leads until they’re ready to buy. And the more refined your approach is to nurturing the prospects already in your pipeline, the better your results.
But if you’re new to the concept, building an effective lead nurturing program can be difficult. In a recent SoftwareAdvice.com article, Jeffrey Russo-Product Marketing Manager at HubSpot-shared four best practices that HubSpot uses to nurture their leads internally. Here’s a look at some of their tips.
Do you know what your site visitors see when they come to your site?
Unless you’re a marketer with a Fortune 500 company with an Internet marketing research budget of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for user experience research, chances are the answer is “no.”
Without a huge budget for research, small and mid-sized businesses used to have to rely largely on educated guesswork and, potentially, months’ worth of A/B testing in the real world to optimize their Web site’s ability to generate leads.
But now Fruition can help you start to optimize your site pages, with evidence-based research, before your site has even launched. And at a price – this is the game-changing part – that small and mid-sized businesses can afford.
Here’s the deal.
Over the course of the evolution of Internet marketing, a handful of marketing tools and methodologies have remained useful and effective. Through changing from predominantly interruption-driven efforts to black hat search optimization to inbound marketing and further on to social media, advertising efforts such as landing pages have been pillars of advertising campaigns and rightfully so: if designed correctly and given great market copy, landing pages are very effective in lead generation and lead info capture. often they are also used for direct conversion to sales as well, which means they can be used on both ends of the sales funnel.
Being so central to Internet marketing endeavors, it’s only natural that the better your landing pages perform, the more successful your campaigning becomes. So how do your landing pages fare?
Fruition Interactive helps you get in front of your target audience, so you can start generating results from your online marketing. Fruition's Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click and online display advertising services are designed to maximize your ROI.
Your Web site is a key business tool. It needs to engage people to take the next step towards becoming your loyal and valued customer. Fruition helps you get the right content to the right people at the right time to influence their decisions and turn awareness into demand.
Call it engagement. Call it retention. Call it what you want, but the fact is increasing lifetime client value is the most cost-effective way to grow your business. Fruition helps you grow lifetime value from your base with highly targeted email marketing, social media marketing and more.
