Lead Gen & Sales

Most of your digital marketing strategies are going to take time to bear fruit. If your target audience has been well defined, messaging carefully crafted and campaigns put together properly, your digital campaigns should produce high quality conversions in due time. Unfortunately, you can’t just expect to launch a campaign and get right to producing peak sales. Before you can start figuring out how much you’re going to owe in taxes from all the sales you’re going to generate, you need to have a focused brand awareness approach in place. Oh great, you generated a bunch of clicks, that’s not going to be enough either.

You’re not likely to produce high quality conversions that generate leads that turn into sales if you haven’t dedicated part of your digital marketing strategy to website optimization. With both traffic and an optimized site to capture leads, you’re job is almost done. The only part left is the hardest. Turning web leads into sales often requires companies to be extremely responsive. This could mean picking up the phone when a lead calls from your website, or responding to an email about a product quickly so that a user can make a purchase online. Remember, many of your first time visitors will come via your mobile marketing efforts, and they’re looking for a quick answer or solution from your company.

Optimizing your digital marketing campaigns to produce leads more efficiently over time will help build your business online. While your lead count may not grow every month due to annual trends and other marketing efforts, a steady pace should generate more leads on an annual basis. Improving paid conversion rates through Adwords optimizations and continuing to grow web traffic organically through content marketing should all be designed to increase the number of quality leads that your site generates.

Bring More Value to Your Digital Marketing Efforts

Your website shouldn’t only be set up to capture users in the final stages of their buying process. You can bring more value to your digital marketing efforts by capturing leads at all points during the sales funnel. Users aren’t likely to give you their email address on their first visit, but you can remarket to them using PPC and Social Media. Once they do provide you with their contact information, a drip email marketing campaign that encourages them to go from lead to customer can help complete the sales cycle. These multiple conversion points should be measured separately, and compared to each other to identify opportunities for improvement on a regular basis.

One of the scariest things that a business owner can see is a decrease in website traffic, but it can be necessary in order to bring more value to your digital marketing campaigns, and produce more leads for less money. Digital campaign optimization should strategically decrease targeting for underperforming audience segments, freeing up more resources for the most effective groupings. Produce more leads for less money, and your cost per sale drops with it. But the job certainly isn’t done yet.

Completing the Cycle

Your former and current customers are your best potential source for future leads and continuing sales growth. As your customer base grows, your social media audiences and email list size will follow. Use these channels to your advantage to encourage current customers to refer new business to your company. Start the conversation online by asking for testimonials on Twitter or provide discount referral codes to share with friends via email. Why not both? In the articles below, I’ll share the best lead gen successes I’ve seen and share any new strategies that I find to generate more sales online.

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